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The Great Wherever with Shannon Sanders

An evening with Shannon Sanders and Jamise Harper examining ideas of inheritance, Black landownership and modern pressures.

Join the Library and Loyalty Bookstores for a conversation with DC author Shannon Sanders discussing her new book The Great Wherever. In conversation with Jamise Harper of Spines and Vines, Sanders will discuss this expansive family saga with a live audience at MLK Library. 

How do ancestors, land, and debt inform a present-day decision about what to keep and what to let go? This conversation will explore questions like:

• How ancestral voices and family history shape decisions about land and legacy.
• The economic and personal stakes for a modern DC gig worker confronting debt and obligation .
• The farm’s role as burdensome inheritance and its impact across generations.
• Editorial and design insights highlighted in recent coverage of the book’s development. 

This conversation offers the opportunity to assess how inheritance, history, and present circumstances intersect and to consider practical approaches to navigating family legacy today. 

About the Book

In The Great Wherever, Shannon Sanders follows Aubrey Lamb, a thirty-two-year-old underpaid gig worker in Washington, DC, who inherits her father’s stake in a Tennessee farm while four ancestral ghosts watch and judge. A parallel narrative traces the land’s history from Thomas—one of the first Black landowners in his community—through a tragedy that fractures the Lamb family and echoes across generations. As a potential sale approaches, Aubrey weighs legacy against immediate needs, and the novel’s modern voice balances difficult histories with clear, grounded observation. 

About the Author and Conversation Partner

Shannon Sanders is the author of the linked short story collection Company, which won the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, was named one of the best books of 2023 by Publishers Weekly and Debutiful, and was shortlisted for the 2024 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her short fiction has appeared in One Story, The Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Electric Literature. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with her husband and three sons. 

Jamise Harper, literary influencer, founder of Spines & Vines, and host of the Instagram Live series Literary Wine Down, will guide the conversation. Her work centers diverse stories, with engagements spanning authors such as S.A. Cosby, Tayari Jones, Elizabeth Acevedo, and programs with the Essence Festival, the National Book Foundation, and the Well-Read Black Girl Festival, including: 

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