A conversation with Elizabeth Acevedo and Clint Smith
The Library and East City Bookshop are happy to welcome National Book Award winning author, Elizabeth Acevedo to discuss her novel Family Lore in conversation with Clint Smith.
Books will be available for purchase at the event - find more details here. A limited number of copies will be given away courtesy of the DC Public Library Foundation.
ABOUT THE BOOK
From bestselling, National Book Award–winning author Elizabeth Acevedo comes her first novel for adults, the story of one Dominican-American family told through the voices of its women as they await a gathering that will forever change their lives.
Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she decides she wants a living wake—a party to bring her family and community together to celebrate the long life she’s led—her sisters are surprised. Has Flor foreseen her own death, or someone else’s? Does she have other motives? She refuses to tell her sisters, Matilde, Pastora, and Camila.
But Flor isn’t the only person with secrets: her sisters are hiding things, too. And the next generation, cousins Ona and Yadi, face tumult of their own.
Spanning the three days prior to the wake, Family Lore traces the lives of each of the Marte women, weaving together past and present, Santo Domingo and New York City. Told with Elizabeth Acevedo’s inimitable and incandescent voice, this is an indelible portrait of sisters and cousins, aunts and nieces—one family’s journey through their history, helping them better navigate all that is to come.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR and CONVERSATION PARTNER
ELIZABETH ACEVEDO is the New York Times bestselling author of The Poet X, which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, the Pura Belpré Award, the Carnegie Medal, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, and the Walter Award. She is also the author of With the Fire on High—named a best book of the year by the New York Public Library, NPR, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal—and Clap When You Land, which was a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor book and a Kirkus Prize finalist. Family Lore is Acevedo’s first novel for adults and will be published in August 2023. She holds a BA in performing arts from the George Washington University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Maryland. Acevedo has been a fellow of Cave Canem and CantoMundo, and a participant in the Callaloo Writers Workshops. She is a National Poetry Slam champion and resides in Washington, DC, with her love.
CLINT SMITH is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2021. He is also the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review. and elsewhere. Clint received his B.A. in English from Davidson College and a Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University.
AGE GROUP: | Adults |
EVENT TYPE: | Discover Summer | Author Talk |