The Ohio Center for the Book is pleased to collaborate with Ursuline College, Case Western Reserve University, and Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards in hosting a series of book discussions. The Spring 2025 series will focus on memoirs by three Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winners: Natasha Trethewey, Isabel Allende, and John Edgar Wideman.
Hosted by Dr. Valentino Zullo, Anisfield-Wolf Postdoctoral Fellow in English and Public Humanities at Ursuline College, and Dr. Jamie Hickner, Lecturer and Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in the English Department at Case Western Reserve University. All discussions are open to the public and take place at the Cleveland Public Library’s NEW Martin Luther King, Jr. Branch, 10601 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland.
Wednesday, 3/19, 4:00-5:45 PM – Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive (2020) A chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy. At nineteen, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma and now explores the way this experience shaped the artist she became. Moving through her mother’s history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a “child of miscegenation” in Mississippi, Trethewey plumbs her sense of dislocation and displacement and the harrowing crime that took place on Memorial Drive in Atlanta in 1985. – Ecco