UPDATED: I've posted the YouTube video of the event below!
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Last night's reading at Community Bookstore in Park Slope, Brooklyn marked the first official event in my launch of Counternarratives, and an exciting, enjoyable event it was. Before a full audience, the great Jeffery Renard Allen, author of a number of award-winning works, including the novels Rails Under My Back and The Song of the Shank, a friend and writer I admire tremendously, joined me, reading an excerpt from the latter novel before I read the ending of the story "The Aeronauts," in which free black Philadelphia-native and teenager Theodore ("Red") accidentally sails off in a sabotaged balloon into Confederate airspace early in the US Civil War. (That snippet always chokes me up a bit.)
Jeff then posed some questions, about form, politics, race, history, and my (still unfinished) novels, before we opened up the discussion to the floor. It was a delight to bring the book into the world in live conversation with Jeff, with whose work I think of my own always in conceptual, intellectual and literary conversation, and exhilarating to be able to read from the now published book before a live audience, filled with many old friends, colleagues, former students, and my wonderful publisher New Directions' key members, among them my editor, Barbara Epler.
Below are a few photos from the event. There's video which I hope to upload soon. I have two more readings on the near horizon, on June 23 at Word Bookstore in Jersey City, and on July 1, in conversation with Christine Smallwood, at McNally-Jackson in Manhattan, so please come out if you can. And if you'd like me to come to your local bookstore or university to read, or chat, drop me a note! Thanks so much again to Community Bookstore and their amazing staff, to New Directions, and everyone who came to help launch the book!
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| Jeff and I (Photo by Barbara Epler) |
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| Reading from "The Aeronauts" (Photo by Barbara Epler) |
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| Reading from "The Aeronauts" (Photo by Barbara Epler) |
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| Chatting with friends and former students Miriam Rocek, her lovely girlfriend, and Brooke Sossin (Photo by Barbara Epler) |
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