DEAD RECKONING: DEBUT NOVELISTS

2:30 – 3:45 PM—Literary Discussion

DEAD RECKONING: DEBUT NOVELISTS

Writers’ first books are often our most personal, the result of years of grappling with the big questions asked by our own (extremely examined) lives: What kind of a future can we have on this hobbled planet? How can we love the flawed humans around us? What should we do with our trauma—or our grief? Five debut novelists will discuss where such reckoning has led them, in literature and in life. The newest literary star from Mississippi (and now New Orleans) Addie Citchens tells the story of one upstanding Delta family’s struggle with the monster in their midst in her audacious debut, Dominion, while in her Southern Gothic novel, Sister Creatures, Laura Venita Green reinvents the rural Louisiana of her childhood to spin a tale of haunting—and the impossibility of returning home. Happy Bad, by Delaney Nolan, takes us into the desert of the near future, when a group of troubled girls must evacuate their treatment facility in search of safety, while Denne Michele Norris and Issa Quincy‘s characters are burdened by the past. In Norris’ debut When the Harvest Comes, a new marriage is challenged by the death of one groom’s estranged father, while Quincy’s Absence is motivated by memory: a poem read to the narrator in childhood recurs, connecting the lives of a beloved schoolteacher, a grieving sister, and a prodigal son through the theme of loss. Moderated by novelist C. Morgan Babst, author of The Floating World.

Hotel Monteleone, Queen Anne Ballroom, $10 or LitPass or VIP Pass.