In Search of What is Lost

In Search of What is Lost

Friday, November 6th 12 p.m. via Crowdcast

About the Event

In Tea by the Sea, Donna Hemans takes her protagonist from Brooklyn to Jamaica in search of her seventeen year old daughter who was stolen at birth by the child’s Episcopal priest father.  Marlon James calls Heman’s debut “a powder keg of a novel, where secrets and lies explode into truth and consequences, all told with spellbinding, shattering power.” Kelli Jo Ford’s, Crooked Hallelujah tells the story of a mixed-blood Cherokee woman and her daughter as they move from Eastern Oklahoma’s Indian Country to Texas in the 1980s. At risk of losing their cultural background and connections, they struggle with the meaning of home. Publisher’s Weekly says “Ford’s storytelling is urgent, her characters achingly human and complex, and her language glittering and rugged. This is a stunner.” Sponsored by Bards Alley. 

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About Kelli Jo Ford

Kelli Jo Ford is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize, the Everett Southwest Literary Award, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Award at Bread Loaf, a National Artist Fellowship by the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and a Dobie Paisano Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, and the anthology Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, among other places.

Donna Hemans

About Donna Hemans

Jamaican-born Donna Hemans is the author of the novels River Woman and Tea by the Sea. In 2015, she won the Lignum Vitae Una Marson Award for Adult Literature for the unpublished manuscript of Tea by the Sea. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Caribbean Writer, Crab Orchard Review, Witness, The Millions, Scoundrel Time, among others. She has won grants from Black Mountain Institute, Maryland State Arts Council, Millay Colony and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in support of her work. She received her undergraduate degree from Fordham University and an MFA from American University. She lives in Maryland and is the owner of the DC Writers Room, a co-working studio for writers.

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