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Monthly discussion of books written by black authors. Meets Every 3rd Saturday. Contact asipple-mcgraw@lexpublib.org to reserve a copy. January's Selection is "Gather Me" a memoir by Glory Edim.
Join us this month to discuss Gather Me: A Memoir in Praise of the Books That Saved Me by Glory Edim
An inspiring memoir of family, community, and resilience, and an ode to the power of books to help us understand ourselves, from the renowned founder of Well-Read Black Girl.
Please contact asipple-mcgraw@lexpublib.org or stop by the Eastside Circulation Desk for a copy of the book. Copies are also available on Libby.
For Glory Edim, that “friend of my mind” is books. Edim, who grew up in Virginia to Nigerian immigrant parents, started the popular Well-Read Black Girl book club at age thirty, eventually reaching a community of half a million readers. But her own love of books stretches far back.
Edim’s father moved back to Nigeria while she was still a child, marking the beginning of a series of traumatic changes and losses for her family. What became an escape, a safe space, and a second home for her and her brother was their local library. Books were where Edim found community, and as she grew older she discovered authors and ideas that she wasn’t being taught about in class. Reading wherever and whenever she could, be it in her dorm room or when traveling by subway or plane, she found the Black writers whose words would forever change her life: Nikki Giovanni, through children’s poetry cassettes; Maya Angelou, through a critical high school English teacher; Toni Morrison, while attending Morrison’s alma mater, Howard University; Audre Lorde, on a flight to Nigeria. In prose full of both joy and heartbreak, Edim recounts how these writers and so many others taught her how to value herself by helping her to find her own voice when her mother lost hers, to trust her feelings when her father remarried, and to create bonds with other Black women and uplift their stories.
Gather Me is a glowing testament to how the power of representation in literature can gather the disparate parts that make us who we are and assemble them into a portrait of discovery.
AGE GROUP: | Adults |
EVENT TYPE: | Books, Writing & Authors |
The Eastside Branch is located near the intersection of Man 'o War Boulevard and Palumbo Drive.
