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Black Writers Read Virtual Book Club Discussion w/Natasha Gordon-Chipembere
November 5, 2023 @ 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Black Writers Read presents its first Virtual Book Club! During the late summer and early fall, we will come together and read books from several of the writers featured on Black Writers Read. There will be one book reserved for each month. Book Club members will have an opportunity to engage with the author as they will be joining us for the guided conversation. Each session will last 90 minutes and will include a Q&A with the book’s author. Groups will be kept small to allow for more opportunities to engage with the author and other readers. Book club members can sign up to join us for one, two, or all of the sessions.
All sessions will take place virtually over Zoom. Participants will receive Zoom information in a separate email as the date approaches. There will be a reading companion guide provided for each book.
Please purchase the books separately via Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Bookshop.org.
November’s Featured Author and Book: Natasha Gordon-Chipembere’s Finding La Negrita (historical fiction)
Sunday, November 5
2 p.m. ET
Cost: $10 per person
Finding La Negrita is a captivating retelling of the Black Madonna narrative, which has driven Costa Rica’s national and spiritual identity since the 1700s. In powerful prose, Natasha Gordon-Chipembere delivers a vivid and intimate living portrait of slavery in this nation, which was radically different from plantation bondage in other parts of the Americas.
Meet Dakarai, a famed African sculptor who must buy his freedom once he is stolen into slavery and separated from his newborn daughter, Jendayi. Her mother has died in childbirth, in the hold of a Middle Passage ship. Husband and child are left to reconcile their grief over her absence and forge a life somehow in the New World. Finding La Negrita spans time and space as it captures Dakarai and Jendayi’s reunion, one ripe with the secrets and sacrifices a single father confronts while raising a strong-minded young girl, in an era with a precarious line between freedom and enslavement. In those margins, and unbeknownst to each other, they both dare to pursue dangerous new loves beyond the limits of what colonial society will permit. But at what cost to themselves and each other?
To register for the event, please visit https://www.eventbrite.com/e/670793660897