Friends of Goodnow Present Race and the American Family

The Friends of the Goodnow Library’s Evening with Authors Series resumes on Thursday, October 8, 2020, with Race and the Modern American Family, a conversation between authors Calvin Hennick and Artress Bethany White hosted by Deborah Norkin. The conversation will take place on Zoom at 7 PM. Registration is required. Please register on the Goodnow Library website. A Zoom link will be sent prior to the meeting.

Calvin Hennick’s debut memoir, Once More to the Rodeo, is the winner of Pushcart’s 2019 Editor’s Book Award. A road trip from Rockport to the annual two-day rodeo in Maxwell, Iowa serves as a backdrop for Hennick to explore the challenges of parenthood in an America grappling with what it means to be an American. Hennick questions how he can teach his son to be a man when his own father figures abandoned him. As a white man, what can he possibly teach his biracial son about how to live as a black man in America? And what does it even mean to be a man today when society’s expectations of men seem to change from moment to moment?

Artress Bethany White is a prize-winning poet, essayist, and literary critic. In Survivor’s Guilt: Essays on Race and American Identity, available from New Rivers Press/Minnesota State University),White mines her own past to share stories both heartbreaking and hysterical. According to White, she wrote these essays in “the spirit of healing for a public searching for answers to America’s complex racial dilemma.”

“Over the past decade, I have faced the challenge of raising a trans-racial family in the South, reckoned with being descended from one of the largest slave-holding families in America, and faced the history of a nineteenth century ancestor being lynched by the KKK. As I worked to assess these realities, I marveled at how my experiences were echoed in the trauma of a nation under siege from domestic terrorism, gun violence, and racism.”

Please join the Friends for this thought-provoking conversation. For more information about the Friends activities and other Friends events, please visit our website www.friendsofgoodnow.org, sign up for our newsletter, or follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You may also join the Friends and help us fund future events.