Book Signing with Kate Sweeney

Please join us at the Penguin Bookshop on September 8 from 6:00-7:00 pm as we welcome author Kate Sweeney to talk about her book AMERICAN AFTERLIFE: ENCOUNTERS IN THE CUSTOMS OF MOURNING.

What happens after someone dies depends on our personal stories and on where those stories fall in a larger tale--that of death in America. It’s a powerful tale that we usually keep hidden from our everyday lives until we have to face it. AMERICAN AFTERLIFE reveals this world through a collective portrait of Americans past and present who find themselves personally involved with death: a klatch of obit writers in the desert, a funeral voyage on the Atlantic, a fourth-generation funeral director--even a mid-western museum that takes us back in time to meet our death-obsessed Victorian progenitors. Each story illuminates details in another until something larger is revealed: a landscape that feels at once strange and familiar, one that’s by turns odd, tragic, poignant, and sometimes even funny.

Kate Sweeney lives in Atlanta where she writes and creates public radio stories. She has won four Edward R. Murrow awards as well as a number of Associated Press awards for her work. Her writing has appeared several times in Oxford American Magazine, as well as Utne Reader Online, Atlanta Magazine and New South, among other outlets. She has taught Creative Writing and English at Emory Continuing Education, Clayton State University and the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

AMERICAN AFTERLIFE has been featured on The Dish,CNN.com, and the public radio history show Backstory. More information on the book and the author can be found at www.americanafterlifebook.com/.

For more information on the event, please visit the Penguin Bookshop’s website at www.penguinbookshop.com