AlexandriaLibraryVA discussion

Wednesday, April 10
6:30pm - 7:30pm
Book: Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden by Camille T. Dungy
Beatley Branch (5005 Duke St.)



Join with readers in the community to talk about Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden by Camille T. Dungy that highlights AAR's 2024 theme of COURAGE.

Come discuss this seminal work that expands how we talk about the natural world and the environment as National Book Critics Circle Criticism finalist Camille T. Dungy diversifies her garden to reflect her heritage.



From the publisher, "Poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens. In resistance to the homogeneous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it"--

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Wednesday, April 24
6:30pm - 7:30pm
Beatley Branch (5005 Duke St)
Book: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi



Gather with fellow readers in the community to talk about Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, a title similar to AAR’s adult fiction pick, Black Cake, that highlights the theme of COURAGE.

Come join the discussion of National Book Critics Circle Award Winner Yaa Gyazi's Homegoing.

From the publisher, "Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into two different tribal villages in 18th century Ghana. Effia will be married off to an English colonial, and will live in comfort in the sprawling, palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising half-caste children who will be sent abroad to be educated in England before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the Empire. Her sister, Esi, will be imprisoned beneath Effia in the Castle's women's dungeon, and then shipped off on a boat bound for America, where she will be sold into slavery. Stretching from the tribal wars of Ghana to slavery and Civil War in America, from the coal mines in the north to the Great Migration to the streets of 20th century Harlem, Yaa Gyasi's has written a modern masterpiece, a novel that moves through histories and geographies and--with outstanding economy and force--captures the troubled spirit of our own nation"--