An Author Talk with Joan Leegant
Join us for a conversation with Boston author Joan Leegant who will talk about her recent book, Displaced Persons: Stories, and offer us a window into her writing process. Where do stories come from, must you start with a plan, getting out of your own way, and why writing isn’t the same as thinking. Come for an eye-opening talk for readers, writers and anyone interested in how the creative process (sometimes!) works
Time: 7:00 PM. Doors open at 6:30 PM.
Tickets:
$20 - Admission + Book
Free - Admission Only
“Displaced Persons is a stunning collection of literary excellence. Each story tackles the enormous questions of the human experience and is masterfully rendered in beautiful, affecting prose.”
— WEIKE WANG Whiting Award-winning author of Chemistry and Joan Is Okay
About the Book
Set half in Israel and half in the States, the stories in this prize-winning collection explore the experience of exile, belonging, and what it means to call a place home. A visiting professor from Boston forms an unlikely bond with an Israeli born in Iraq. Two teenage tourists are startled out of their naiveté in a restaurant in Jerusalem’s Old City. A gifted yeshiva student spiraling into mental illness takes refuge in the poetry of Walt Whitman. An aged widower returns after sixty years to the Bronx neighborhood of his youth to make amends with a first love he abandoned to go to prison. Shimmering with insight and compassion, Displaced Persons is a profound, exquisite collection that illuminates pivotal moments of transition, longing, and hope
About the Author:
For her first book of stories, An Hour in Paradise: Stories, JOAN LEEGANT won the 2003 PEN/New England Book Award and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. She is also the author of a novel, Wherever You Go. Her prize-winning fiction has appeared in over two dozen literary magazines and anthologies. Formerly an attorney, she has taught at Harvard, Oklahoma State, and Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle where she was also the writer-in-residence at Hugo House. For five years, she was the visiting writer at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv where she also spoke at Israeli schools on American literature and culture under the auspices of the U.S. Embassy, and taught English to African refugees and asylum seekers. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with her family.