Russell
Library presents an event in honor of Mother’s Day on Saturday, May 9
from 2-4pm in the Hubbard Room, Russell Library, 123 Broad St., featuring two
regional authors who have written about their mothers’ complex lives.
Elisabeth Petry |
Elisabeth
Petry will speak about author Ann Petry from a daughter's point of view. Ann
Petry's novel The Street, published
in 1946, was the first novel by an African American author to sell more than a
million copies. In researching her mother’s life for her book, At Home
Inside, Elisabeth Petry had to sift through a myriad of contradictory stories.
Ann Petry applied her formidable storytelling skills to the tales she told
about herself and her family, and the truths her daughter Elisabeth uncovered
make fascinating stories themselves. In talking about her life, Ann Petry claimed
six different birth dates. She hid her first marriage, and even represented her
father, Peter C. Lane, Jr., as a potential killer. Mining Petry's journals daughter
Elisabeth creates part biography, part love letter, and part sounding of her
mother's genius and luminescent personality.
Elisabeth Petry is a freelance writer with a juris doctor from the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Middletown, Connecticut, and is in addition to At Home Inside, is the editor of Can Anything Beat White? A Black Family's Letters. She also leads the Russell Library Veteran’s Writing Group on Thursday evenings at the library.
Hanna Perlstein Marcus |
Hanna Perlstein Marcus is the author of Sidonia’s Thread, The Secrets of a
Mother and Daughter Sewing a New Life in America. In this memoir, Hanna
Perlstein Marcus tells the story of her mother, the secrets she kept, and how
she came to unearth those secrets. Hanna and her mother came to
Springfield, Massachusetts after World War II to build a new life. With no
other family except each other, they built a world that revolved around her
mother’s remarkable talent as fashion designer and seamstress.
Curious know the secrets her
mother was unable to reveal, Hanna closely studied her mother’s old
letters and photographs, determined to find the secret of her paternity,
the reasons for her mother’s reclusive behavior, and clues to her
heritage.
Sidonia’s Thread won best nonfiction Kindle book
for 2014. Hanna Perlstein Marcus is currently working on her next book. The Greenhorns will focus on the immigrant
community in Springfield, Massachusetts, where she and her mother moved when
first arriving in the United States.
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