Remembering 9/11
Novelist
Brad Kessler and poet Hayan Charara read to a packed and
grateful room five days after 9/11/01. They return with brand new books
and will be joined by Marian Fontana, a playwright and comedienne,
and author of A Widow’s Walk, a memoir about her firefighter husband’s
death. She is president of the September 11th Families’ Association.
Kessler’s
latest novel, Birds in Fall, is about a plane crash in Nova Scotia
with no survivors, and in his depiction of the solace that family members
find among strangers, it speaks to the occasion. It was met with wide
acclaim and called “a perfect gem of a novel” by Library Journal.
Hayan
Charara’s second poetry collection, The Sadness of Others, was
published earlier this year in the Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry
Series, and critics have praised the unflinching honesty and the modesty
and generosity of spirit that we remember well from that reading five
years ago. On 9/11 he lived in New Jersey across from the World Trade
Center, and today his life is still caught up in world events—his father
and other family members are in Lebanon.
Reservations suggested: 914-332-5953.
All readings include a question & answer period and a reception with books by the author(s) for sale.
Suggested
Donation: $5 ($3 for HVWC members and those under age 18)
Programs and events at The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center are made possible, in part, by grants from the Bydale Foundation, the David G. Taft Foundation, the Orchard Foundation, and the Thendara Foundation; with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts; and by the Basic Program Support Grant of the Westchester Arts Council with funds from Westchester County Government.