Author Event: Brother Epistles by Shanda McManus

We are thrilled to have Shanda McManus presenting her newest memoir, BROTHER EPISTLES!

A $5 General Admission ticket will reserve your seat and you will recieve a $5 Coupon to use at the time of the event. An $18 ticket is your RSVP and includes a copy of BROTHER EPISTLES.

Learn about the book: BROTHER EPISTLES: A SISTER'S MEMOIR

On a Philadelphia street in 1992, Shanda McManus’s brother Monir was killed in a drive-by shooting. Three decades later, still haunted by his M**der, McManus traces her brother’s life through their upbringing in North Philadelphia, Monir’s teen fatherhood and stint in the U.S. Army to support his young sons, and finally, his participation in the drug trade. In Brother Epistles, a series of intimate letters, McManus writes as both sister and physician, blending social commentary, memory, and collective history to lament the fragility of Monir’s life while demanding an American reckoning for the socioeconomic structures responsible for so many young Black men dying through homicide. A heartbreaking conversation between a sister and her brother, leavened with humor, family love, and unconquerable Black joy, Brother Epistles is a powerful meditation on Black identity, the criminalization of Black boys, and the devastating ripple effects of a tragic loss on the loved ones left behind.

Learn about the author: SHANDA MCMANUS

Shanda McManus, a family medicine physician and native Philadelphian, writes about the intersection of life, race, and medicine. Shanda’s writing has appeared in Intima Journal of Narrative Medicine, Midnight & Indigo, Bellevue Literary Review, and swamp pink. She has been a fellow with PEN America Emerging Voices in Creative Nonfiction and Baldwin For The Arts.

Learn about the moderator: JOHN VERCHER

John Vercher lives in the Philadelphia area with his wife and two sons. John currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English at Monmouth University (where he also served as the ‘24-’25 Artist-in-Residence) and core faculty at Randolph College’s low-residency MFA program in Lynchburg, Virginia. John is the author of three critically acclaimed and award-nominated novels.

His debut, Three-Fifths, was named one of the best books of 2019 by the Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Financial Times, and was nominated for The 2020 Edgar Award for Best First Novel and The Strand Critics' Award for Best Debut NovelHis second novel, After the Lights Go Out, was called “simply brilliant” by Publishers Weekly in a starred review and “shrewd and explosive” by The New York Times. BookRiot selected the novel as a 2022 Best Book of the Summer, Publishers Weekly included it in their Summer Reads 2022 list, and Booklist named it an Editors’ Choice in Adult Fiction for 2022.

John’s third novel, Devil Is Fine, was named a Best New Book of the Summer by TIME Magazine and The Root, an Indie Next pick for July, one of the top ten books to add to your reading list in June by the Los Angeles Times, a June book pick by The Center for Fiction, one of the 12 Must-Read Books of June by The Chicago Review of Books, a Book of the Day for July by NPR, and was featured on NPR’s It’s Been A Minute. Additionally, Devil Is Fine was named one of the 100 Must-Read Books of 2024 by TIME Magazine, a Best Novel of 2024 by Electric Lit, Jezebel, and The Chicago Public Library, and was a finalist for the Library of Virginia’s Virginia Literary Prize, and longlisted for the 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize, the Mark Twain American Voice Award in Literature Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.He is currently at work on his fourth novel.

Praise for BROTHER EPISTLES:

“Brother Epistles, inspired by a tragedy, is, above all, a celebration of sisterly love. Shanda McManus’s letters to her younger brother Monir, murdered decades ago at age twenty, are heartbreaking and often humorous. Shanda reminisces with Monir about the hardships and joys of their youth and fills him in on all that has happened since his death: the fate of his sons and their children, the ongoing prejudice and violence experienced by young black men, and the evolution of her own life: marriage, motherhood, a successful career as a physician, and a long delayed confrontation with grief through writing. Brother Epistles is all a memoir should be, unsparingly honest, insightful, riveting. It left me changed--and deeply moved.”
—Suzanne Koven, MD, MFA
“Brother Epistles is an act of both remembrance and reckoning. Shanda McManus confronts what it means to grow up Black in America and the intimate human cost of a nation’s indifference. A powerful meditation on grief, love, and survival.”
—Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, author of What Doctors Feel, and editor of
Bellevue Literary Review