Author Rebecca Brenner Graham with Gina Warner | DEAR MISS PERKINS

Join us at Bards Alley for a conversation between author Rebecca Brenner Graham and Badass Women's Book Club founder and leader Gina Warner to discuss Graham's narrative non-fiction title Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany. The event will be held at Bards Alley Bookshop on March 1 at 2:30PM.

Books may be reserved in advance with Bards Alley online at bardsalley.square.site or by calling the store at (571) 459-2653. The author will be signing books after her discussion.

ABOUT DEAR MISS PERKINS: She was the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, the longest-serving Labor Secretary, and an architect of the New Deal. Yet beyond these celebrated accomplishments there is another dimension to Frances Perkins’s story. Without fanfare, and despite powerful opposition, Perkins helped save the lives of countless Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.

“Immigration problems usually have to be decided in a few days. They involve human lives. There can be no delaying,” Perkins wrote in her memoir, The Roosevelt I Knew. In March 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, Perkins was appointed Secretary of Labor by FDR. As Hitler rose to power, thousands of German-Jewish refugees and their loved ones reached out to the INS—then part of the Department of Labor—applying for immigration to the United States, writing letters that began “Dear Miss Perkins . . .”

Based on extensive research, including thousands of letters housed in the National Archives, Dear Miss Perkins adds new dimension to an already extraordinary life story, revealing at last how one woman tried to steer the nation to a better, more righteous course.​

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