Essie Chambers presents Swift River in conversation with Curtis Sittenfeld

It's the summer of 1987 in the dying New England mill town of Swift River, and sixteen-year-old Diamond Newberry is learning how to drive. Since her father disappeared seven years ago, she and her mother hitchhike everywhere they go; they’re the only ones in town without a car. But that’s not the only reason Diamond stands out: She weighs 298 pounds, and since Pop’s been gone, she is the only Black person in all of Swift River. This summer, Ma is determined to declare Pop legally dead so that they can collect his life insurance money, get their house back from the bank and move on with their lives.
When Diamond receives a letter from a relative she’s never met, key elements of Pop's life are uncovered, and she is introduced to two generations of African American Newberry women, spanning the twentieth century and revealing a much larger picture of prejudice and love, of devotion and abandonment. As more letters come, they fill in the pieces of Diamond’s history she never knew she was missing, giving her a sense of her place in the world and in her family. But how will what she’s learned of the past change her future?
Swift River is about a family struggling with generational trauma and a town’s hidden history; it is the story of a funny, weird, unforgettable girl trying to take a first step toward a life that will ultimately lead her away from the only home she's ever known.

Essie Chambers is an award-winning writer and producer. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, and has received fellowships from the MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, and Baldwin for the Arts. She previously held senior creative executive positions at ViacomCBS (Paramount). She was a producer on the documentary Descendant, which was released by President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground and Netflix in 2022, and the critically acclaimed PBS documentary The New Public. Swift River is her first novel.

Curtis Sittenfeld is the bestselling author of seven novels, including Prep, American Wife, Eligible and Rodham, and one story collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It. Her newest novel, Romantic Comedy, was published in April 2023. Her books have been selected by The New York Times, Time, EW, and People for their “Ten Best Books of the Year” lists, picked twice for Reese Witherspoon's book club, and translated into thirty languages. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Best American Short Stories anthology, of which she was the 2020 guest editor. She lives with her family in Minneapolis.

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