Fireside Chat w/ Author Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum

Join us for an exciting fireside chat event with author Kirsten Sunberg Lunstrum in conversation with Jenny Bartoy.

Please select your ticket type to let us know if you will be purchasing a book at the event or not. GA = Attending, but no book, GA + Book = attending and purchasing a book. This helps us order enough books for the event!

About Elita:

Unfolding during the moody Pacific Northwest winter of 1951, we follow Bernadette Baston, scholar of child development and language acquisition, as she travels to a penitentiary on the remote island Elita in the Puget Sound to consult on a curious case: two guards have discovered an animal-like adolescent girl living alone in the cold woods beyond the Pr*son’s walls. There are few answers, but many people who know more than they are saying. According to official reports, the girl, dubbed Atalanta, does not speak. Is her silence protecting someone? The Pr*son warden, court-appointed guardian, and police detective embroil Bernadette in resolving a secret that the tight-knit island community has long held, and her investment in the girl’s case soon becomes more personal than professional. As a mother, wife, and woman bound by mid-twentieth-century expectations, Bernadette strategizes to retain the fragile control she has over her own freedom, identity, and future, which becomes inextricably tied to solving Atalanta’s case.

About Kirsten:

Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is the author of the forthcoming novel (TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press, 2025) and three collections of short fiction, What We Do With the Wreckage (2017 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction winner, University of Georgia Press in October, 2018), This Life She’s Chosen (2005, Chronicle Books) and Swimming With Strangers (2008, Chronicle Books). Her short fiction and essays have appeared widely in journals, including The Sun, Prairie Schooner, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, North American Review, One Story, The American Scholar, Michigan Quarterly Review, Willow Springs, and Southern Humanities Review, among other publications. Kirsten has been the recipient of a PEN/O. Henry Prize and fellowships from MacDowell, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the 2016 Jack Straw Writers Program. She teaches creative writing and literature and lives with her family near Seattle, Washington.

About Jenny Bartoy:

Host or Publisher Grit City Books