Kai Harris Presents: What the Fireflies Knew

Schedule

Mon Mar 21 2022 at 06:30 pm to 08:30 pm

Location

Bookbug & this is a bookstore | Kalamazoo, MI

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Welcome Kai Harris back to Kalamazoo for this special reading/ book signing of her debut novel: "What the Fireflies Knew"
About this Event

This event is being hosted in partnership with and support of The Face Off Theatre Company and Read and Write Kalamazoo. Please consider a donation/ticket to either or both of these organizations in celebration of this event.

Signed copies of What the Fireflies Knew will also be available at this event.

About the Author:

Kai Harris is a fiction writer and Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the English department at Santa Clara University. Kai is an advocate for the Black community, and writes fiction filled with family, love, and #blackgirlmagic. Her short story, “The Waitress,” was published in 2017 in Rabble Lit, and was also featured as Longform’s “Fiction Pick of the Week.” Kai published an excerpt from her novel, What the Fireflies Knew in the Black Girlhood issue of Kweli Journal, and two flash fiction pieces: “For Jeannie” in the Hilltop Review and “No Joy” in Flash Fiction Magazine. Kai’s short story, “While We Live,” won the Gwen Frostic Creative Writing Award in Graduate Fiction at her university in 2020, and was published in Guernica in 2021.

Kai was selected as a fellow in the Mellon Foundation Humanities Without Walls Pre-Doctoral Career Diversity Summer Workshop in 2019, where she explored possibilities related to the Humanities. Kai is also a proud VONA/Voices Alum. During her PhD, Kai was editor-in-chief of Third Coast Magazine, and was recognized in 2018 for academic excellence among underrepresented students through the John Orr Prize at Western Michigan University. Prior to graduation, she won All-University awards for Teaching Excellence and Creative Research.

About "What the Fireflies Knew":

An ode to Black girlhood and adolescence as seen through KB's eyes, What the Fireflies Knew follows KB after her father dies of an overdose and the debts incurred from his addiction cause the loss of the family home in Detroit. Soon thereafter, KB and her teenage sister, Nia, are sent by their overwhelmed mother to live with their estranged grandfather in Lansing, Michigan. Over the course of a single sweltering summer, KB attempts to navigate a world that has turned upside down.


Her father has been labeled a fiend. Her mother's smile no longer reaches her eyes. Her sister, once her best friend, now feels like a stranger. Her grandfather is grumpy and silent. The white kids who live across the street are friendly, but only sometimes. And they're all keeping secrets. As KB vacillates between resentment, abandonment, and loneliness, she is forced to carve out a different identity for herself and find her own voice.


A dazzling and moving novel about family, identity, and race, What the Fireflies Knew poignantly reveals that heartbreaking but necessary component of growing up--the realization that loved ones can be flawed and that the perfect family we all dream of looks different up close.

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Where is it happening?

Bookbug & this is a bookstore, 3019 Oakland Drive, Kalamazoo, United States

Event Location & Nearby Stays:

Tickets

USD 0.00 to USD 30.00

Bookbug \/ this is a bookstore

Host or Publisher Bookbug / this is a bookstore

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