Offsite: Quiara Alegría Hudes: The White Hot w/ Lin-Manuel Miranda

Event guidelines:

• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing line will follow the talk.
• The conversation will be livestreamed for free online here: https://youtube.com/live/3LWB0F1upFM
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact [email protected].

The story of a runaway mother’s ten days of freedom—and the pain, desire, longing, and wonder we find on the messy road to enlightenment—from Pulitzer Prize winner Quiara Alegría Hudes.

April is a young mother raising her daughter in an intergenerational house of unspoken secrets and loud arguments. Her only refuge is to hide away in a locked bathroom, her ears plugged into an ambient soundscape, and a mantra on her lips: dead inside. That is, until one day, as she finds herself spiraling toward the volcanic rage she calls the white hot, a voice inside her tells her to just…walk away. She wanders to a bus station and asks for a ticket to the furthest destination; she tells the clerk to make it one-way. That ticket takes her from her Philly home to the threshold of a wilderness and the beginning of a nameless quest—an accidental journey that shakes her awake, almost kills her, and brings her to the brink of an impossible choice.

The White Hot takes the form of a letter from mother to daughter about a moment of abandonment that would stretch from ten days to ten years—an explanation, but not an apology. Hudes narrates April’s story—spiritual and sexy, fierce and funny—with delicate lyricism and tough love. Just as April finds in her painful and absurd sojourn the key to freeing herself and her family from a cage of generational trauma, so Hudes turns April’s stumbling pursuit of herself into an unforgettable short epic of self-discovery.

Quiara Alegría Hudes is an American writer. Her work includes the Pulitzer Prize winning play Water by the Spoonful, the Tony Award winning Broadway musical and major motion picture In the Heights, the animated film Vivo, and the essay High Tide of Heartbreak. As a Pr*son reform activist, Hudes and her cousin founded Emancipated Stories, a platform where people behind bars can share one page of their life story with the world.

Lin-Manuel Miranda is a Pulitzer Prize, Grammy, Emmy, and Tony Award-winning songwriter, actor and director, as well as a New York Times bestselling author (Hamilton: The Revolution; Gmorning, Gnight!: Little Pep Talks for Me & You). He is the creator and original star of Broadway’s Tony-winning Hamilton and In the Heights. Additional Broadway: Freestyle Love Supreme (Co-Founder, Guest Star), Bring It On: The Musical (co-composer/co-lyricist), and West Side Story (2009 revival, Spanish translations). He is a recipient of the 2015 MacArthur Foundation Award, 2019 Portrait of a Nation Prize and 2018 Kennedy Center Honors. He lives with his family in New York.

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