One Book, One U: Keynote Event with author Brit Bennett

Join us to hear Brit Bennett discuss her book, “The Vanishing Half,” the 2025-2026 for the University of Miami.
Longlisted for both the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, Bennett’s novel about family and relationships explores the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s decisions, desires, and expectations.
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern Black community and running away at age 16, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her Black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?
Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces an emotional family story that explores the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, “The Vanishing Half” considers the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.
Following the discussion there will be a Q&A with the audience, and the author will be available to sign copies of the book at the conclusion of the event.

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Host or Publisher University of Miami Libraries