Relative Strangers | Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello & Dawn Davies
About this Event
🎟 This event is FREE and open to the public and books will be available for purchase the night of the event! An RSVP grants general entry, but seating is not guaranteed, so please try and show up early. Please RSVP only if you intend to join us. Can't make the event?
About The Book
What happens when a complete unknown is actually close family? In Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity, and the Meaning of Kinship—a provocative anthology curated by B.K. Jackson, with a foreword by Libby Copeland, author of the groundbreaking book The Lost Family: How DNA Testing is Upending Who We Are, 28 acclaimed and emerging writers explore the transformative experience of encountering unknown close relatives. These are intimate stories by those who’ve spent years longing and searching for their unknown biological families and by others shocked to discover they have parents or siblings they never dreamed of—blindsiding revelations that require both a radical recalibration of identity and a redefinition of family. Each addresses the myriad emotions that arise in the aftermath of these discoveries and encounters, demonstrating that what we don’t know can hurt us, that secrets are toxic, and that truth can bring healing, redemption, and, sometimes, estrangement. Woven through is a universal question: What does it mean to be family?
About Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She co-translated Yi Won’s The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (Zephyr Press, 2021), which won the 2022 Translation Grand Prize from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Cancio-Bello has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Knight Foundation, and American Literary Translators Association, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, and more. She is co-founder of the Adoptee Literary Festival and serves as a programs and marketing supervisor for Miami Book Fair.
About Dawn Davies
Dawn Davies is the author of Mothers of Sparta: A Memoir in Pieces (Flatiron Books, 2018), which won the Florida Book Award Gold Medal for General Nonfiction and the GLCA New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her essays and stories have been Pushcart Special Mentions and Best American notables. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Missouri Review, Poetry Northwest, The AlaskaReview, Narrative, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. She lives on a farm in South Carolina. Visit her at authordawndavies.com and find her on Instagram @dawnlandia.
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