Sonya Lea w/ Karen Maeda Allman, AMERICAN BLOODLINES

Sonya Lea visits the store to discuss her new book American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture, which combines memoir with reportage and cultural criticism to interrogate and complicate the traditional narrative about how lynch culture is created in families, communities, and institutions. The essays in this collection grapple with our complicity in these atrocities—including the agreement in our silences—and demonstrate how we, as descendants, might take responsibility and bring new scrutiny to ancestral and communal crimes. She is joined in conversation by Karen Maeda Allman, assistant agent at Wales Literary Agency and former Elliott Bay bookseller.

Summer 1936: Rainey Bethea, a young Black man, is tried for the rape and M**der of an elderly white woman. The all-white, all-male jury takes just four and a half minutes to find him guilty. Bethea is hanged near the banks of the Ohio River in Owensboro, Kentucky, with more than twenty thousand white people in attendance. The crowd turns the violent spectacle of Bethea's hanging—the last documented public execution in the United States—into a brutal carnival.

Bethea's story came to author Sonya Lea through her family, and it is through her family that she reckons with its truths. At her grandmother's funeral, Lea received an oral history recorded by a neighbor. In its pages, Lea, who is descended from white Kentuckians on both sides, discovered that two of the spectators at Bethea's execution were her grandparents, teenage newlyweds Sherrel and Frances Ralph. Lea's research would also divulge that she was related to the prosecuting attorney for the Commonwealth, the man considered most responsible for Bethea's hanging.

American Bloodlines combines memoir with reportage and cultural criticism to interrogate and complicate the traditional narrative about how lynch culture is created in families, communities, and institutions. The essays in this collection grapple with our complicity in these atrocities—including the agreement in our silences—and demonstrate how we, as descendants, might take responsibility and bring new scrutiny to ancestral and communal crimes.

Sonya Lea is an American Canadian writer and writing mentor. Her book, American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture (University Press of Kentucky, October 2025) is about the last public execution in America, a “legal lynching” in Owensboro, Kentucky, where she was born. Her memoir Wondering Who You Are (Tin House, 2015,) about her partner’s memory loss and its impact on her relationship, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her essays have appeared in Salon, The Southern Review, Brevity, Guernica, Ms. Magazine, The Prentice Hall College Reader, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Rumpus, and more. Lea has received support from the Canada Council and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts for her work. She teaches workshops and retreats throughout North America. For more go to www.wonderingwhoyouare.com. IG: @sonya_lea

Karen Maeda Allman is a bookseller alum, having worked for Independent Bookstores (including the Elliott Bay Book Company) for over 30 years. She is currently an assistant agent at Wales Literary Agency and serves on the Board of Seattle Arts and Lectures. She has served on many jury and awards panels, the National Book Award for Translated Literature and the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction

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Host or Publisher Elliott Bay Book Company