Year of the Water Horse

Please join Janice Page, Arts Editor for the Washington Post, in conversation with Joshua Kosman, former classical music critic at the San Francisco Chronicle, at Clio's to discuss The Year of the Water Horse.

Originating as a cover story written for the Boston Globe, in which Janice chronicled her journey to adopting a daughter from the same region of China where her mother-in-law had once unintentionally abandoned a daughter when she was forced to flee a civil war, YEAR OF THE WATER HORSE combines Janice’s adoption odyssey with elements of the shared but very different sagas of the families she was born into and married into.

At its center is the duality of one child taken from a land where one was left behind, and how those plainly poetic life stories—of daughters and mothers bridging numerous cultural, political, and geographic divides—altered the author’s own relationship with loss, survival, acceptance, and grace.

Janice Page is arts editor at The Washington Post. Prior to that, Page worked at The Boston Globe, where she also published books in partnership with the Globe including the New York Times best-sellers Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy and Whitey Bulger: America’s Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice. She has also been on staff at The Los Angeles Times, The Providence Journal-Bulletin and written for The New York Times and Newsweek/MSNBC. A Boston-area native, Janice is a graduate of Rutgers University and was named the 2023 recipient of the Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger Residency at Yaddo, where she worked on Year of the Water Horse.

Joshua Kosman covered classical music for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1988 to 2024, reviewing and reporting on the wealth of orchestral, operatic, chamber, and contemporary music throughout the Bay Area. He holds degrees in music from Yale and UC Berkeley, and is a contributor to the New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians, 2nd Edition, and the New Grove Dictionary of Opera. He is a member of the Music Critics' Association of North America and a past winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for music criticism, and his articles have won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club. He is the co-constructor of a weekly cryptic crossword puzzle in The Nation magazine, and has repeatedly placed among the top 20 contestants at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.

Copies of Janice's book are available for purchase with your ticket.

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