Offsite: Ayana Mathis with ​​​​​​​Anastacia-Renee at NAAM

Ayana Mathis, the bestselling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, returns to the Northwest African American Museum to launch her new novel The Unsettled, a searing multi-generational story—set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama—about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival. Beloved (former Seattle) poet Anastacia-Renee will join Ayana in onstage conversation. The Unsettled is a brilliant, explosive, vitally important new work from one of America’s most fiercely talented storytellers. From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter's squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested room, the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place, and to save herself from the complicated past that led them there. Ava has been estranged from her own mother, Dutchess, since she left her Alabama home as a young woman barely out of her teens. Despite their estrangement and the thousand miles between them, mother and daughter are deeply entwined, but Ava can't forgive her sharp-tounged, larger than life mother whose intractability and bouts of debilitating despair brought young Ava to the outer reaches of neglect and hunger. Ava wants to love her son differently, better. But when Toussaint’s father, Cass, reappears, she is swept off course by his charisma, and the intoxicating power of his radical vision to destroy systems of racial injustice and bring about a bold new way of communal living. Meanwhile, in Alabama, Dutchess struggles to keep Bonaparte, once a beacon of Black freedom and self-determination, in the hands of its last five Black residents—families whose lives have been rooted in this stretch of land for generations—and away from rapidly encroaching white developers. She fights against the erasure of Bonaparte's venerable history and the loss of the land itself, which she has so arduously preserved as Ava's inheritance. As Ava becomes more enmeshed with Cass, Toussaint senses the danger simmering all around him—his well-intentioned but erratic mother; the intense, volatile figure of his father who drives his fledgling Philadelphia community toward ever increasing violence and instability. He begins to dream of Dutchess and Bonaparte, his home and birthright, if only he can find his way there. Ayana Mathis’s first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie was a New York Times bestseller, an NPR Best Book of 2013, the second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0., and has been translated into sixteen languages. Her nonfiction has been published in the The New York Times, The Atlantic, Guernica, and Rolling Stone. Mathis is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. She was born in Philadelphia, and currently lives in New York City where she teaches writing in Hunter College’s MFA Program. Anastacia-Renee is an award-winning writer, educator, interdisciplinary artist, TEDx Speaker and podcaster. She is the author of Side Notes from the Archivist (HarperCollins/Amistad), (v.) (Black Ocean), Forget It (Black Radish) and Here In The (Middle) of Nowhere forthcoming from HarperCollins/Amistad March 2024. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in, BOMB, Prairie Schooner, Hobart, Foglifter, Auburn Avenue, Catapult, Alta, Torch, Poetry Northwest, Cascadia Magazine, The Fight and Fiddle, Ms. Magazine and others. Renee has received fellowships and residencies from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, 4Culture,VONA, Ragdale, Mineral School, and The New Orleans Writers Residency.

Event Links

Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/2022318-0

Website: https://go.evvnt.com/2022318-2

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