Award-winning author Susan Straight reads from her new book In the Country of Women, which the New York Times describes as “a family memoir that stretches back to the mid-19th century and traverses a forest of family trees.” Joyce Carol Oates comments, “What a beautiful book! In the Country of Women must be the most populated, celebratory, filled-with-life memoir of our time.” Viet Thanh Nguyen calls it “an enriching, inspiring, and moving account of how a writer chose her family and her destiny.” Straight will be joined in conversation by her daughter Delphine Sims, a PhD student in art history at UC Berkeley, where she studies the intersections of race and gender in the history of landscape photography.

Susan Straight is the author of eight critically acclaimed novels, including Aquaboogie; I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots; Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights; Highwire Moon, a National Book Award finalist; and Between Heaven and Here. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Guardian, Granta, and Harpers, among other leading publications. She is distinguished professor of creative writing at UC Riverside.

This program is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Lands of Promise and Peril: Geographies of California.