An Evening with #1 Bestselling Author Celeste Ng! Maggie Smith Moderates!

60 Cleveland Avenue,Columbus OH 43215

28 October, 2022

Description

Join the number one bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng as she launches Our Missing Hearts, a deeply suspenseful and heartrending novel about the unbreakable love between a mother and child in a society consumed by fear. Ng will be in conversation with acclaimed poet and essayist Maggie Smith! A ticket includes a copy of Our Missing Hearts and is $31 with tax. COLUMBUS COLLEGE OF ART & DESIGN and OHIOANA LIBRARY are Gramercy’s Community Partners in presenting this program. At the author's request, proof of full vaccination and masks are required to attend this program. Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. For a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve “American culture” in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic—including the work of Bird’s mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet who left the family when he was nine years old. Bird has grown up disavowing his mother and her poems; he doesn’t know her work or what happened to her, and he knows he shouldn’t wonder. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is pulled into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of librarians, into the lives of the children who have been taken, and finally to New York City, where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of much-needed change. Our Missing Hearts is an old story made new, of the ways supposedly civilized communities can ignore the most searing injustice. It’s a story about the power—and limitations—of art to create change, the lessons and legacies we pass on to our children, and how any of us can survive a broken world with our hearts intact. Celeste Ng is the number one New York Times bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere. Ng is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and her work has been published in over thirty languages. Maggie Smith is the author of the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change, as well as Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, and Lamp of the Body. Smith’s poems and essays are widely published and anthologized, appearing in The Best American Poetry, the New York Times, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Her memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, will be published by One Signal/Atria in April 2023.