Authorama Presents Yaa Gyasi in Conversation with Deborah DEEP Mouton

Don't miss bestselling novelist Yaa Gyasi and former Houston Poet Laureate Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton live online. They will discuss Gyasi's National Book Critics Circle and PEN/Hemingway Award-winning debut novel HOMEGOING and her follow-up TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM (paperback release 7/6), and much more. Audience Q&A follows. ABOUT TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM: Yaa Gyasi's stunning follow-up to her acclaimed national bestseller Homegoing is "a book of blazing brilliance" (The Washington Post)—a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama. Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after an ankle injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her. But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family's loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive. ABOUT THE AUTHORS: Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. Her debut novel, Homegoing, won her the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award for best first book, the PEN/Hemingway Award for a first book of fiction, the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” honors for 2016, and the American Book Award. She lives in Brooklyn. Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton is an internationally-known writer, librettist, educator, activist, performer, and Poet Laureate Emeritus of Houston, Texas.Formerly ranked the #2 Best Female Performance Poet in the World, Her recent poetry collection, Newsworthy, garnered her a Pushcart nomination and was named a finalist for the 2019 Writer’s League of Texas Book Award and an honorable mention for the Summerlee Book Prize. A German translation, under the title "Berichtenswert," is set to be released in Fall 2021 by Elif Verlag. In addition, a story book opera, entitled Lula the Mighty Griot will debut with Houston Grand Opera in early 2021 and her memoir, Black Chameleon, is forthcoming by Henry Holt & Co. [Organizer's description]