Charles M. Blow
Fire Shut Up In My Bones: A Memoir
Monday, October 20, 2014
Program 6:30 pm
Followed by a book signing

Please join us at Roosevelt House for a special evening featuring New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, as we mark the publication of his new memoir Fire Shut in My Bones. In the book Mr. Blow looks back at his childhood in the out-of-time African-American Louisiana town, Gibsland, where he grew up in the 1970s -- a segregated, impoverished place where slavery's legacy felt astonishingly close, reverberating in the elders' stories and in the near-constant wash of violence that defined his early life.

Blow's mother was a fiercely driven woman with five sons, brass knuckles in her glove box, and a job plucking poultry at a nearby factory. Charles was the baby of the family, fiercely attached to his "do-right," not "good-time" mother. Until one day -- a day that forever divided his life into Before and After -- when an older cousin took advantage of the very young boy. Charles's escape from that world is recounted in a searing, redemptive story that will work its way into the deepest chambers of your heart.

Mr. Blow will be interviewed by Karen Hunter, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, co-author of numerous New York Times bestsellers and Assistant Professor of Film & Media at Hunter College.