Events
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Start: 6:30 pm
Heidi Durrow's debut novel The Girl who Fell From the Sky tells the story of Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., who becomes the sole survivor of a family tragedy. With her strict African American grandmother as her new guardian, Rachel moves to a mostly black community, where her light brown skin, blue eyes, and beauty bring mixed attention her way. Growing up in the 1980s, she learns to swallow her overwhelming grief and confronts her identity as a biracial young woman in a world that wants to see her as either black or white.Meanwhile, a mystery unfolds, revealing the terrible truth about Rachel's last morning on a Chicago rooftop. Interwoven are the voices of Jamie, a neighborhood boy who witnessed the events, and Laronne, a friend of Rachel's mother. Inspired by a true story of a mother's twisted love, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky reveals an unfathomable past and explores issues of identity at a time when many people are asking "Must race confine us and define us?"In the tradition of Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John,Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sandra Cisneros' House on Mango Street, here is a portrait of a young girl—and society's ideas of race, class, and beauty.
Start: 8:00 pm
For over three and a half decades, Ricardo Pau-Llosa has been a prominent figure in the literary and visual arts of South Florida. An internationally recognized authority on Latin American Modernist art, Pau-Llosa has attained equal prominence as a poet and essayist. And he has also been collecting art. The University of Notre Dame’s Snite Museum of Art is featuring a major exhibition this fall – Parallel Currents: Highlights of the Ricardo Pau-Llosa Collection of Latin American Art (Aug. 29-Nov. 14). Pau-Llosa will be signing copies of the superbly designed and printed, full-color book accompanying the exhibition, Parallel Currents which includes a penetrating essay, “Art and the Diasporic Imagination” (published with facing-page translation into Spanish), in which Pau-Llosa discusses the emergence of the Latin American art scene in Miami, the role art played in his exile family’s struggles to establish themselves in America, and the development of his original critical model for the interpretation of the region’s art. Also being presented this evening is the just released book, The Miami of the Poet (Maker’s Press), with a selection of Pau-Llosa’s South Florida-inspired works alongside photographs by James Gersing. 8pm
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