Tuesday Morning Booktalks

media release: Join fellow booklovers and award-winning UW English professor Emily Auerbach for lively discussions of two novels by Georgia authors. Both focus on a search for identity and love in the face of trauma and racism in the American South. Classes meet on Tuesdays in the South Madison Community Room at 2300 S. Park St. (free and accessible parking) from 10-11:30 AM, with coffee and snacks served starting at 9:30 AM. These sessions are free but with the hope participants will donate to the life-changing UW Odyssey Project.

Tuesday, October 27: Tayari Jones, Kin

This 2026 blockbuster novel traces two motherless girls, “cradle friends” since birth, searching for family in the face of adversity. Born in Mississippi, the girls traverse the South in the 1950s and 1960s, struggling to become women without mothers to guide them. Vernice’s path takes her to Spelman College in Atlanta, while Annie’s search for her mother sends her to Memphis. The New York Times hailed Kin as “a lush, beautiful novel about found family.” Like The Color Purple from nearly a half-century earlier, Kin features the narrative voices of two women (in this case, close enough to be sisters) and asks its readers to redefine family.