Memphis Reads 2024 Series: “Writer’s Talks” w/ Valeria Luiselli
Memphis Reads Selects Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions as Book Selection for 2024
[Memphis, TN, July 2024] – Memphis Reads, the Memphis community common reading program based at Christian Brothers University, is pleased to announce its book selection for 2024: “Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions” by Valeria Luiselli.
Tell Me How It Ends is Structured around the forty questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation, Tell Me How It Ends (an expansion of her 2016 Freeman’s essay of the same name) humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality of racism and fear-both here and back home. (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/588966/tell-me-how-it-ends-by-valeria-luiselli/).
Memphis Reads was created to give students a common academic experience and to connect them with the campus community, as well as the larger Memphis community. Having students and faculty members read the same book provides them with numerous opportunities to discuss it throughout the school year — and by spreading the program city-wide, it provides the same opportunity for our colleagues at other schools and for the general community.
Author Valeria Luiselli will be in Memphis at several Memphis Reads events, including speaking engagements at Christian Brothers University on October 2nd (CBU Theater @ 7 PM), Rhodes College on October 3rd (McNeill Concert Hall @ 6 PM), and a visit to a Memphis- Shelby County high school as well. Memphis Reads partners will host parallel events, giving multiple points of access to the topics addressed in Tell Me How It Ends. All events will be free and open to the public.
Memphis Reads is a community partnership between Christian Brothers University, Memphis Public Libraries, Facing History & Ourselves, City of Memphis, Memphis-Shelby County Schools, Rhodes College, the University of Memphis, LeMoyne-Owen College, NOVEL Bookstore, Refugee Empowerment Program, Memphis Museum of Science and History, and so many more. Sponsors include International Paper, CBU, Rhodes College, Follett Corporation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Tennessee Arts Commission.
Tell Me How It Ends is published by Penguin Random House (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/588966/tell-me-how-it-ends-by-valeria-luiselli/) and is available at local booksellers and online. Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa, and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; and, most recently, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. She is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant”; the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, an American Book Award, and the 2021 Dublin Literary Award; and has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award twice and the Kirkus Prize on three occasions. She has been a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and the recipient of a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney’s, among other publications, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives in New York City.
For more information on Memphis Reads, please contact Justin Brooks (Director of the CBU Center for Community Engagement) at jbrook13@cbu.edu or (901) 321-3537.
