Authors Uncovered with Nadia Owusu

6:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Wilkinson Public Library
Magazine Room

Event Details

Aftershocks: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Identity

We have given away the promo copies of the book, but come for the talk tonight!  (No need to pre-register, just show up!)

A deeply felt memoir from Whiting Award–winner Nadia Owusu about the push and pull of belonging, the seismic emotional toll of family secrets, and the heart it takes to pull through.

Selected as a best book of the year by Vulture, Amazon, Esquire, and Time!

Young Nadia Owusu followed her father, a United Nations official, from Europe to Africa and back again. Just as she and her family settled into a new home, her father would tell them it was time to say their goodbyes. The instability wrought by Nadia’s nomadic childhood was deepened by family secrets and fractures, both lived and inherited. Her Armenian American mother, who abandoned Nadia when she was two, would periodically reappear, only to vanish again. Her father, a Ghanaian, the great hero of her life, died when she was thirteen. After his passing, Nadia’s stepmother weighed her down with a revelation that was either a bombshell secret or a lie, rife with shaming innuendo.


Nadia Owusu is a Brooklyn-based writer and urban planner. She is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award. Her lyric essay So Devilish a Fire won the Atlas Review chapbook contest. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Granta, the GuardianBon Appétit, Electric Literature, The Paris Review Daily, and CatapultAftershocks is her first book.

Event Type(s): WPL Programs
Age Group(s): Adult

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