August: Book Club Pick & Studio Visit with Nadia Owusu
On Aftershocks and Creativity
Join us for Studio Visits
A monthly conversation series about the creative process, hosted by Suleika Jaouad. Learn from extraordinary artists as they share stories, failures, wisdom and instruction.
For our upcoming Studio Visit, Suleika will be hosting a virtual conversation with the Whiting Award-winning writer Nadia Owusu on Sunday, August 22 from 1-2 pm ET.
Nadia Owusu is a Ghanaian and Armenian-American writer and urbanist. She was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and raised in Italy, Ethiopia, England, Ghana, and Uganda. Her first book, Aftershocks, A Memoir, topped many most-anticipated and best book of the year lists and was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. By day, Nadia is the Director of Storytelling at Frontline Solutions, a Black-owned consulting firm that helps social-change organizations to define goals, execute plans, and evaluate impact. The recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, she is a graduate of Pace University (BA) and Hunter College (MS). She earned her MFA in creative nonfiction at the Mountainview low-residency program, where she now teaches.
This August, we’re reading Nadia’s stunning debut memoir, Aftershocks, as our book club pick. Grab your copy from our Bookshop!
“In a literary landscape rich with diaspora memoirs, Owusu’s painful yet radiant story rises to the forefront. The daughter of an Armenian-American mother who abandoned her and a heroic Ghanaian father who died when she was thirteen, Nadia drifted across continents in a trek that she renders here with poetic, indelible prose.”—O Magazine
“[Owusu] dispatches all of this heartache with blistering honesty, but does so with prose light enough that it never feels too much to bear.”—Entertainment Weekly
“[A] gorgeous and unsettling memoir.”—The New York Times (Editor’s Choice)
“Full of narrative risk and untrammeled lyricism, [Aftershocks] fulfills the grieving author’s directive to herself: to construct a story that reconstructs her world.” —Washington Post