Join us at 6 PM on Thursday, February 22nd in our Tribeca office for an evening of readings from two Civitellians’ new novels: Rachel Eliza Griffiths (DG 2022)’s Promise and Ayana Mathis (CRF 2017)’s The Unsettled.
Two Black sisters growing up in small-town New England fight to protect their home, their bodies, and their dreams as the Civil Rights Movement sweeps the nation in Promise.
Set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama, The Unsettled is about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival.
Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, visual artist, and novelist. She is a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for a NAACP Image Award. Griffiths is also a recipient of fellowships from organizations including Cave Canem Foundation, Kimbilio, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Yaddo. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Tin House, and other publications. Promise is her first novel.
Ayana Mathis is the author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Knopf, 2012) and The Unsettled (Knopf, 2023). Her work has been supported by the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation. She was a 2020-2021 American Academy in Berlin Prize Fellow. Mathis is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. She was born in Philadelphia, and currently lives in New York City where she teaches writing in Hunter College’s MFA Program and is pursuing her Masters of Divinity at Union Theological Seminary.