Megan Holt & One Book One New Orleans
Join us on Monday, January 18 at 12pm CT as we host Megan Holt, Executive Director of One Book One New Orleans, to update us on this year’s selection and events. This event will livestream to Facebook, YouTube, and our website homepage.
This year’s One Book selection is The Yellow House by Sarah Broom. If you purchase a copy to donate, you’ll get 5% off your entire purchase. Your donation provides a copy of the book and an accompanying curriculum to adult education programs throughout the Greater New Orleans area, people in prisons throughout the southeast, and teenagers in juvenile justice facilities.
MORE ABOUT ONE BOOK ONE NEW ORLEANS
A campaign for literacy and community, One Book One New Orleans calls on New Orleans residents to share the experience of reading the same book at the same time, works to provide literacy resources to adults, and emphasizes the importance of dialogue between diverse groups of people.
Their partnerships with the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society, the New Orleans Public Library, and WRBH Reading Radio allow them to host quality community programming and to provide access to the selected book to those with limited budget and those with visual impairment.
Through their partnerships with the Literacy Alliance of Greater New Orleans, Louisiana Books 2 Prisoners, and the Center for Educational Excellence in Alternative Settings, they provide copies of the selected book and an accompanying curriculum to adult education programs throughout the Greater New Orleans area, people in prisons throughout the southeast, and teenagers in juvenile justice facilities.
MORE ABOUT THE YELLOW HOUSE
Winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction
A New York Times Bestseller
Named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review
Named one of the “10 Best Books of 2019” by the New York Times Book Review, Seattle Times, Chicago Public Library, the Chicago Tribune, and Slate
Named a Best Book of 2019 by the Washington Post, NPR’s Book Concierge, NPR’s Fresh Air, the Guardian, BookPage, New York Public Library, and Shelf Awareness
Named a Best Memoir of the Decade by LitHub
A brilliant, haunting and unforgettable memoir from a stunning new talent about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a shotgun house in New Orleans East.
In 1961, Sarah M. Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant―the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah’s father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah’s birth, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae’s thirteenth and most unruly child.
A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America’s most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother’s struggle against a house’s entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser-known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the “Big Easy” of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power.
Order the book below!
