ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

IDENTITY, INTERSECTIONALITY, AND BELONGING: AUTHOR PATRICE GOPO IN CONVERSATION WITH AUTHOR BRYN CHANCELLOR

On Saturday, September 8, from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m., Main Street Books is pleased to welcome the incisive and insightful Patrice Gopo to the store for a reading of her recently released essay collection, All the Colors We Will See, followed by a conversation with her fellow North Carolina Arts Council Literature Fellow and author of Sycamore, Bryn Chancellor.

Patrice Gopo grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, the child of Jamaican immigrants who had little experience being black in America. In All the

Colors We Will See, Patrice seamlessly moves across borders of space and time to create vivid portraits of how the reality of being different affects her quest to belong. In this poetic and often courageous weaving of writings, Patrice examines the complexities of identity in our turbulent yet hopeful time of intersecting heritages. As she digs beneath the layers of immigration questions and race relations, Patrice also turns her voice to themes such as marriage and divorce, the societal beauty standards we hold, and the intricacies of living out our faith.

Patrice Gopo’s essays have appeared in a variety of publications, including Creative Nonfiction, Gulf Coast, Full Grown People, and online in The New York Times and The Washington Post. Her radio commentaries have appeared on Charlotte, North Carolina’s NPR Station WFAE 90.7. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she is the recipient of a 2016 Regional Artist Project Grant and a 2017-2018 NC Arts Council Artist Fellowship. Patrice lives with her family in North Carolina.

Bryn Chancellor is the author of the novel Sycamore, which was a Southwest Book of the Year, an Indie Next pick, an Amazon Editors’ Best Book of 2017, and among Bustle‘s Best Debuts of 2017. Her story collection When Are You Coming Home? won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Gulf Coast, Blackbird, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Phoebe, The Common, Publishers Weekly, and elsewhere. She is a grateful recipient of fellowships from the Alabama, Arizona, and North Carolina state arts councils and the Poets and Writers Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award. A graduate of Vanderbilt University’s M.F.A. Program, she is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.