Open Book / Open Mind, Ayana Mathis, "The Unsettled"

The author of “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” talks about her new family saga set in the 1980s spanning Philadelphia and small-town Alabama with memoirist and essayist Emily Raboteau,

REGISTRATION IS CLOSED BUT SEATS ARE AVAILABLE. Please come join us today!

The event is free but registration is required. Doors open at 3:30 p.m. After the discussion, there will be a Q&A period and a book signing and sale with Watchung Booksellers. 

Open Book / Open Mind is sponsored by Montclair Public Library Foundation, Watchung Booksellers, the New Jersey Council on Humanities, David and Mary Lee Jones, Rosemary Iversen and an anonymous donor. We are also grateful for the generous support of our in-kind sponsors, First Congregational Church of Montclair, The George, and Amanti Vino. To support Open Book / Open Mind and other library programs, click here to donate.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ayana Mathis's  first novel, THE TWELVE TRIBES OF HATTIE, was a New York Times Bestseller, the second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, a 2013 New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, and was long listed for the Dublin Literary Award and nominated for Hurston/Wright Foundation's Legacy Award. Mathis’s essays and criticism have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Financial Times, Rolling Stone, and Glamour magazine. She is currently pursuing her Masters of Divinity at Union Theological Seminary.

Mathis's 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 received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and went on to become the first African-American woman to serve as an Assistant Professor in that program. She currently teaches at Hunter College in the MFA Program. 

She was born in Philadelphia, and currently lives in New York City where she teaches writing in Hunter College’s MFA Program.

ABOUT THE BOOK

 "The Unsettled" was named a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of 2023, a best of 2023 by The New Yorker, Publisher’s Weekly, an Oprah Daily Best Novels of 2023, and a Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2023. The New York Times calls it, “Poignant, heartbreaking.”

The book is a searing multi-generational novel—set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama—about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival.

“Ten years after "The Twelve Tribes of Hattie," Mathis again strikes story-telling gold.” –People

“An ardent, ambitious, and carefully stitched tapestry of a novel, one that deserves and rewards our attention.” –The Minneapolis Star Tribune

“'The Unsettled' is a powerful, moving novel about the fracture of Black family and the attempts we make to suture it, about the power of our history and futile attempts to sanitize it, about the connection of Black people to the lands they fight so hard to keep, and the government’s attempts to separate them from it.” –Roxane Gay 

“[A] masterpiece . . . "The Unsettled" is poised to be a significant addition to contemporary literature, affirming Mathis’s status as a gifted and influential voice in the literary world . . .  An emotionally charged journey through the intricate tapestry of family, love, and the relentless pursuit of belonging.” –Essence magazine

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Emily Raboteau writes at the intersection of social and environmental justice, race, climate change, and parenthood. Raboteau is an essayist and novelist with an upcoming memoir, “Lessons for Survival.”  Her previous books are "Searching for Zion," winner of an American Book Award, and "The Professor’s Daughter" A regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, Raboteau’s essays have recently appeared and been anthologized in The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is a full professor at the City College of New York (CUNY) in Harlem and lives in the Bronx with her husband, the novelist Victor LaValle, and their two children.

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