Although this event has passed, you can still purchase tickets now through Tuesday, March 15, at 7:30 p.m. (PT). The event will be viewable until 11:59 p.m. on Tuesday, March 15.
Inspired by her popular BuzzFeed piece “37 Difficult Questions from My Mixed-Raced Son,” Mira Jacob’s graphic memoir, Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations, is Jacob’s response to timely and pointed questions raised by her six-year-old son, Zakir.
At an increasingly fraught time for immigrants and their families, Good Talk delves into difficult conversations about race, sex, love, and belonging that are both unavoidable and necessary. A gifted storyteller, Jacob’s work is earnest, moving, and often laugh-out-loud funny as she weaves together the threads of one American life.
Q&A with author Sonora Jha.
Mira Jacob is a novelist, memoirist, illustrator, and cultural critic. Her graphic memoir Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award, named a New York Times Notable Book, as well as a best book of the year by Time, Esquire, Publisher’s Weekly, and Library Journal. A bold, wry, and intimate graphic memoir about American identity, interracial families, and the realities that divide us, Good Talk is currently in development as a television series with Film 44.
Her novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick, shortlisted for India’s Tata First Literature Award, longlisted for the Brooklyn Literary Eagles Prize, and named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus Reviews, The Boston Globe, Bustle, and The Millions.
Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, Literary Hub, Guernica, Vogue, and The Telegraph. She is a visiting professor at the MFA Creative Writing program at The New School, and a founding faculty member of the MFA Program at Randolph College.
She is the co-founder of Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn, where she spent thirteen years bringing literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry to Williamsburg. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, documentary filmmaker Jed Rothstein and their son.
Sonora Jha, our Q&A moderator for the evening, is an essayist, novelist, and professor of journalism at Seattle University. She is the author of the memoir How to Raise a Feminist Son: Motherhood, Masculinity, and the Making of My Family (Sasquatch Books USA and Penguin Random House India, 2021) and the novel Foreign(Random House India 2013). Her op-eds and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Seattle Times, The Establishment, DAME, and in several anthologies. Her new novel, The Laughter, is forthcoming from Harper Via in early 2023.
Jha grew up in Mumbai and has been chief of metropolitan bureau for the Times of India and contributing editor for East magazine in Singapore. She teaches fiction and essay writing for Hugo House, Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, and Seattle Public Library. She is an alumna and board member of Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat and has served on the jury for awards for Artist Trust, Hedgebrook, and Hugo House. Learn more.
