Please join us in welcoming Kimberly Garrett Brown for a reading from her novel: CORA’S KITCHEN

Cora James wants to be an author, but with a full-time job at Harlem’s 135th Street library and a family to care for, her dreams quickly become buried. Langston Hughes is one of her library patrons, and one day she writes him a letter, asking for advice on craft. He encourages Cora to give her dreams a chance. Yet even then she is stymied, forced to take a leave of absence from her job to cover for her cousin, who temporarily can’t work as a cook for a rich white family uptown. Cora doesn’t expect to become friends with Eleanor, the lady of the house, but they are soon linked together by good intentions, bad luck, and their shared, steadfast belief that their individual dreams should matter.

Set in 1928, this moving and powerful epistolary novel examines race and gender issues in early twentieth-century America, the role of artists, the powerful pull of family, and the importance of women’s friendships. Surprising, memorable, and engrossing, CORA’S KITCHEN announces an important new voice.

KIMBERLY GARRETT BROWN is the Publisher and Executive Editor of Minerva Rising Press. Her work has appeared in Black Lives Have Always Mattered: A Collection of Essays, Poems and Personal Narratives, The Feminine Collective, Compass Literary Magazine, Today’s Chicago Woman, Chicago Tribune, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her first novel, Cora’s Kitchen, comes out from Inanna Publications in September 2022. It was a finalist in the 2018 William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition and the 2016 Louise Meriwether First Book Prize. She earned her MFA at Goddard College. She currently lives in Boca Raton, Florida.

Website: https://kimberlygarrettbrown.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kimgarrettbrown
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kimgarrettbrown
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kimwrites/
Inanna Publications is one of only a very few independent feminist presses remaining in Canada. Inanna is committed to publishing fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by and about women, and complementing this with relevant non-fiction, that offer new, innovative and diverse perspectives with the potential to change and enhance women’s lives everywhere.