Fiction can be a means of escape...or it can serve to illuminate real-world events and engage readers with issues that affect their lives. In this session, we’ll hear from four writers who ingeniously incorporate contemporary issues in their novels while also telling stirring stories. In Shadowhouse Fall, the followup to his bestselling novel Shadowshaper, Daniel José Older examines gentrification and state-sponsored violence through the prism of urban fantasy. In her debut novel I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, a finalist for the National Book Award, Erika L. Sánchez writes about the tensions between her protagonist’s ambitions and her undocumented Mexican parents’ expectations. In her buzzworthy debut, Dear Martin, Nic Stone experiments with form and honors Civil Rights Movement history while fearlessly addressing issues of police violence and social injustice. Finally, former Boston Globe reporter Dick Lehr turns his pen to YA with Trell, a hard-hitting narrative inspired by Lehr’s journalistic background and a Roxbury murder and wrongful conviction that has stayed with him since he reported on the story decades ago. These books—and this discussion, moderated by the Boston Public Library’s Laura Koenig—will inspire new ways of thinking about the real world we live in.
