Jennifer Croft at Milkweed Books

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Milkweed Books
1011 Washington Ave S
Open Book, 1st Floor
Minneapolis, MN 55404
United States

Free and open to the public.

Milkweed Books is excited to host author, 2018 Man Booker Prize Winner, and National Book Award Finalist Jennifer Croft for a reading from her new memoir, Homesick (Unnamed Press).

Thursday, November 7 | 7:00 p.m.
Milkweed Books | Open Book, 1st Floor
1011 Washington Ave, Minneapolis, 55415
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

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Sisters Amy and Zoe grow up in Oklahoma where they are homeschooled for an unexpected reason: Zoe suffers from debilitating and mysterious seizures, spending her childhood in hospitals as she undergoes surgeries. Meanwhile, Amy flourishes intellectually, showing an innate ability to glean a world beyond the troubles in her home life, exploring that world through languages first. Amy’s first love appears in the form of her Russian tutor Sasha, but when she enters university at the age of 15 her life changes drastically and with tragic results.

In Homesick, Croft complements her stunning prose with beautiful color photography to tell her coming of age story. This memoir is about learning to love language in its many forms, healing through words and the promises and perils of empathy and sisterhood.

Homesick is the story of a singular consciousness, a strikingly personal account of a deeply troubled young girl’s efforts to absorb disaster—and to persevere—buoyed by her passion for language, its infinite permutations and enigmas … Every page of this stunning and surprising book turns words around and around, deepening their mystery and making the reader understand that, like a photograph that (somewhat falsely) freezes a moment in time, learning to speak means discovering that words carry both truth and lies.” —The New York Times

“Croft’s photos, mixed in with her text, create continuity between memoirist and protagonist, despite their differing names. Her musings on language and occasional inclusion of Cyrillic script serve the same purpose. They make Homesick into a translator’s Bildungsroman, one in which art is first a beacon, then a home.” —NPR

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 ?Jennifer Croft was awarded the Man Booker International Prize in 2018 and was a National Book Award Finalist for her translation from Polish of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She is the recipient of Fulbright, PEN, MacDowell, and National Endowment for the Arts grants and fellowships, as well as the inaugural Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation and a Tin House Workshop Scholarship for her memoir Homesick. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She is a founding editor of Bueanos Aires Review and has published her own work and numerous translations in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Granta, VICE, n+1, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, BOMB, Guernica, The New Republic, The Guardian, The Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. She currently divides her time between Buenos Aires, New York, and Los Angeles.

Learn more.