Milkweed Books
1011 S Washington Avenue
Suite 107
Minneapolis, MN 55415
United States
THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. PLEASE RSVP HERE.
Join Milkweed Books as we launch local author J.P. WHITE’s new novel, The Last Tale of Norah Bow. He will read from the book, engage in a conversation with GLENN MILLER about craft and character, and open it up to audience questions and book signing.
ABOUT THE BOOK
In 1926, during Prohibition, Vital Bow is abducted at gunpoint during dinner at the family cottage in Rye Beach, Ohio. His intrepid fourteen-year-old daughter, Norah Bow, discovers her father’s involvement in a rum-running gang operating on Lake Erie and determines to sail north to rescue him. En route, Norah rescues Ruby Francoeur, an enigmatic woman of easy virtue who conceals secrets of her own. With Ruby as crew, Norah enters an island-and-city world of eccentric and monstrous characters who test her resolve, strength, and knowledge as both a young woman and a skipper. NORAH BOW is a coming-of-age story told by an elder Norah, a tale filled with characters steeped in betrayal, remorse, and a fierce desire for more lives. Norah Bow is a story about family secrets, self-reliance, and the complicated nature of memory itself.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
J.P. WHITE has published essays, articles, fiction, reviews, interviews, and poetry in over a hundred publications. A highly acclaimed, award-winning writer, White pushes beyond the boundaries of the lyric/narrative tradition to let more of the flux and wonder of the human condition rush in. In the last 30 years, he has published essays, articles, fiction, reviews, interviews and poetry in over 100 publications including The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Gettysburg Review, American Poetry Review, and Poetry. He is a graduate of New College in Sarasota, Florida, Colorado State University and Vermont College. J.P. White spent his childhood summers sailing on Lake Erie. In the early 1980s, he worked delivering sailboats up and down the Eastern seaboard, to the Bahamas and the Caribbean. He currently sails a Cape Dory 25D out of St. Louis Bay on Lake Minnetonka, near Minneapolis, Minnesota.
GLENN MILLER is the author of Doorman Wanted. He launched his professional career by working on television soap operas and game shows on the back lots of NBC Burbank. He holds a master’s degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and has served as a CBS-affiliate news producer, an executive speechwriter, and creative director at production agencies within the Twin Cities. His published writings range from a regularly featured column in the Minneapolis-based Southwest Journal to the airing of a humor commentary on NPR’s Marketplace. He teaches at Minneapolis’s Loft Literary Center and has served on the boards of local nonprofit publishers Graywolf Press and Coffee House Press and was president of The Friends of the Minneapolis Public Library. He and his wife, Jocelyn Hale, live in Minneapolis and are the proud parents of two grown sons.
Glenn’s hobbies include reading (always one novel and one work of nonfiction going at the same time); artwork (currently charcoal, but considering moving back into oils); tennis (please don’t tell him he’s not as good as he thinks he is, let’s keep that a poorly hidden secret); cooking; and trying desperately to tackle the German language.