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White Whale Bookstore is honored to host the launch of American Bastard, the new memoir by local award-winning writer and poet Jan Beatty! All pre-orders of American Bastard will be signed! She’ll be joined by Ed Ochester for a reading and by local band 8th Street Rox for some tunes. As some of Jan’s biggest fans, we can’t wait to celebrate her and this book.
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Purchase AMERICAN BASTARD here: https://whitewhalebookstore.com/item/FZHdqVE6TBsWlVkKitJkNA
This event will be in-person at Lotenero Art Studio. You are required to show proof of vaccination for COVID-19 at the door, and masks are required. The authors will only remove their masks to read at the mic. A selection of beverages will be available at the event, but we ask that if you are not actively consuming a beverage that you keep your mask on at all times otherwise.
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ABOUT AMERICAN BASTARD:
“I don’t think I’ve ever read a book like this one. I hadn’t known some live haunted by their own blood ghosts. It will be medicine for those wounded by their own births and illuminating for anyone who thought they understood notions of home and kin. It’s as if Beatty’s lived homesick for herself. American Bastard is as brutal and beautiful as Beatty’s poetry. A surgery of the self. Precise and invasive, exploratory and celebratory, debilitating and transformational.”—Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street and A House of My Own: Stories from My Life
American Bastard is a lyrical inquiry into the experience of being a bastard in America. This memoir travels across literal continents—and continents of desire as Beatty finds her birthfather, a Canadian hockey player who’s won three Stanley Cups—and her birthmother, a working-class woman from Pittsburgh. This is not the whitewashed story, but the real story, where Beatty writes through complete erasure: loss of name and history, and a culture based on the currency of gratitude as expected payment from the adoptee. American Bastard sandblasts the exaltation of adoption in Western culture and the myth of the “chosen baby.” This journey into the relationship of place and body compels and unhinges, with the link between identity and blood history as its driving force. Beatty rescripts the order of things: the horizontal world of the birth table where babies are switched, the complex yard of the body where names and blood shift and revolt, and the actual story into the relationship of place and the insurrection of the body erased. Issues of class and struggle run throughout this book, this narrative river between blood and continents, between work and desire.
ABOUT THE WRITERS:
Jan Beatty’s seventh book, American Bastard, won the Red Hen Nonfiction Award and was published in 2021. A new chapbook, Skydog, is forthcoming from Lefty Blondie Press in December. The University of Pittsburgh Press published The Body Wars in Fall, 2020. In the New York Times, Naomi Shihab Nye said: Jan Beatty’s new poems in “The Body Wars” shimmer with luminous connection, travel a big life and grand map of encounters. Other books include Jackknife: New and Collected Poems (2018 Paterson Prize) named by Sandra Cisneros on LitHub as her favorite book of 2019. Her fourth book, The Switching/Yard, was named by Library Journal as one of ...30 New Books That Will Help You Rediscover Poetry. The Huffington Post called her one of ten “advanced women poets for required reading.” Beatty\'s work has been published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Poetry, BuzzFeed, North American Review, and Best American Poetry. Other books include Red Sugar, Boneshaker, and Mad River, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. For many years, Beatty worked as a waitress, an abortion counselor, and in maximum security prisons. She directs creative writing at Carlow University where she runs the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops.
Through his writing, editing, and teaching, Ed Ochester has been a major influence on contemporary letters for more than three decades. He edits the Pitt Poetry Series and is general editor of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for short fiction, both published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. From 1978 to 1998 he was director of the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh and was twice elected president of Associated Writing Programs. He co-edited the poetry magazine 5 AM and lives in a rural county northeast of Pittsburgh.