Uasouthern festival of books and its an amazing event that brings authors from all over the country to nashville each fall to be with the thousands of readers and writers from around the region. For those of us would enjoy being here, f were lucky that its a free event so thanks to a lot of the Community Support remember that the festival does depend on individual donations among other sources to remain free so please take the time to donate and what you can to help keepit free and any amount helps. Whatever amount you can spare. You can donate via the website, behalf or in person at the headquarters tends throughout the weekend and any amount is appreciated. Now let me introduce the authors, kendra allen who is the author of when you learn u that alphabet and jennine cap crucet who is the author of my time among the whites. So kendra, i think you said you want to go first. What were going to do is each of the authors is going to read from their book and we will have discussion back and forth and talk about the books and about their writing and their lives if they want to and we will have an informal discussion so kendra, let me give you an introduction. Kendra is the author of when you learn the alphabet, raised in dallas texas and is currently an mfa candidate at the university of alabama. Her work which has been described as raw and witty has been published in december magazine and in brevity magazine where i read trash just to bring it back intomorrow. Thank you. Thank you, im looking forward to hearing a little bit more about your work in a few minutes. Next we will talk with jennine cap crucet, her book of essays is my time among the whites notes from an unfinished education. Janine is the author of two previous books and an opinion editor for the New York Times and her novel was a New York Times review editors choice and the winner of the 2016 International Latino book awards and was cited as the best book of the year by nbc latino, the guardian and the miami herald. Its been adopted as an oncampus read at 25 american universities. Her short stories has been honored with the iowa short Fiction Award and other awards and she was raised in miami florida, an associate un professor at the department of english and institute for ethnic studies at the university of nebraska. Sowelcome and you talk a little bit about your book for you read. I feel maybe we should have a discussion about this. Im from miami, thats important to me. Specifically im fromhialeah. So thank you for coming and bringing a little piece of home here today but that is very important and ive been on this list, 305 is the area code. I feel ive got to have it with me all the time. That sounds like somethingwe will wind up talking about today. So this is my essay collection, my time among the whites, notes from an unfinished education and this came from a deep desire to have Difficult Conversations about race or concepts of race and concepts of citizenship, particularly since the 2016 election and i elhad a lot of friends, a lot of white friends were shocked by the Election Results weor the purported electionresults. And i think i went on record inthe New York Times in may that year being like a ,trump is going to win this. You need to talk to your people. Talk to your family, that ework has to happen. I know part of where this book came from was that i wanted to have these conversations with friends and longer ways and some of these are based on pieces i published in the New York Times and i would write these 6000 word pieces and then they would say all right, send us 1000 words or 800 words. Id send like 1500 and do this and my editor would be thats not what i asked for. So we worked together to get that one or two ideas and i would hear from readers and i was happy to hear from readers because it meant the conversation was happening but they would ask questions that those other 5000 words didnt make it addressed so i started to see that its hard , especially now that we traffic and soundbites and things cant be communicated that way when there vitally important as they are now and when actual peoples lives are at stake and they have been for a long time so im going to read a little bit from an essay in yourcold nothing is impossible in america , the second essay in the book and im going to read from the beginning for just a bit and talk with you today. So this is from nothing is impossible inamerica. When nonlatino americans meet me and learn my family is from cuba they often ask me one of two bizarre questions. The first is if ive ever been to cuba, a question so layered and brought for me that i learned to respond by asking why would i have ever been to cuba . Then just seeing what they say. I almost relish their awkward answers and the assumptions they revealt. I got this question a lot when i lived in minnesota, a place where many students brag about their scandinavian heritage and it never once occurred to me to ask within seconds of meeting them if theyd ever been to sweden. The second question less common though still fairly fraught isnt even a question. Thats weird, interesting or funny they say. Janine isnt a very cuban name. You are correct i say, itis not. I also want to y,feel that uncomfortable pause that follows with a story about the American Dream that goes like this. Two kids from cuba meet teenager in florida. I have names given to them by cuban parents who mistakenly assume they live in cuba cipretty much forever. They mark them as ethnic minorities in the united states. These names in their new home country impacts everything about their lives. Their educations and the premature end of those educations and what areas of the city they can look for ahome. They married young, start a family young and because they are lightskinned una reason theres a chance their americanborn offspring could avoid at least some of the elements of the systemic prejudice they encounter despite having worked hard to learn english as almost eradicating the accents, this is after all a story haabout the American Dream which means that many thingswill need to be unjustly eradicated. In this version of the American Dream they think that takes to change their destiny in this country is picking the right name for your child. They are not totally wrong. As john oliver on his show last week tonight pointed out when in his preelection efforts to make Donald Drumpf again he told an apocryphal story about the candidates grandfathers amy change the last name from drumpf to trump when heimmigrated from germany. He asked those voting for the man to take a moment to imagine how you would feel if you just met a guy named Donald Drumpf. The joke plays on scene ofthe and oliver is only pointing out a reality for Many Americans , the reality the couple had lived through and saw as an opportunity to alter what they hoped was better. Because of the experience of living with their own names, my parents thought giving their american child a distinctly ethnic name came with unfair quantifiable consequences. They sensed this long before Research Studies would show which names on similar remnant resumes to count as qualified for a job and how they weathered those consequences themselves, they felt an understandable reluctance to have me inherit them. This is how i came to benamed after the 1980 usa runnerup. Its not fiction. My parents had a loose plan to name me after the winter and they had settled in on a may evening to watch the pageant with that intention even though i wouldnt be borne up until july 1981. Theyve always been the type to plan ahead. I was not just their first kid but also the firstborn in America American in our family. Perhaps they saw a suitable american name was needed to complete the immigration from cuba to american. What better placeto find a name and an american beauty pageant . Bob barker was close back then, they must have liked the way the name sounded in his price is right draw. The man who made his living encouraging people to spend a wheel and asked them how much they got random crap was worth withoutoverestimating would determine the name that would identify me for the rest of my life. Imagine talking with that provoked black ball, janine. His pointy white teeth seething that last syllable like a cartoon cat. Inalthough my parents, my names are maria and evaristo were rooting for her janine scored , a. K. A. Miss arizona didnt win. The winner of the pageant, the person after whom i was supposed to be named was sean weatherly. That years miss south carolina. I can almost hear my parents deciding to that naming after the winner began that sean was a boys name is like evidence to the contrary ending right in front of them wearing a crown. So close enough. There was my name, janine. Spelling they thought, they spelled it jennine but they agreed the spelling was all swrong. The vowels in her name making little sense, that early i right after the j. Lets change that to anactual e. D in english area and while were at it lets change the original e2 and i, throw in next and for balance. Lose a, and what is that sound doing in there anyway but lets keep that last eat because in english to always put a silent e on the end. Daughter named area they had no idea that in altering the spelling that they were undoing thework of making the name something that would help me pass. Although im sure the soundof it has opened doors that might have otherwise been unfairly closed, people looking for it as a marker of my parents immigrant status. When seen in writing the spelling always flagged for certain people, people looking for it as a marker of my parents immigrant status, and alterations betraying the reason they went with that name in the first place. The first real short story i ever wrote was a College Short fiction workshop tried to explore this moment cobetween them and negotiation of it. In a 19yearold woman and her husband of two years are discussing what to to name their baby if its a girl. L. The husband is confident it will be a boy. The womanf f decides to state t name on a televised beauty pageant which shes never seen and they proceed to watch it together, the woman feeling huge at the sight of so many skinny white women. At some point the husband brings hera sandwich. He is used to having her bring himsandwiches that he cant get out of the couch. They very subtly bring up the racism they encountered because of their own markedly spanish names. One workshop repeat from my nvall College Classmate was that they didnt think this scene was loud enough and wanted the conversation to be more explicit. Their assumption being that people of color rarely sit around discussing their oppression outright as they watch tv at home. They decided they should give her a name encourages her to do so and the winners name in the story is gauge which neither parent can pronounce correctly and doesnt work in spanish at all so they go with sandra, the name of the contestant who finishes in the top 10 but scored highest in the interview portion. Historians with both characters burning, thus completing my obsession with bodily functions. It wasnt a great story. But it showed promise and at least enough to garner my professors and attention and encouragement which is sometimes all budding writer needs. I told no one in class the bstory was based on how i got my name even when they discuss improbable the scenario seemed to them, how pointedly symbolic it was, how totally unlikely it would be these white classmates told me for a cuban couple not want to honor their own heritage in the naming of their first child. Okay. Truth be told apart of me agreed with my classmates and i never fully believed esthis was how my parents chose my name until college. When i looked at the pageant results prompted by the workshop assignments and learn horrified that my names origin storywas a real back of my life. What were my parents inning for in naming me after a beauty queen . What were they trying to say about the kind ofdaughter they wanted . What were they hoping for , willing me to be with this name . Or was it more about what they were trying to prove for the country that had taken them in as children . Perhaps there line was more into with names like the first words they saw upon arrival or rescue by the u. S. Navy, us marines. Our names, a form of gratitude and in my case, a kind of skin deep hope. So ill stop there spoiler alert, i never won miss usa. That goes into different themes from their. [applause] if we can just have some time to talk back and forth about the various themes in your book and how you came to talk about that. One of the things i did notice in both of the books is you both write a lot about family connections so can you both that a littlebit . Kendra, do you want to go first . I feel like the things in my book are definitely family connected. Thats the way it always starts and when i think of family i think of my moms side of the family most times, even though i have relationships with my dads side and i think of family, and thinking about all the women on my moms side so whenever im writing anything , im thinking of my mama, my grandmother, my cousin, the things like that ikand the struggles that they probably never got to express in a way that i get the chance to, the privilege due in a book or just even people reading my work that they would never probably get the opportunity to do so i feel like im speaking through them or for them in a sense. Nbut even when i go into race and gender im stillthinking of them to. Like the turmoil that they never, black women in general are looked at last for everything. Our pain is looked at last. We are assumed to be stronger than everybody else. Whats the one word that people say . Exactly. They said theyre not in our class hitoday or things like that but when im writing about race and gender, thats the pride that i wish we could all release in real life. Family for you . I was speaking about that too, thinking about family inadvertently from my end and thinking about my moms side only and what does that mean about Family Dynamics and how that plays out against the broader sense of history but i kept trying not to write about family and i dont know coming back to that and i realized i sort of embraced it at some point in the process understanding that for such a big part of your life, whatever you come to see as your family is your universe and that is how your learning culture and your learning what are the norms around you and then some of us get the opportunity to leave home and test those things in other environments and our definitions of family and more and change and you also acquire children and family that you bring into your life and think of his family so i ended up writing so much about family as entry points because of something that allows a point of connection and im just saying im going to tell you this one little story about how my parents came up with my name and then by the end im talking about systems of oppression but you kind of came into it looking at these two people making one choice and by the end of the essay you understand how that choice is an endpoint t to all these different accidents of history that go back hundreds of years that end with this family being an American Family for the First Time Ever in its history and i found that happening over and over again and i think because im mostly a fiction writer, my first two books are fiction, my first essay collection im always like im just going to tell a story, not try to sayanything. And in the form of an essay dits like you need to say something. You know what youre doing here, its okay to build to that and come back to that story as a way to make your sceneresonate a little more clearly. I dont write fiction becauseit would be really trash. Just write poems, we have another genre that were playing off in our drama. With essays im thinking of the Bigger Picture and then i go into those small incidences of actual family life, but then its also , i used family as a way to break generational trauma and pain and cycles and thats like, i have a hard time expressing myself in speech or orally so i have to write it down and through those essay stories im able to figure out what is the actual trauma thats been tying all the women in my family together. What amis the exact moment that this relationship broke . I can figure that out in an essay form where i cant figure it out when im sitting in my family for 24 years. I couldnt figure it out and then im writing it down and okay, i get it. It sounds like we both used family as a question. At the question a essay can address and we can address what it means. Can you talk about when you knew that this was the book you needed to write right now . I think for me its the beginning of i waswriting it without even wanting to. I had asked for comments on something and i couldnt stay in the limit because it wasnt something that could be handled in that short of a conversation, even though that was what the form was demanding at the time so once i started to have several of these things and i thought that a kind of all fell under this umbrella of thinking about race and moments where i get to count or pass as white and the moments where i dont and how much of that was outside of my own control and i histarted seeing that in things that range from growing up in miami erwhen if youre a lightskinned cuban you look kind of white and by that your part of the dominant culture and you get to possess cultural norms for your community. Thats how i come to define the elements of whiteness but part of my time among the whites was when i got to be white and elevating in places like nebraska now where it was this idea of no, youre definitely not a white woman, youre not a white haperson and you know that but the context is what changed, i didnt change. My actual skin color did not change all of a sudden who i was was being told to me rather than me getting to express it. So you could hear in this answer that these were big things and i started thinking about this is connected to my family at disney world and we went to disney world all the time. Is that a particular south florida thing . Other questions would spell out from that and other times when i went to the dude ranch and nebraska and i moved there because i found out so many of my students were registered as College Students, i may first jen College Student but thes