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We continue to follow government guidelines regarding Covid-19 safety at the Festival. We encourage masks for indoor events. Please be aware that select indoor programs might require masks and we ask for your cooperation in these cases.
3:00 pm EST
September 29, 2026

Center Stage (Columbus Park)

Columbus Park Brooklyn NY United States

Fiction

History, Reimagined

In this panel, authors Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Kristopher Jansma and Vanessa Chan take us on heartbreaking journeys filled with hope that change will come. Ruffin’s novel, The American Daughters, is a coming-of-age story following Ady, an enslaved young girl who joins a sisterhood of Black women working together to undermine Southern society. In Jansma’s Our Narrow Hiding Places, an elderly woman relives her horrific past as she tells her grandson about her Dutch family’s survival of the final years of Nazi occupation. Chan’s The Storm We Made follows a Malayan mother turned spy and her children during the Japanese occupation. Join these authors for a deep dive into histories that, until now, have been left behind. Moderated by Christopher Hermelin, host of So Many Damn Books.

 

Participating authors

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