The consequences of one generation’s choices can become the inheritance of the next. In De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s The Fervent Whites, the return of a couple wrongfully imprisoned for murder unsettles a Hudson Valley community. In Harriet Clark’s The Hill, a young girl grows up visiting her mother in prison, caught between a grandmother who condemns her daughter’s radical past and a mother who wants her daughter to be free from its consequences. In Jasmin Iolani Hakes’s The Pōhaku, generations of women inherit the responsibility of protecting an ancient stone and the history it carries, confronting the wounds of displacement and the enduring ties between family, place, and identity. Winslow, Clark, and Hakes explore the ways the past persists in families and communities, shaping the lives of those who inherit its secrets, convictions, and wounds—and ask whether we can ever escape the histories we did not choose. Moderated by writer and National Book Critics Circle board member, Lauren LeBlanc.
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