Description:

The animating question at the center of award-winning journalist Dawn Turner’s profound, gorgeously written, and resonant memoir Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood is: when did we lose them? Them being the author’s sister, Kim, and her best friend, Debra. One dead by 25, the other imprisoned for decades after killing a man. Why did they fall behind while another graduated college and became an award-winning journalist? Why was Dawn given grace to learn from her mistakes while Debra and Kim never recovered?

They were third-generation daughters of the Great Migration, who came of age in the 1970s, in the warm glow of the recent civil rights movement. It offered them a promise, albeit nascent and fragile, that they would have more opportunities, rights, and freedoms than any generation of Black Americans in history. Their working-class, striving parents were eager for them to realize this hard-fought potential. The girls had big dreams for themselves as well: Dawn and Debra both planned to be doctors, Kim a teacher. But then they arrived at a precipice, a fraught rite of passage for all girls when the dangers and the harsh realities of the world burst the innocent bubble of childhood, when the choices they made could—and would—have devastating consequences. There was a razor thin margin of error, especially for brown girls.

Turner honed her reporter’s skill in two decades at the Chicago Tribune. It is this keen eye that she trains on her personal story, resulting in a memoir that offers timely and powerful observations about the complex interplay of race, class, and opportunity in America.

Turner will be in conversation with Heidi Stevens, also formerly of the Tribune, now creative director of Parent Nation, a new initiative at University of Chicago’s TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health.

BONUS AFTER-HOURS EVENT: Attendees who purchase a copy of Three Girls from Bronzeville from FAN’s partner bookseller The Book Stall are invited to attend an AFTER-HOURS event hosted by Turner and Stevens that will start immediately after the webinar. Details on the webinar registration page.