Vroman’s Bookstore and Friends In Deed in Pasadena will present San Francisco-based journalist and author Katherine Seligman on “Vroman’s Live” at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 16, as she discusses her new book, “At the Edge of the Haight.”
This is Seligman’s debut novel, where she tells the story of Maddy Donaldo, homeless at 20, as she makes a family of sorts in the dangerous spaces of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
Friends In Deed is an interfaith nonprofit organization that provides supportive services for homeless and at-risk neighbors to meet basic human needs and rebuild their lives.
“At the Edge of the Haight” is the 10th Winner of the 2019 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, awarded by Barbara Kingsolver.
“What a read this is, right from its startling opening scene,” Kingsolver writes about Seligman’s novel. “But even more than plot, it’s the richly layered details that drive home a lightning bolt of empathy. To read ‘At the Edge of the Haight’ is to live inside the everyday terror and longings of a world that most of us manage not to see, even if we walk past it on sidewalks every day. At a time when more Americans than ever find themselves at the edge of homelessness, this book couldn’t be more timely.”
In the book, Maddy Donaldo unwittingly witnesses the murder of a young homeless boy and is seen by the perpetrator. From there, her relatively stable life is upended. Suddenly, everyone from the police to the dead boys’ parents want to talk to Maddy about what she saw. As adults pressure her to give up her secrets and reunite with her own family before she meets a similar fate, Maddy must decide whether she wants to stay lost or be found.
Against the backdrop of a radically changing San Francisco, a city that embraces a booming tech economy while struggling to maintain its culture of tolerance, “At the Edge of the Haight” follows the lives of those who depend on makeshift homes and communities.
Seligman has been a writer at the San Francisco Chronicle, a reporter at the San Francisco Examiner and a correspondent with USA Today. Her work has appeared in Redbook, Life, Money and California Magazine.
On “Vroman’s Live,” she will be in conversation with fellow novelist Hillary Jordan, author of the novels “Mudbound” (2008) and “When She Woke” (2011), as well as the digital short “Aftermirth,” all published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. “When She Woke” was nominated for a 2012 Lambda Literary Award and long-listed for the 2013 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
To watch “Vroman’s Live,” visit www.crowdcast.io/e/10cqtgvm/
For more information about Friends In Deed, visit their website, www.friendsindeedpas.org/fid.
