A conversation with award-winning author Brit Bennett at 7 p.m. Friday (Feb. 12) will be the first of two virtual events presented by the Chippewa Valley Book Festival this month and next.
The hour-long Bennett program is free but registration is required. More information and a registration link can be found at www.cvbookfest.org/festival-events/bennett..
Bennett will discuss her novel The Vanishing Half with Allyson Loomis, a UW-Eau Claire associate professor of English. A question-and-answer segment will follow their casual conversation.
The Vanishing Half won the 2020 Goodreads Historical Fiction Award and was a #1 New York Times best seller. The book is an emotional family story about African American identical twin sisters who choose very different life paths in the 1950s and ‘60s. It touches on topics that include race, class, family, gender, community, love and the cost of secrets.
The Book Festival’s second virtual event will feature Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life, at 7 p.m. on March 12. More details about that event are available at www.cvbookfest.org/festival-events/taylor.
HBO purchased rights to Bennett’s novel
HBO recently purchased the rights to develop Bennett’s The Vanishing Half into a limited series with the author as an executive producer. The book follows the twin sisters’ stories as one passes for white and moves to California while the other returns to her tiny southern community to raise her dark-skinned daughter.
The book reportedly was a favorite 2020 read of former President Barack Obama. Bennett’s debut novel, The Mothers, was also a New York Times best seller.
Bennett was a guest on Wisconsin Public Radio’s “Spectrum West” program on Feb. 4. That broadcast can be heard at Listen: Spectrum West, February 4, 2021 | Wisconsin Public Radio (wpr.org).
Copies of The Vanishing Half, with signed bookplates, are available at Dotters Books.