Joining Hilary in conversation is Alex Green, Editor-in-Chief of Stereo Embers Magazine and host of Stereo Embers: The Podcast. Mood-setting music for the evening provided by The Modest Orchestra (with Mike Waters, Lee Bloom, and Carla Kaufman).
In Forget I Told You This, Amy Black, a queer, single mother and an aspiring artist in love with calligraphy, dreams of a coveted artist’s residency at the world’s largest social media company, Q. When a stranger asks Amy to transcribe a love letter for him, his disappearance leads her straight to Q—with the chance to style herself a 21st-century soferet — and to a group of data privacy vigilantes who want her to burn Q to the ground. A very contemporary Jewish novel about faith, free will and what it means to believe in an age of Artificial Intelligence, Forget I Told You This asks us what it means to see and be seen in a world in which our every move is surveilled.
Hilary Zaid has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a James D. Houston Fellow at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and two-time attendee of Tin House Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared in Mother Jones, Ecotone, Day One, The Southwest Review, and The Utne Reader and elsewhere. Hilary’s novel Paper is White was long-listed for the 2018 Northern California Independent Booksellers’ Award for Fiction, is a 2018 Foreword Indies silver medalist and the winner of the 2018 Independent Publishers’ Book Awards (IPPY) in LGBT+ Fiction. Forget I Told You This is the inaugural winner of the Barbara DiBernard Award.
Alex Green is a professor at St. Mary’s College of California, Alex is the Editor-In-Chief of Stereo Embers Magazine, the author of five books and has served as a Speaker/Moderator for LitQuake, Yahoo!, The Bay Area Book Festival, A Great Good Place For Books, Green Apple Books, and The St. Mary’s College Of California MFA Reading Series. He’s the host of Stereo Embers: The Podcast, a weekly program airing exclusively on Bombshell Radio that features interviews with musicians, authors, artists, and actors talking about the current creative moment in their lives. Past guests include Taylor Jenkins-Reid, Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls, Juliana Hatfield, David Duchovny, and Congresswoman Jackie Speier.
This event is presented in partnership by the JCC East Bay, A Great Good Place for Books, and Keshet.
