The Shadow
Charlottesville, VA (VR) — New Dominion Bookshop (404 E Main St.) will host a book reading and signing with author and UVA professor Kiki Petrosino on Friday, September 9, from 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM. Kiki Petrosino will be reading from her new memoir, Bright, which will be released from Sarabande in early August. This in-person event will be free to attend and open to the public. The bookshop recommends arriving early for the best seating.
“Kiki Petrosino’s Bright is an astonishing lyric archive of the body—who it’s made of; what’s imposed upon it; what’s extracted from it—the result of which is one of the most moving and incisive documents on the brutalizing fictions of race that I’ve ever read.” —Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights
About the Book: Bright: A Memoir, the first full-length essay collection from acclaimed poet Kiki Petrosino, is a work of lyric nonfiction, offering glimpses of a life lived between cultural worlds. “Bright,” a slang term used to describe light-skinned people of interracial American ancestry, becomes the starting point for an extended meditation on the author’s upbringing in a mixed Black and Italian American family. Alternating moments of memoir, archival research, close reading, and reverie, this work contemplates the enduring, deeply personal legacies of enslavement and racial discrimination in America. Situated at the luminous crossroads where public and private histories collide, Bright asks important questions about love, heritage, identity, and creativity.
About the Author: Kiki Petrosino is the author of White Blood: a Lyric of Virginia (2020) and three other poetry books, all from Sarabande. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her memoir, Bright, is forthcoming from Sarabande in 2022. She directs the creative writing program at the University of Virginia, where she is a professor of poetry. Petrosino is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a fellowship in creative writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, the UNT Rilke Prize, and the Spalding Prize, among other honors.
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