Sarah Broom in conversation with Vann Newkirk
Sarah Broom in conversation with Vann Newkirk
Tuesday, February 4, 6pm; preceded by a reception at 5:30pm
Stone Auditorium, Woldenberg Arts Center, room 210
The event is free and open to the public, and no tickets are required, but please arrive early to guarantee seating.
Sarah M. Broom is the author of the The Yellow House, a memoir about her family’s history in New Orleans, which won the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction. In its citation, the National Book Foundation wrote, “If Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House was simply an indictment of state sanctioned terror on the Gulf Coast, it would be a stunning literary achievement. Broom however shows us that such an account without breathtaking rendering of family and environment is, at best, brittle. The Yellow House uses reportage, oral history, and astute political analysis to seep into the generational crevices, while reveling and revealing the choppy inheritances rooted in one family in the neighborhood of New orleans East.” A native New Orleanian, Broom was awarded a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2016, and her other work has appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Oxford American, and O, The Oprah Magazine.
Vann R. Newkirk II is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics and policy, with a frequent focus on civil rights and environmental justice. Previously a health policy analyst for the Kaiser Family Foundation, Newkirk is currently working on a book “on the fates of some of the oldest black communities in the United States in the paths of climate catastrophes.” Later this winter, The Atlantic will release his longform podcast documentary about Hurricane Katrina.
The event is sponsored by the School of Liberal Arts Program in Environmental Studies, as part of American Water and Actual Air, a 2019-2020 series focused on interpreting the environment across the disciplines, curated by Andy Horowitz (History) and Tom Beller (English). For more information, contact ahorowitz@tulane.edu. The reception is sponsored by the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South.
