The Writer’s Center welcomes poet Sunu P. Chandy and novelist Marjorie Hudson for a reading and discussion of their new books. Book signing to follow.
Free and open to the public, limited space, registration required. Please view and agree to [link id=’2132036′ text=’The Writer’s Center COVID Safety Policy’] before attending our live events.
Sunu P. Chandy (she/her) is a social justice activist through her work as a poet and a civil rights attorney. Sunu’s collection of poems, My Dear Comrades, was selected for the 2021 Terry J. Cox Prize, and will be published by Regal House on March 28, 2023. Sunu’s work can also be found in publications including Asian American Literary Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Poets on Adoption, Split this Rock’s online social justice database, The Quarry, and in anthologies including The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood and This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation. Sunu is a graduate of Northeastern Law School and Earlham College, where she majored in Women’s Studies and Peace and Global Studies. Sunu has also completed her MFA in poetry at Queens College, City University of New York. Sunu was included as one the 2021 Queer Women of Washington and one of Go Magazine’s 100 Women We Love: Class Of 2019. Sunu is also the legal director for the National Women’s Law Center and serves on the board of the Transgender Law Center.
Marjorie Hudson (she/her) was born in a small town in Illinois and raised in Washington, D.C., where she graduated from American University with a degree in Journalism and Women’s Studies. After serving as features editor of National Parks Magazine, she moved to rural North Carolina, working as a freelance writer with a column interviewing nature photographers and publishing articles in Garden & Gun, American Land Forum, Wildlife in North Carolina, Our State Magazine, and North Carolina Literary Review. As copyediting chief for Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, she encountered the work of contemporary Southern writers such as Jill McCorkle, Kaye Gibbons, and Clyde Edgerton for the first time. Inspired, she turned her hand to fiction writing, and her first story won a statewide award judged by Shannon Ravenel. She earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She lives with her husband, Sam, and feisty small terrier DJ, on a century farm in North Carolina, and when she’s not writing, she mentors writers, lifts up local Black history, and reads poetry to trees.
About the Books
Indigo Field
In the rural South, a retired colonel in an upscale retirement community grieves the sudden death of his wife on the tennis court. On the other side of the highway, an elderly Black woman grieves the murder of her niece by a white man. Between them lies an abandoned field where three centuries of crimes are hidden, and only she knows the explosive secrets buried there. When the colonel runs into her car, causing a surprising amount of damage, it sparks a feud that sets loose the spirits in the Field, both benevolent and vengeful. In prose that’s been called “dazzling” and “mesmerizing,” in the animated voices of trees and birds and people, in Southern-voiced storytelling as deeply layered as that of Pat Conroy, Marjorie Hudson lays out the boundaries of a field that contains the soul of the South and leads us to a day of reckoning.
My Dear Comrades
In this poetry collection, Sunu P. Chandy includes stories about her experiences as a woman, civil rights attorney, parent, partner, daughter of South Asian immigrants, and member of the LGBTQ community. These poems cover themes ranging from immigration, social justice activism, friendship loss, fertility challenges, adoption, caregiving, and life during a pandemic. Sunu’s poems provide some resolve, some peace, some community, amidst the competing notions of how we are expected to be in the world, especially when facing a range of barriers. Sunu’s poems provide company for many who may be experiencing isolation through any one of these experiences and remind us that we are not, in fact, going it alone. Whether the experience is being disregarded as a woman of color attorney, being rejected for being queer, losing a most treasured friendship, doubting one’s romantic partner or any other form of heartbreak, Sunu’s poems highlight the human requirement of continually starting anew. These poems remind us that we can, and we will, rebuild.