Program Description
Event Details
Join us in the Scott Room to celebrate a new novel from local author.
Pamela Gwyn Kripke’s short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Folio, The Woven Tale Press, The Barcelona Review, The Concrete Desert Review, Double back Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Round Table Literary Journal, The MacGuffin and Book of Matches. She comes to fiction after a career in journalism, having written for The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Dallas Morning News, Slate, Salon, The Huffington Post, Child, Medium, Elle, Inside Higher Ed, D Magazine, Creators Syndicate and numerous other publications. She began her career as a television reporter in Biloxi, MS and has held assorted magazine editorships in New York and Dallas. Ms. Kripke graduated from Brown University, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and Scarsdale High School, and was selected to attend the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. She lives near Philadelphia and has two daughters.
At the Seams is the story of an infant’s unexplained death inside a New York hospital in the 1930s and the impact of the tragedy and its concealment on the generations to follow. Precocious eight-year-old Kate Nichols tries to make sense of the loss, confronting obstacles, confusions and tests of loyalty as she comes of age in 1960s suburbia. She must choose whether to crack open the mystery or acquiesce to the family’s established pattern of secrecy and repression. It’s not until she is a single mother that her own feelings trigger a search into the past, revealing a tale of generational trauma, maternal strength and the lengths we’ll go to protect the people we love. The book is based on true events. The baby would have been the author’s uncle.