Join us for an in-person event to celebrate the release of One Blood by Denene Millner! For this event, Millner will be joined in conversation by Cozbi A. Cabrera.
Please note: Pre-registration for this event is required. By pre-registering, you are verifying that you are fully vaccinated and will wear a mask throughout the entirety of the event.
Join New York Times bestselling author Denene Millner as she explores the lives of three generations of women tied together by love, hope, dreams, ambition...and family secrets in this epic novel.
Meet Grace: raised by her beloved grandmother in tension-filled, post-segregation Virginia, Grace is barely a teenager when she loses her grandmother. Shellshocked, she is shipped up North to live with her formidably ambitious Aunt Hattie―a woman who firmly left behind her Southern roots in pursuit of upward mobility. Feeling like a fish out of water in the high society world filled with fancy teas and coveted debutante balls, Grace’s only place of comfort is with the smart, handsome son of one of the society’s grand dames.
Meet Delores: beautiful, intelligent and fierce, Delores a.k.a. Lolo has never had it easy. Once she makes it north, she puts aside her dream of being a model to do what she has to do to survive as a woman with little money and no mooring: get married and have a family of her own. When secrets start to spill out and she and her family slowly begin to unravel, Lolo is willing to do whatever it takes to keep her dream intact and those she loves together.
Meet Rae: when Lolo’s headstrong daughter, Rae discovers that she is adopted, it’s just one secret among others that her family is keeping. When Rae finds out that she’s about to become a mother herself, she knows that there is an important reckoning that must be faced about herself and her two mothers.
Potent, poetic, powerful, told with deep love, and spanning from the Great Migration to the civil unrest of the 1960s to the quest for women’s equality in early 2000s, Denene Millner’s beautifully wrought novel explores three women’s intimate, and often complicated, struggle with what it truly means to be to be family.
DENENE MILLLNER is a six-time New York Times bestselling author, Emmy Award–nominated TV show host and award-winning journalist who has written thirty-one books, among them Taraji P. Henson’s Around the Way Girl and the picture book Early Sunday Morning. Millner is also the editorial director of Denene Millner Books, an award-winning imprint that has published two Caldecott Honor books, a Newbery Honor Book, the Kirkus Prize for Children’s Literature and a Southern Book Award. A MacDowell Fellow, Millner has written essays for the New York Times, Glamour and NPR, which hosted her critically-acclaimed podcast, “Speakeasy with Denene.” Millner is a graduate of Hofstra University. She lives in Atlanta with her two daughters and their goldendoodle, Franklin.
Cozbi A. Cabrera received a BFA from Parsons School of Design. Her cloth dolls (Muñecas) have garnered the attention of collectors around the world and have been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show. She is the illustrator of several books, including the picture book Beauty, Her Basket, which Publishers Weekly called “a quiet treasure” in a starred review. Her work is featured in her eponymous shop and atelier in Brooklyn. She lives in New York City. To learn more about Cabrera, please visit her at Cozbi.com.
Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are required. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com by September 7th. For other questions or access needs, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com.