Jean Carney - "Blackbird Blues" - Kenneth W. Warren

Jean Carney discusses Blackbird Blues. She will be joined in conversation by Kenneth W. Warren. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.

At the Co-op

RSVP HERE (Please note that your RSVP is requested but not required.)

About the book: Blackbird Blues is a novel of illegal abortion and child abandonment in the 1963 Chicago world of civil rights and interracial jazz. Voices of two women tell their stories: Mary Kaye O’Donnell, an eighteen-year-old Irish-American aspiring jazz singer struggling with an unwanted pregnancy, and the 1940s diary entries of Sister Michaeline, Mary Kaye’s jazz mentor and guide through the bedlam of Mary Kaye’s childhood.

About the author: Blackbird Blues is Jean’s debut novel. Before turning to writing fiction, Jean spent eight years as an award-winning reporter and editorial writer at The Milwaukee Journal, covering Children’s Court, City Hall, and Roe v. Wade. She earned a Ph.D. in Human Development at the University of Chicago and trained at a large Chicago inner-city psychiatric hospital. In full-time private practice as a psychologist for thirty years in the Chicago Loop, she saw patients from all walks of life and ethnic backgrounds in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. After her husband died of ALS, she edited his last book, Jewish Writing and the Deep Places of the Imagination, stopped publishing in professional psychoanalytic venues, and turned to fiction. She has since remarried and is the mother of a son and a son and daughter by marriage.

About the interlocutor: Kenneth W. Warren is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is What Was African American Literature? He is also coeditor (with Adolph Reed Jr.) of Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought and (with Tess Chakkalakal) of Jim Crow, Literature, and The Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs.