PEN America Virtual Authors’ Evening with Julie Lythcott-Haims

Date: Tuesday, July 7, 2020
Time: 7:00pm ET
Location: Zoom
Donation to Attend: $150 per ticket

Join us for a virtual intimate evening with Julie Lythcott-Haims, author of Real American: A Memoir, winner of the 2018 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, which is the story of Julie’s journey from self-loathing to self-love as a Black and biracial woman living in predominantly white spaces.

Julie Lythcott-Haims thought she’d done everything right. She attended elite schools, and became a corporate lawyer and a university dean. But the racism and microaggressions she encountered beginning in earliest childhood led to self loathing despite outward success. Her critically-acclaimed and award winning prose poetry memoir Real American chronicles her journey to “locate a self [she] could love” and insists that white Americans confront their prejudice against brown skin – which she terms “the skin God gave us.” In our present moment, the conversations she convenes about race center around the question “Do you see Blacks as fully human? If so, how do you know?” She offers humans of all ages and stages concrete advice about how to align anti-racist values with behaviors so as to bring about real change.

A $150 donation is required to attend this very special evening. This donation is considered 100 percent tax-deductible and supports PEN America’s mission to defend writers and free expression at a time of unprecedented need. Please fill out the form below to make a contribution and reserve your ticket. Your generosity is deeply appreciated.

Space will be limited to 25 guests to facilitate audience participation and discussion. Following your RSVP, you will be sent the Zoom meeting invitation. This is a private video meeting, and only guests who are on the RSVP list will be permitted to join. 

Please contact Hannah Waltz at [email protected] for any additional questions or concerns.

RSVP Here

More about Julie:
Julie Lythcott-Haims is the New York Times bestselling author of the anti-helicopter parenting manifesto How to Raise an Adult. Her TED Talk on the subject was one of the top talks of 2016, and in 2020 she became a regular contributor with CBS This Morning on parenting. Check out this recent discussion moderated by Julie between Dr. Ibram X. Kendi and Allison Briscoe-Smith: Parenting in Support of Black Lives: How to Build a Just Future for Kids.

Her second book is the critically-acclaimed and award-winning prose poetry memoir Real American, which illustrates her experience as a Black and biracial person in white spaces. A third book, Your Turn: How to Be an Adult, will be out in April 2021. She also wrote the foreword for Writing Memoir, a book of writing prompts developed by Julie and The Writers Grotto for those hungry to share their lived experience. Julie is a former corporate lawyer and Stanford dean, and she holds a BA from Stanford, a JD from Harvard, and an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts. She serves on the boards of Foundation for a College Education, Global Citizen Year, and Common Sense Media, and on the advisory board of LeanIn.Org. She volunteers with the hospital program No One Dies Alone. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her partner of over thirty years, their young adults, and her mother.