Content:

Rachel León and Alison Kinney come to the store for a reading and conversation about writing stories of resistance, joy, and hope amidst an ongoing crisis in celebration of their new books How We See the Gray and United States of Rejection.

About Rachel León's How We See the Gray:

Foster care is a disaster in Rockford, Illinois. Meredith, a social worker and single mom, is stretched beyond thin but determined to protect her kids: not only her son, but those on her caseload too. When the stress of the job has her breaking her sobriety, the foundations of her life begin to tremble. After drinking too much, she makes a mistake that puts her preschooler in jeopardy, and Meredith finds herself in a situation that mirrors her clients’ as she loses custody of her son. In her fight to get him back, Meredith experiences the system from the outside—while still working for the kids inside of it. Set over the course of a year, this riveting documentary-esque novel is told from multiple perspectives, including those of case workers, birth parents, foster parents, and foster children. Written with the working-class humor and heart that defines the Midwest, How We See the Gray is a story about mistakes, second chances, and trying to do better in a system that seems doomed to fail.

About Alison Kinney's United States of Rejection:

This is a love-hate story about personal and political relationships in the United States, told through the intimate stories of both the rejectors and the rejected: lovers, families, neighbors, and a nation and its people. Although we’re taught not to care about others’ opinions, rejection always hurts, and it hurts some people a lot more than others. To prove it, this book marshals contemporary neuroscience, the Founding Fathers’ rejection advice, and four centuries of personal narratives, many of them hilarious, many more heartbreaking. These rejection and acceptance stories span loving and disastrous American first encounters, soldiers and dancers rejected on front lines and chorus lines, playground bullies invoked before the Senate, and generations of lovers and patriots battling or swiping right to defend their loved ones and their country.

Abraham Lincoln wrote, “The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more evil, than of good.” But rejection is often unjust, often deserved, and unusually complicated, depending on who’s rejecting whom and why.

In laboratories, diaries, self-help manuals, auditions, lawsuits, and wars, we find models for “getting past” rejections, not just through personal resilience, but also through creating accountability and justice. United States of Rejection begins with heartbreak and ends with hope: an urgent self-improvement program for changing our relationships and the future of our messy nation.

Rachel León (she/they) has worked in child welfare for nearly two decades. She serves as managing director for the Chicago Review of Books and fiction director for Arcturus. Their work has appeared in Catapult, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. León is the editor of The Rockford Anthology and the author of the novel How We See the Gray.

Alison Kinney is the author of three nonfiction books of cultural history, most recently United States of Rejection: A Story of Love, Hate, and Hope. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, The Guardian, New Inquiry, and other publications. Alison teaches creative nonfiction and lives in Brooklyn, New York.