REGISTER HERE: https://www.eventbrite.com/d/online/tell-me-your-names-and-i-will-testify-virtual-launch-event/
Carolyn Holbrook will host a virtual event on Wednesday, August 12 at 4:00 p.m. for the launch of her new book, Tell Me Your Names and I Will Testify: Essays. Her granddaughters, Tess Montgomery, Nia Davis, and Najah Davis will read sections from the book, and there will be a Q&A with Carolyn moderated by Pamela Fletcher Bush and Artika Tyner. Please register via Eventbrite at the link above to receive the Zoom meeting information.
Once a pregnant sixteen-year-old incarcerated in the Minnesota juvenile justice system, now a celebrated writer, arts activist, and teacher, Carolyn Holbrook has heeded the call to tell the story of her life. In a memoir woven of moments of reckoning, she summons stories born of silence, stories held inside, untold stories stifled by pain or prejudice or ignorance.
"Carolyn Holbrook’s remarkable book testifies to the power of the arts to heal her own life traumas, both historical and more recent. We see and hear her learn to speak up, and to claim space, in a world designed to keep silent or remove people like her." —Resmaa Menakem, author of My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies*
"Carolyn Holbrook is steadfast in her work to break free of constrictions that harm one’s spirit, knowing them to be racially, economically, and culturally imposed. Honest and perceptive stories of her experiences illuminate how her basic acts to create, over and over again, make for a life whose purpose and meaning resonate with her readers." —Cindy Gehrig, retired president, Jerome Foundation
"Tell Me Your Names and I Will Testify is a powerful portrait of a life fueled by hope and faith in art and the artfulness of self, others, and community. Carolyn Holbrook’s social observations and personal remembrances cut across lines of race, class, and generational divides, deep into the heart of who we all are to one another at our most fundamental level of creative being. You will shiver, laugh, cry, cheer, stomp, want to sing, and, perhaps most indelibly of all, by the grace of this bold book and its author’s beautiful invocation, you too will feel inspired and empowered to write what lives deepest within you back into its vibrant fullness." —Ed Bok Lee, author of Mitochondrial Night
