"Don't Say We Didn't Warn You" with Writer-In-Residence Ariel Delgado Dixon In-Person
Hemingway Writer-In-Residence Ariel Delgado Dixon joins us to discuss her debut novel, Don't Say We Didn't Warn You. Dixon will be joined by Mary Pauline Lowry, a 2020 resident with The Community Library and the Boise-based author of The Roxy Letters.
Two sisters unite to survive a traumatic upbringing—from absentee parents to a wilderness camp for troubled teens—in this “relentless and spooky” (Joy Williams) debut from an essential new voice.
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022—Good Housekeeping, Autostraddle, The Millions
“When the Juvenile Transportation Services come for you in the night in a preordained kidnapping, complete with an unmarked van and husky guardsmen you can’t outmatch, you have been sold for a promise.”
A young woman thinks she has escaped her past only to discover that she’s been hovering on its edges all along: She and her younger sister bide their time in a dilapidated warehouse in a desolate town north of New York City; their parents settled there with dreams of starting an art commune. But after the girls’ father vanishes, all traces of stability disappear for the family, and the girls retreat into strange worlds of their own mythmaking and isolation.
As the sisters both try to survive their increasingly dark and dangerous adolescences, they break apart and reunite repeatedly, orbiting each other like planets. Both endure stints at the Veld Center, a wilderness camp where troubled teenage girls are sent as a last resort, and both emerge more deeply warped by the harsh outdoor survival experiences they must endure and the attempts by staff to break them down psychologically.
With a mesmerizing voice and uncanny storytelling style, this is a remarkable debut about two women who must struggle to understand the bonds that link them and how their traumatic history will shape who they choose to become as adults.
Register to save your seat, or join us live or later on Vimeo. Click here to watch.
Chapter One Bookstore will be on site selling Ariel's book, and a signing will follow the conversation.
- Date:
- Tuesday, May 3, 2022
- Time:
- 6:00pm - 7:00pm
- Time Zone:
- Mountain Time - US & Canada (change)
- Location:
- John A. and Carole O. Moran Lecture Hall
- Campus:
- The Community Library
- Audience:
- Adults
- Categories:
- Lectures & Conversations
Ariel Delgado Dixon was born and raised in Trenton, New Jersey. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, O: The Oprah Magazine, The Mississippi Review, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. Her first novel, Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You, was published in February 2022 by Random House. She lives in Philadelphia and is a 2019 graduate of the Boise State University MFA Program in Creative Writing (along with Mary Pauline Lowry).
