On Sunday, November 3rd, Baton Rouge Gallery’s Sundays@4 series is delighted to host a presentation and discussion by Hannah Palmer on her book “The Pool is Closed”. As with all Sundays@4 experiences, this will be free and open to the public.

Hannah S. Palmer is a writer and designer from the Southside of Atlanta. She earned an MFA in creative writing from Sewanee: The University of the South, and she is the author of Flight Path: A Search for Roots beneath the World's Busiest Airport (2017). Through essays, memoirs, and public art projects, she explores how hidden histories and wildness shape our lives in the urban landscape.

In 2018, while teaching her kids to swim and working on urban river restoration projects, Hannah S. Palmer began a journal of social encounters with water. As she found herself dangling her feet in a seemingly all-white swimming pool, she started to worry about how her young sons would learn to swim. Would they grow up accustomed to the stubbornly segregated pools of Atlanta? Was it safe for them to wade in creeks laced with urban runoff or dive into the ever-warming, man-made swimming holes of the South? Should they just join the Y?

But these weren’t just parenting questions. In the South, how we swim—and whether we have access to water at all—is tied up in race and class. As she took her sons pool-hopping across Atlanta, Palmer found an intimate lens through which to view the city’s neighborhoods. In The Pool Is Closed, she documents the creeks behind fences, the springs in the sewers, the lakes that had all but vanished since her own parents learned to swim. In the process, she uncovers complex stories about environmental history, water policy, and the racial politics of public spaces.

Nothing prepared Palmer for the contamination, sewage, and bodies that appear when you look at water too long. Her search for water became compulsive, a way to make sense of the world. The Pool Is Closed is a book about water: where it flows and where it floods, who owns it, and what it costs. It’s also a story about embracing parenthood in a time of environmental catastrophe and political anxiety, of dwindling public space and natural resources. It chronicles a year-long quest to find a place to swim and finding, instead, what makes shared water so threatening and wild.

Sundays@4 is presented in partnership with the Atchafalaya National Heritage Area whose mission is to enhance the identity of our unique American landscape by preserving and promoting our heritage and by fostering progress for local champions that create authentic, powerful connections between people, culture, and the environment.