On Sunday, April 14, Baton Rouge Gallery is honored to host a reading and conversation with author Maurice Carlos Ruffin as he presents his newly released novel, The American Daughters (One World, an imprint of Random House), which was recently named a New York Times Editor’s Choice.
Maurice Carlos Ruffin
As with all Sundays@4 presentations, this event will be free and open to all. Joining Maurice in conversation will be author Susan Weinstein, who serves as Chair of the English Department at Louisiana State University.
Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the recipient of the 2023 Louisiana Writer Award and the Black Rock Senegal Residency. The American Daughters was also a finalist for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and longlisted for the Story Prize. The book was also selected to represent Louisiana at the 2023 National Book Festival.
A New Orleans native, Ruffin is also a professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University, and the 2020-2021 John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, the LA Times, Oxford American, Garden & Gun, Kenyon Review, and Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America.
About The American Daughters, courtesy of Penguin Random House:
“An enthralling tale of a secret resistance movement run by Black women in pre-Civil War New Orleans.”—Time
“Stirring . . . In telling this important, neglected history with imagination-fueled research, The American Daughters offers an inspiring story of people who show a way forward with their perseverance, bravery and love.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
Ady, a curious, sharp-witted girl, and her fierce mother, Sanite, are inseparable. Enslaved to a businessman in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the pair spend their days dreaming of a loving future and reminiscing about their family’s rebellious and storied history. When mother and daughter are separated, Ady is left hopeless and directionless until she stumbles into the Mockingbird Inn and meets Lenore, a free Black woman with whom she becomes fast friends. Lenore invites Ady to join a clandestine society of spies called the Daughters. With the courage instilled in her by Sanite—and with help from these strong women—Ady learns how to put herself first. So begins her journey toward liberation and imagining a new future.
The American Daughters is a novel of hope and triumph that reminds us what is possible when a community bands together to fight for their freedom.