About this Event
We are thrilled to have Shanda McManus presenting her newest memoir, BROTHER EPISTLES!
A $5 General Admission ticket will reserve your seat and you will recieve a $5 Coupon to use at the time of the event. An $18 ticket is your RSVP and includes a copy of BROTHER EPISTLES.
Learn about the book: BROTHER EPISTLES: A SISTER'S MEMOIR
On a Philadelphia street in 1992, Shanda McManus’s brother Monir was killed in a drive-by shooting. Three decades later, still haunted by his M**der, McManus traces her brother’s life through their upbringing in North Philadelphia, Monir’s teen fatherhood and stint in the U.S. Army to support his young sons, and finally, his participation in the drug trade. In Brother Epistles, a series of intimate letters, McManus writes as both sister and physician, blending social commentary, memory, and collective history to lament the fragility of Monir’s life while demanding an American reckoning for the socioeconomic structures responsible for so many young Black men dying through homicide. A heartbreaking conversation between a sister and her brother, leavened with humor, family love, and unconquerable Black joy, Brother Epistles is a powerful meditation on Black identity, the criminalization of Black boys, and the devastating ripple effects of a tragic loss on the loved ones left behind.
Learn about the author: SHANDA MCMANUS
Shanda McManus, a family medicine physician and native Philadelphian, writes about the intersection of life, race, and medicine. Shanda’s writing has appeared in Intima Journal of Narrative Medicine, Midnight & Indigo, Bellevue Literary Review, and swamp pink. She has been a fellow with PEN America Emerging Voices in Creative Nonfiction and Baldwin For The Arts.
Praise for BROTHER EPISTLES:
“Brother Epistles, inspired by a tragedy, is, above all, a celebration of sisterly love. Shanda McManus’s letters to her younger brother Monir, murdered decades ago at age twenty, are heartbreaking and often humorous. Shanda reminisces with Monir about the hardships and joys of their youth and fills him in on all that has happened since his death: the fate of his sons and their children, the ongoing prejudice and violence experienced by young black men, and the evolution of her own life: marriage, motherhood, a successful career as a physician, and a long delayed confrontation with grief through writing. Brother Epistles is all a memoir should be, unsparingly honest, insightful, riveting. It left me changed--and deeply moved.”
—Suzanne Koven, MD, MFA
“Brother Epistles is an act of both remembrance and reckoning. Shanda McManus confronts what it means to grow up Black in America and the intimate human cost of a nation’s indifference. A powerful meditation on grief, love, and survival.”
—Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, author of What Doctors Feel, and editor of
Bellevue Literary Review
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Asbury Book Cooperative, 644A Cookman Avenue, Asbury Park, United States
USD 7.18 to USD 21.05
