Name: Ayana Mathis
Start: 2024-10-09T20:00:00+02:00
End: 2024-10-09T21:30:00+02:00
Location: English Theatre Berlin

The U.S. Embassy Literature Series – A reading and discussion with Ayana Mathis, moderated by Sharmaine Lovegrove
Two bold, utopic communities are at the heart of Ayana Mathis’s searing follow-up to her bestselling debut, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie.
Bonaparte, Alabama – once 10,000 glorious Black-owned acres – is now a ghost town vanishing to depopulation, crooked developers, and an eerie mist closing in on its shoreline. Dutchess Carson, Bonaparte’s fiery, tough-talking protector, fights to keep its remaining one thousand acres in the hands of the last five residents. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, her estranged daughter Ava is drawn into Ark – a seductive, radical group with a commitment to Black self-determination in the spirit of the Black Panthers and MOVE, with a dash of the Weather Underground’s violent zeal. Ava’s eleven-year-old son Toussaint wants out – his future awaits him on his grandmother’s land, where the sounds of cicada and frog song might save him if only he can make it there.
In Mathis’s electrifying novel, Bonaparte is both mythic landscape and spiritual inheritance, and 1980s Philadelphia is its raw, darkly glittering counterpoint. The Unsettled is a spellbinding portrait of two fierce women reckoning with the steep cost of resistance: What legacy will we leave our children? Where can we be free?

Ayana Mathis is the author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Knopf, 2012) and The Unsettled (Knopf, 2023). The Unsettled was named a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of 2023, a best of 2023 by The New Yorker, Publisher’s Weekly, an Oprah Daily Best Novels of 2023, and a Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2023. The novel was a finalist for the 2024 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. The New York Times calls it, “Poignant, heartbreaking.”
Her first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, was a New York Times Bestseller, the second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, a 2013 New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, and was long listed for the Dublin Literary Award and a finalist for Hurston-Wright Foundation’s Legacy Award. Mathis’s essays and criticism have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, T Magazine, The Financial Times, Rolling Stone, Guernica and Glamour. Currently pursuing her Masters of Divinity at Union Theological Seminary, Mathis’s most recent nonfiction explores the intertwining of faith and American literature in her multi-essay New York Times series “Imprinted By Belief”.
Her work has been supported by the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation. She was a 2024-2025 American Academy in Berlin Prize Fellow. Mathis received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and went on to become the first African-American woman to serve as an Assistant Professor in that program. She currently teaches at Hunter College in the MFA Program.

Sharmaine Lovegrove is the Managing Director of Dialogue Books, a brand-new division of Hachette UK with the remit of Inclusion, Inspiration and Innovation, the publishing division is a home for a variety of stories from illuminating voices often missing from the mainstream.
Sharmaine was the recipient of the Future Book Publishing Person of the Year 2018/19 and is inspired by innovative storytelling, and has worked in public relations, bookselling, events management and TV and Film scouting. She was the literary editor of ELLE and established a bookshop and creative agency in Berlin.
Sharmaine serves on the boards of The Black Cultural Archives and Bookshop.org UK and is a founding organizer of The Black Writers Guild. Home is London, she lives in Berlin and her roots are Jamaican – Sharmaine is proud to be part of the African diaspora and books make her feel part of the world.