About this Event
The Avenue is a novel about a single mother who works at an antique store – in 2004 before the stock market crash, when the antique stores had just started popping up everywhere in the increasingly white-on-white gentrified Hampden, Baltimore. It’s about wanting a better world and living in this one. It’s about a mango margarita and a record store guy. It’s about value, matter, and objects changing hands.
From groundbreaking zinester and essayist China Martens comes a raw, luminous debut novel that transforms the gritty everyday of working-class Baltimore into something transcendent. Following Mattie, a thirty-eight-year-old single mom navigating precarious employment, teenage chaos, and heartbreak on The Avenue, Martens crafts an unflinching portrait of survival that pulses with magic and beauty.
About the Author:
China Martens is a zinestress extraordinaire born in Baltimore. Her first book, The Future Generation: The Zine-Book for Subculture Parents, Kids, Friends & Others, is a compilation of 16 years of her first zine that was reissued in March 2017. She is also the co-editor of Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind: Concrete Ways To Support Families In Social Justice Movements & Communities and Revolutionary Mothering: Love On The Front Lines, an anthology which centers mothers of color and marginalized mothers voices, which Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker called “Juicy, gutsy, vulnerable, and brave.” The Avenue is her first novel.
About the Program:
- Doors will open to registered attendees at 1 pm.
- Books will be available for purchase before and after the event.
- Free street parking available along Falls Road and 37th Street. Bike parking available at the building.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Enoch Pratt Free Library, 400 Cathedral Street, Baltimore, United States
USD 0.00
