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We are thrilled to host Katy Simpson Smith in celebration of the paperback release of her novel, The Weeds.Together with Ms. Smith attendees will learn multiple techniques for drying flowers and other botanicals. Attendees will have the opportunity to discuss The Weeds with Ms. Smith while taking part in this unique hands-on workshop led by Stephanie Tarrant, second generation florist and owner of The Crypt Flowers.
$10 tickets include the workshop and refreshments.
$30 tickets include the above plus a signed paperback copy of The Weeds.
About the author:
Katy Simpson Smith was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She is the author of the novels The Story of Land and Sea, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and one of Vogue’s Best Books of 2014; Free Men; and The Everlasting, a New York Times Best Historical Fiction Book of 2020. Her writing has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford American, Granta, and elsewhere. She received a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and is also the author of We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835. She lives in New Orleans.
About the artist:
Stephanie Tarrant is a second generation florist living in New Orleans. Using botanical material, they preserve the fleeting beauty of blooming and once living things laid and arranged in epoxy resin creating home decor, altar adornments and wearable jewelry. Through many methods of drying and pressing flowers and foliage, they challenge the economic and environmental impacts of the retail floral industry by conserving perishables as permanent fixtures of beauty.
About the Book:
In Katy Simpson Smith's The Weeds , two women, connected across time, edge toward transgression in pursuit of their desires.
A Mississippi woman pushes through the ruin of the Roman Colosseum, searching for plants. She has escaped her life, signed up to catalog all the species growing in this place. Crawling along the stones, she wonders how she has landed here, a reluctant botanist amid a snarl of tourists in comfortable sandals. She hunts for a scientific agenda and a direction of her own.
In 1854, a woman pushes through the jungle of the Roman Colosseum, searching for plants. As punishment for her misbehavior, she has been indentured to the English botanist Richard Deakin, for whom she will compile a flora. She is a thief, and she must find new ways to use her hands. If only the woman she loves weren't on a boat, with a husband. But love isn't always possible. She logs 420 species.
Through a list of seemingly minor plants and their uses--medical, agricultural, culinary--these women calculate intangible threats: a changing climate, the cost of knowledge, and the ways repeated violence can upend women's lives. They must forge their own small acts of defiance and slip through whatever cracks they find. How can anyone survive?
Lush, intoxicating, and teeming with mischief, Katy Simpson Smith's The Weeds is a tense, mesmerizing page-turner about science and survival, the roles women are given and have taken from them, and the lives they make for themselves.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
8123 Oak St, New Orleans, LA, United States, Louisiana 70118
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