Name: Karen Russell at the Cambridge Public Library
Start: 2025-03-24T18:00:00-04:00
Location: Cambridge Public Library

Karen Russell at the Cambridge Public Library

Harvard Book Store and the Cambridge Public Library welcome Karen Russell—award-winning author of six books of fiction, including the "New York Times" bestsellers "Swamplandia!" and "Vampires in the Lemon Grove"—for a discussion of her new novel "The Antidote". She will be joined in conversation by Kim Tingley—contributing writer for "The New York Times Magazine".
TICKETING
RSVP for free to this event or choose the "Book-Included" ticket to reserve a hardcover copy of "The Antidote" and pick it up at the event. Karen Russell will sign copies of her new book after the presentation.
ABOUT "The Antidote"
From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of "Swamplandia!" and "Vampires in the Lemon Grove" Karen Russell: a gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town
"The Antidote" opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. "The Antidote" follows a "Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.
Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. "The Antidote" echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.
BIOS
Karen Russell is the author of six books of fiction, including the bestsellers "Swamplandia!" and "Vampires in the Lemon Grove". She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has received two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane prize, the 2024 Mary McCarthy Award, and was selected for the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" prize and The New Yorker's "20 under 40" list (She is now decisively over 40). She has taught literature and creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of California-Irvine, Williams College, Columbia University, and Bryn Mawr College, and was the Endowed Chair of Texas State’s MFA program. She serves on the board of Street Books, a mobile-library for people living outdoors. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, son, and daughter.
Kim Tingley is a contributing writer for "The New York Times Magazine", where she originated and wrote the Studies Show column. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award in 2012 and was a 2016 fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. Her story "Sixth Sense," about wave-piloting in the Marshall Islands, is anthologized in "The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017". She holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University.
CO-SPONSOR
The Cambridge Public Library serves as a doorway to opportunity, self-development, and recreation for all its residents, and as a forum where they may share ideas, cultures, and resources among themselves and with people around the globe. Learn more at cambridgema.gov/cpl.