Sarah Gerard with Anna Qu, Raksha Vasudevan, and Pamela Jean Tinnen

Tattered Cover is excited to welcome Sarah Gerard in conversation with Anna Qu, Raksha Vasudevan, and Pamela Jean Tinnen to our Colfax location on July 9th, 2024 at 6PM.

They will be discussing Sarah's new book,!

Acclaimed author Sarah Gerard turns her keen observational eye and penetrating prose to the 2016 M**der of her friend Carolyn Bush, examining the multi-faceted reasons for her death―personal and societal, avoidable and inevitable―

as "nuanced and subtly intimate" (NPR) as her lauded essay collection, Sunshine State.

Registration includes a signed copy of the book and opportunity to meet the author.

If you are unable to attend the event after purchasing a ticket, you are required to pick up your copy of the book (with proof of purchase from your event registration) within 30 days after the event date. If the book is not picked up by that date, you relinquish your copy to Tattered Cover Book Store.

ABOUT THE BOOK

On the night of September 28, 2016, twenty-five-year-old Carolyn Bush was brutally stabbed to death in her New York City apartment by her roommate Render Stetson-Shanahan, leaving friends and family of both reeling. In life, Carolyn was a gregarious, smart-mouthed aspiring poet, who had seemingly gotten along well with Render, a reserved art handler. Where had it gone so terribly wrong?

This is the question that has plagued acclaimed author Sarah Gerard and driven her obsessive pursuit to understand this horrific tragedy. In Sarah's exploration of Carolyn's life and death, she spent thousands of hours interviewing Carolyn's and Render's friends and family, poring over court documents and news media, reading obscure writings and internet posts, and attending Carolyn's memorials and Render's trial.

What emerged from Sarah's relentless instinct to follow a story and its characters to their darkest ends is a book that is at once a striking homage to Carolyn's life, a chilling excavation of a brutal crime, and a captivating whydunit with a shocking conclusion.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah Gerard is the author of the essay collection Sunshine State, a New York Times critics' choice; the novella Binary Star, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times first fiction prize; two chapbooks; and the novel True Love. Her short stories, essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, Granta, The Baffler, Vice, BOMB Magazine, and other journals, as well as anthologies. She's been supported by fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, Tin House, PlatteForum, Ucross, and the Whiting Foundation. She lives in Denver.

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNERS

Raksha Vasudevan was born in India and raised in Canada, Raksha Vasudevan is a journalist and former aid worker.
She has reported on issues of race, environmental justice, housing, and "progress" for The New York Times, VICE, The Guardian, Outside, and High Country News, where she is also a contributing editor. Her essays and commentary on colonial legacy and family estrangement appear in The New York Times Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, Guernica, Hazlitt, The Washington Post, and LitHub, among others. Her work has been nominated for a Canadian National Magazine Award, two Pushcart Prizes, a Best of the Net award and listed as "Notable" in Best American Essays 2020 and 2021. Raksha has received fellowships and support from Ragdale, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Writers' Trust of Canada. She lives in Denver with her partner and dog.

Anna Qu is a Chinese American writer. She writes personal essays on identity and growing up in New York as an immigrant. Her work has appeared in Poets & Writers, Lithub, Threepenny Review, Lumina, Kartika, Kweli, Vol.1 Brooklyn, and Jezebel, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College.

Anna serves as the Nonfiction Editor at Kweli Journal, and teaches at Catapult, Monmouth University and the low res MFA program at New England College. Awarded the 2023 BMI Shearing Fellowship, she'll be in Vegas in the Spring.

Pamela Jean Tinnen is a curator, art dealer and writer based in New York with 15+ years experience in public exhibitions, corporate collections and the commercial art market.
She has worked for over a decade as a curator specializing in public-art at NYU, as well as for contemporary art galleries. In 2019, she founded her gallery, High Priestess Project where she focuses on emerging artists with exceptional talent and upmarket appeal. Her artistic, academic and curatorial interests most often engage photography, noir-aesthetics, semiotics, dark-tourism, and visual-culture. In her spare time, which is on its face an oxymoron, she enjoys playing the drums and penning her first novel. Pamela holds an MA in Museum Studies from New York University, and a BA in Literature from the University of South Florida.

Event Venue

Tattered Cover Colfax Ave, 2526 E Colfax Ave, Denver, United States