About this Event
Tombolo Books welcomes award-winning professor and author Alison Kinney to the bookstore to discuss her latest book United States of Rejection with Tombolo bookseller and author Rachel Knox!
United States of Rejection is a love-hate story about personal and political relationships in the United States, told through the intimate stories of both the rejectors and the rejected: lovers, families, neighbors, and a nation and its people.
More about United States of Rejection
Although we’re taught not to care about others’ opinions, rejection always hurts, and it hurts some people a lot more than others. To prove it, this book marshals contemporary neuroscience, the Founding Fathers’ rejection advice, and four centuries of personal narratives, many of them hilarious, many more heartbreaking. These rejection and acceptance stories span loving and disastrous American first encounters, soldiers and dancers rejected on front lines and chorus lines, playground bullies invoked before the Senate, and generations of lovers and patriots battling or swiping right to defend their loved ones and their country.
Abraham Lincoln wrote, "The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more evil, than of good." But rejection is often unjust, often deserved, and unusually complicated, depending on who’s rejecting whom and why.
In laboratories, diaries, self-help manuals, auditions, lawsuits, and wars, we find models for "getting past" rejections, not just through personal resilience, but also through creating accountability and justice.United States of Rejectionbegins with heartbreak and ends with hope: an urgent self-improvement program for changing our relationships and the future of our messy nation.
Alison Kinney (she/her) is an author, teacher, and nonfiction writer focusing on cultural history, the arts, ecology, and social justice.
Her newest book, UNITED STATES OF REJECTION: A STORY OF LOVE, HATE & HOPE, will be published by University of Georgia Press on May 1, 2026 (Crux: the Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction). She’s also the author of AVIDLY READS OPERA, (NYU Press, 2021) and HOOD (Bloomsbury’s “Object Lessons” series, 2016). She’s written online and/or in print for The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, Lapham’s Quarterly, Longreads, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, L.A. Review of Books and Avidly, VAN Magazine, Gay Magazine, The Believer, New Republic, The New Inquiry, Hyperallergic, LitHub, and other publications. Five of her essays have been named Notable Essays in The Best American Essays, from 2016 through 2020. Alison has taught nonfiction writing at The New School and at Catapult and is now Assistant Professor of Writing at Eugene Lang College at The New School and in 2026 is a recipient of the Distinguished University Teaching Award.
Rachel Knox is a writer born and raised in Tampa Bay. She teaches writing at the University of South Florida and is a bookseller at Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Tombolo Books, 2153 1st Avenue South, St. Petersburg, United States
USD 0.00
