Beth Macy

Library Author Series: Beth Macy

Tuesday, December 6, 2016 - 6:30pm to 8:00pm
  • Library Hall

Spend an evening at the library with award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author Beth Macy as she shares the stories behind her critically acclaimed new book, Truevine, a story about race, greed and the circus.

Beth Macy is the author of the Lukas Prize-winning Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local — and Helped Save an American Town. She has been chasing the story behind her new nonfiction narrativefor more than 25 years. Truevine is the true story of two African-American brothers who were kidnapped and displayed as circus freaks, and whose mother endured a 28-year struggle to get them back. The book has been short-listed for a Kirkus Prize in nonfiction, and long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence, a project of the American Library Association.
 
The year was 1899 and the place a sweltering tobacco farm in the Jim Crow South town of Truevine, Virginia. George and Willie Muse were two little boys born to a sharecropper family. One day a white man offered them a piece of candy, setting off events that would take them around the world and change their lives forever. Captured into the circus, the Muse brothers performed for royalty at Buckingham Palace and headlined over a dozen sold-out shows at New York's Madison Square Garden. They were global superstars in a pre-broadcast era. But the very root of their success was in the color of their skin and in the outrageous caricatures they were forced to assume: supposed cannibals, sheep-headed freaks, even "Ambassadors from Mars." Back home, their mother never accepted that they were "gone" and spent 28 years trying to get them back.

Through hundreds of interviews and decades of research, Macy expertly explores a central and difficult question: Where were the brothers better off? On the world stage as stars or in poverty at home? Truevine is a compelling narrative rich in historical detail and rife with implications to race relations today.

About the author
A longtime reporter who specializes in outsiders and underdogs, Macy has won more than a dozen national journalism awards, including a Nieman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard in 2010. Among the marginalized groups she has chronicled for newspapers and magazines are Hispanic immigrants, African refugees, caregivers for the elderly, veterans with PTSD and displaced factory workers.

Macy has been published in Oprah magazine, Parade, The New York Times, Salon and Christian Science Monitor. For two decades, she was the families beat reporter at The Roanoke (Va.) Times, where many of her longer pieces originated. Her approach to storytelling: Report from the ground up, establish trust, be patient, find stories that tap into universal truths. Eat the posole. Get out of your ZIP code. To do good work, be a human first.

This community talk is free.

About the Library Author Series
Bud Werner Memorial Library presents an ongoing program of author talks throughout the year. These are free community events held in Library Hall, where a diverse award-winning range of visiting authors speak about their literary works and their writing processes. Each talk is followed by a Q&A and an opportunity to have authors sign copies of  their books.

Books will be available for sale and author signing courtesy of Off the Beaten Path Bookstore.