November 4, 2019 at 7:30 p.m.
Books & Books, Miami Book Fair and the
Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County
present two literary events
AN EVENING WITH TA-NEHISI COATES
National Book Award-winning author to discuss debut novel The Water Dancer which was just announced as the latest pick for Oprah’s coveted Book Club
“It is one of the best books I’ve ever read in my entire life, right up there in the Top 5!” – Oprah Winfrey
November 4, 2019 at 7:30 p.m.
Tickets: $40*
John S. and James L. Knight Concert Hall
Books & Books (@booksandbooks), Miami Book Fair (@miamibookfair) and the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County (@arshtcenter) are proud to present two literary events during the Center’s 2019-2020 season: AN EVENING WITH TA-NEHISI COATES and AN EVENING WITH PATTI SMITH. On November 4, Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisipcoates), National Book Award-winning author of Between the World and Me, will discuss his new novel The Water Dancer, a boldly imaginative work of magic and adventure which was just selected as the latest pick for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club. On December 17, Patti Smith (@thisispattismith), Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids and M Train, will discuss her new book, Year of the Monkey, a profound, beautifully realized memoir in which dreams and reality are vividly woven into a tapestry of one transformative year. Additional 2019-2020 season events co-presented with Books & Books and Miami Book Fair will be announced at a later date.
Tickets to AN EVENING WITH TA-NEHISI COATES are available now at $40* and include a copy of his book, The Water Dancer. Tickets to AN EVENING WITH PATTI SMITH are $37* and include a copy of her book, Year of the Monkey. Tickets will be available to Arsht Center Culturist Members on September 25 at noon and to the general public on September 30 at noon. All tickets may be purchased through the Adrienne Arsht Center Box Office by calling (305) 949-6722, or online at arshtcenter.org.
BRINGAFRIEND to save! For every full-priced ticket purchased, guests can get a second ticket for only $10* by using the code BRINGAFRIEND for either literary event. Each full-priced ticket includes admission to the event and a copy of The Water Dancer or Year of the Monkey. *Fees apply. Not valid on previously purchased tickets. $10 tickets do not include a copy of the books.
ABOUT TA-NEHISI COATES AND THE WATER DANCER
In only a decade’s time, Ta-Nehisi Coates has produced some of our country’s most seminal pieces of non-fiction writing. Whether in personal narratives like Between the World and Me or reportage like The Case for Reparations, his luminous prose and gift for examining our most urgent struggles through a historical and cultural lens has transformed our notions of what non-fiction can do.
The Water Dancer is a boldly imagined work of magic and adventure, love and separation, and the power of resistance. Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage–and lost his mother and all memory of her when he was a child–but he is also gifted with a mysterious power. Hiram almost drowns when he crashes a carriage into a river, but is saved from the depths by a force he doesn’t understand, a blue light that lifts him up and lands him a mile away. This strange brush with death forces a new urgency on Hiram’s private rebellion. Spurred on by his improvised plantation family, Thena, his chosen mother, a woman of few words and many secrets, and Sophia, a young woman fighting her own war even as she and Hiram fall in love, he becomes determined to escape the only home he’s ever known.
So begins an unexpected journey into the covert war on slavery that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the deep South to dangerously utopic movements in the North. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, all Hiram wants is to return to the Walker Plantation to free the family he left behind–but to do so, he must first master his magical gift and reconstruct the story of his greatest loss.
This is a bracingly original vision of the world of slavery, written with the narrative force of a great adventure. Driven by the author’s bold imagination and striking ability to bring readers deep into the interior lives of his brilliantly rendered characters, The Water Dancer is the story of America’s oldest struggle–the struggle to tell the truth–from one of our most exciting thinkers and beautiful writers. For more information, please visit https://ta-nehisicoates.com/.
Special lobby experience for AN EVENING WITH TA-NEHISI COATES: Guests are invited to read and examine a variety of letters from The Underground Railroad Records which Coates researched for The Water Dancer. The Underground Railroad Records contains a collection of first account narrative slave letters. Letters from the book will be displayed in the Center’s Knight Concert Hall lobby for guests to view and immerse themselves in a bit of history.