The HLAA-TC Virtual Book Club met on Tuesday, April 26th at 7:00pm to discuss the book “Burn Down the Ground: A Memoir” by Kambri Crews. We were joined by author Kambri Crews for an engaging and interesting conversation about her book. It was a small group with local members and members from other parts of the country. The memoir was about Crews’ experience growing up as a Child Of Deaf Adults (CODA) and her relationship with her father. The book was published in 2012 so Kambri shared with the group what had happened in her life (and her father’s) since writing it.

If you didn’t get a chance to read the book or attend the book club with Kambri Crews, our book club certainly recommends the book (available from libraries, Amazon, etc.).  To find out more about Kambri Crews visit her website  (check out the Press page on her website to read about her more recent activities).

The next HLAA-TC Virtual Book Club will be Tuesday, May 24th at 7:00 p.m. (Central Time). We are reading the novel “Deafening” by Frances Itani. The book is widely available. A synopsis can be found on the Amazon page: “Grania O’Neill, the daughter of hardworking Irish hoteliers in small-town Ontario, is five years old when she emerges from a bout of scarlet fever profoundly deaf—suddenly sealed off from the world that was just beginning to open for her. While her guilt-plagued mother cannot accept it, Grania finds allies in her grandmother and her older sister, Tress. It isn’t until she’s enrolled in the Ontario School for the Deaf in Belleville, that Grania truly begins to thrive. In time, she falls for Jim Lloyd, a hearing man with whom Grania creates a new emotional vocabulary that encompasses both sound and silence. But just two weeks after their wedding, Jim leaves to serve as a stretcher bearer on the blood-soaked battlefields of Flanders. During this long war of attrition, Jim and Grania’s letters back and forth—both real and imagined—attempt to sustain their young love in a world as brutal as it is hopeful. Winner of the Commonwealth Book Prize, Frances Itani’s debut novel is a “brilliantly lucid and masterfully sustained” ode to language—how it can console, imprison, and liberate—with “the integrity of an achieved artistic vision, the kind of power that is generally associated with the gracious, crystalline prose of Grace Paley, the flagrantly good, good lines of Robert Lowell and W. H. Auden’s poetry” (Kaye Gibbons, author of A Virtuous Woman).”

If you would like to receive a meeting link for the May book club, please email Laura Hagemann at social@hlaatc.org