Join poet, novelist, translator, and essayist Amit Majmudar in conversation with writer and educator Renée Shea about Twin A: A Memoir.
Registration is on Eventbrite. The purchase of Twin A waives the $5 registration fee.
Ohio Poetry Association is Gramercy’s Community Partner for this program.
Shortly after learning they would become the parents of twins, the physician-writer Amit Majmudar and his wife received a devastating in utero diagnosis: one of the twins had a potentially fatal congenital heart defect.
Written in the form of an extended letter, Twin A recounts the epic story of the open-heart surgeries, complications, and prolonged recoveries that Majmudar's son survived in infancy and early childhood. But the narrative turns into something much richer and more expansive than the mere description of a surgical history. Thanks to Majmudar's ample gifts as a wordsmith, medical and scientific information frequently give way to original poetry and fables, family history, and a series of evocative religious and philosophical reflections about matters of life and death.
The result is a fresh, captivating exploration of the events that transform his son and everyone around him. Drawing strength and beauty from catastrophe, Majmudar's Twin A creates a moving portrait of a family's love and a child's extraordinary resilience.
Amit Majmudar is a poet, novelist, translator, and essayist, as well as the former first Poet Laureate of Ohio. Along with Twin A: A Memoir, his recent books include the poetry collection What He Did in Solitary and Black Avatar: and Other Essays. He has also published a translation from the Sanskrit, Godsong: A Verse Translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, with Commentary. He works as a diagnostic and nuclear radiologist in Westerville, Ohio.
Renée Shea, formerly an English professor at Bowie State University in Maryland, has written extensively for Poets & Writers Magazine, contributing profiles of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Edwidge Danticat, Rita Dove, Camille T. Dungy, Imbolo Mbue, Celeste Ng, Naomi Shihab Nye, Arundhati Roy, Namwali Serpell, and Tracey K Smith. Shea is lead author for the English Language Arts High School Series for Bedford, Freeman & Worth.
