NEA Big Read 2022

NEA Big Read: Beloved: Mining Memories to Understand Choice

Free

Click 'Register' Below to Apply by 4/15

Once a week Saturdays, 12:00 pm EDT - 2:30 pm EDT April 30 to May 21, 2022

Online via Zoom

A free, interactive close reading and personal narrative writing workshop for students in grades 11 and 12. Applications closed April 15th.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a story about, among many things, how the manipulation of memory drives personal choice. Through a mixture of discussion and close-reading activities, participants will work together to examine the various ways memory takes shape in the novel.

Everyone will be provided with a copy of the book, and participants are required to read assigned pages between sessions.

Students will then mine their memories to find, shape, and share personal narratives. Writing about a pivotal choice from their lives, participants will explore how memory lives in the body, both on its surface and under its skin.

Led by

Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons

Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons

Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons is a writer, educator, and storyteller who lives in Astoria, Queens. Her recent work has appeared in HiLobrow, Marie Claire, and Hippocampus magazine. She is also the creator of No, YOU Tell It! (noyoutellit.com), a series that advocates for authentic personal stories by having storytellers trade true tales to speak each other’s words aloud, empowering voices on the page and stage. Follow @noyoutellit on Instagram for more.

Featured Book

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Beloved

By Toni Morrison

Published by Knopf Doubleday

Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement.

About this series

NEA Big Read 2022

The Center for Fiction’s 2022 Big Read initiative focuses on Beloved, the landmark novel by the late, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison. Our free multidisciplinary public programming includes discussion groups, workshops for young writers, and public events with authors and scholars. The Center will also connect with students through our signature KidsRead / KidsWrite programming, bringing events to NYC public schools that adapt discussions of Beloved for a high school audience and feature books suitable for younger readers that engage with similar themes. Through this communal celebration of a novel that has been frequently banned and censored, we hope to help return a masterful novelist’s canonical work to its rightful place of prominence. This initiative was made possible through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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