Allegiance: Art, Love, and Migration

Three books—a novel, a graphic memoir, and a poetry collection—that grapple with questions of who to love, national identity, class divides, loneliness in an unknown place. In the 1920s, a young refugee from the Soviet Union finds herself embroiled in the art and marriage of a brilliant writer and his wife in Adrienne Celt’s novel Invitation to a Bonfire. Wendy Chen’s Unearthings, the fourth selection in Tavern Books’ Wrolstad Contemporary Poetry Series, explores Chen’s identity as an Asian-American woman and the complexities of cultural, ancestral, and familial inheritance. Ali Fitzgerald’s graphic memoir Drawn to Berlin: Comic Workshops in Refugee Shelters and Other Stories from a New Europe depicts her decade in Germany, entwining political and personal displacement as she explores loss, community, and the way art can bring people together. Moderated by Sarah Bowlin.

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