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I Am You: Victoria Redel in conversation with Kimberly King Parsons

Tue, October 14 from 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm PDT
716 SE Grand Ave Portland, OR 97214

The Literary Arts Bookstore is pleased to welcome Victoria Redel in celebration of her latest,I Am You, in conversation with 2025 Oregon Book Award Winner Kimberly King Parsons.


 

An unforgettable love story about sex, art, and politics in 1600s Amsterdam. At age eight, Gerta Pieters is dressed as a boy and put to work in the service of the Oosterwijcks, a genteel Dutch family. When Gerta catches the eye of the young Maria Oosterwijck, Gerta’s asked to accompany her to Amsterdam, where Maria will study under a noteworthy Dutch artist.
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Inspired by the little that is known about skilled still life painter Maria van Oosterwijck’s life, I Am You is a love story, a meditation on gender, and an ode to artistic creation. Victoria Redel’s novel brings to life the copious spoils of Amsterdam’s Golden Age, and the perils that lay hidden within them for women like Maria and Gerta.
Victoria Redel

Victoria Redel

Victoria Redel has written four books of poetry, most recently Paradise; her last novel, Before Everything, was published in 2017. Her short stories, poetry and essays have appeared in Granta, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Bomb, One Story, Salmagundi, O,and NOON among many others. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center. She is a professor in the graduate and undergraduate creative writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.

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Kimberly King Parsons

Kimberly King Parsons

National Book Award-nominee Kimberly King Parsons is the bestselling author of We Were the Universe, a Dakota Johnson Book Club pick ranked #2 on TIME Magazine's Best Books of 2024. The New York Times praised this debut novel as "a profound, gutsy tale of grief's dismantling power" and it was a best book of 2024 in Elle, Oprah Daily, Marie Claire, Marie Claire UK and many others. Parsons’s debut collection, Black Light, was a finalist for the Edmund White Award for Fiction, the Story Prize, and the Texas Institute of Letters Fiction Award. An Oregon Book Award-winner, Parsons teaches fiction at Pacific University and lives in Portland with her family.

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