A virtual reading group curated around our Stowe Prize for Literary Activism winners and shortlist.
FREE
Virtual – invite friends across the country!
6:00 – 7:00 PM EST
No requirement to read the book beforehand!
Riverbend Bookshop: Get a 10% discount our Stowe Prize books! Mention us at check-out or use STOWEFORCHANGE for online purchases.
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.
As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.
Led by Luisa Soboleski, President of the Connecticut Association of the Deaf, a board member of Disability Rights of Connecticut (DRCT), Co-Chair of the State Advisory Board for Persons who are Deaf, DeafBlind, and Hard of Hearing. She is a retired principal of the American School for the Deaf, a Southington resident, and a third generation deaf.
Leading the book discussion is Scott Gac, Professor and Director of American Studies at Trinity College, Stowe Center Board of Trustees member
Scott Gac is an author, historian, and teacher. At Trinity College in Connecticut, he is a Professor of History and American Studies. He has published on American music and social activism in Choice, Rethinking History, and Reviews in American History. His most recent book is Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
