Please join us at Ciné, for a reading and reception with W. Ralph Eubanks and Aryn Kyle to mark our seventy-fifth anniversary, celebrate our success with the National Magazine Awards, and honor our interns in the University of Georgia Experiential Learning Program. Come for the readings, stay for the cake, GR memorabilia, book signings, and conversation!
W. Ralph Eubanks is a literary and cultural critic of the American South as well as a memoirist invested in using archives and oral history as a means to understand one’s past. His first book, Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey into Mississippi’s Dark Past (Basic Books, 2003), follows Eubanks on his journey to learn about the role his parents played in the Civil Rights movement in his native Mississippi. His second book, The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South (HarperCollins, 2009), tracks the author as he learns more and more about the daily lives of his grandparents, whose union broke miscegenation laws in the early twentieth century. His latest, A Place Like Mississippi (Timber Press, 2021), explores the landscape and literary history of his home state. Eubanks is currently Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute (Harvard) as well as Visiting Professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. He has also been head of publishing at the Library of Congress and editor of Virginia Quarterly Review.
Aryn Kyle’s short-story collection, Boys and Girls Like You and Me (2010), and her novel, The God of Animals (2007), were both published by Scribner. She has won two National Magazine Awards for fiction, the first for the first story she ever published, which became the opening of The God of Animals, and the second for “Copper Queen,” published in the Fall 2021 issue of The Georgia Review. Her new novel, Hinterland, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books. Kyle’s fiction offers complicated, nuanced, and intense stories of girls and women working through times of hardship and uncertainty, depicting growth and maturation at every stage of life.
Ciné, which defines itself as “the only independently operated, mission driven, non-profit, community-based art house movie theatre in the region,” is located at 234 West Hancock Avenue, Athens. In addition to its theaters and event space, it also offers a full bar. See www.athenscine.com for more information, including Ciné’s Covid-19 safety policy.