Jamie Brooks - The Fleeing Season
Featured Book
The Fleeing Season: An American Mother’s Migration Toward Safety and Justice
For generations, migration stories moved in one direction: toward the American Dream. Now, a seismic reversal is underway. For the first time since the Great Depression, more people are leaving the United States than moving in. Jamie D. Brooks and her family are among the many who have fled.
Blending cultural reporting with memoir, The Fleeing Season shares one mother’s story as she considers how and where to raise her family. Brooks recounts her decision to emigrate to the United Kingdom, while reckoning with issues that so many American families face: school shootings, systemic racism, a broken health care system, rising rates of homelessness, and the lack of a social safety net. Intimate and honest, Brooks’s story is not a political polemic. Rather, it maps a path toward reproductive justice.
This book will be available for purchase at the event.
About This Event
In a special event organized by University of Iowa Press, author Jamie Brooks will read from her new memoir, The Fleeing Season: An American Mother's Migration Toward Safety and Justice. The Fleeing Season is the first book in the Locating Reproductive Justice Series, edited by Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz and Lina Murillo and published by University of Iowa Press, which explores reproductive justice within and beyond US borders to center global, transnational, regional, and local conversations on reproductive justice as theory and practice.
Featured Author
Jamie D. Brooks
Jamie D. Brooks is a lawyer who spent two decades advocating for reproductive justice and improving access, safety, and quality within the United States healthcare system—work she continues to do in London, England.
About the Venue
Prairie Lights Books
Prairie Lights sprang to life in May 1978 as a small, intimate bookstore offering titles by the newer voices of Raymond Carver and Alice Munro and by established authors like Eudora Welty and George Orwell. As the staff and customers tended the books with care much like a garden, the store grew and blossomed. By 1982 Prairie Lights transplanted itself from South Linn St. to South Dubuque and has gradually spread to three and a half floors, the half being an 1100 square foot coffee house located in the same space that the local literary society met throughout the 1930's, hosting writers Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, Sherwood Anderson, Langston Hughes, E.E Cummings and others. Gertrude Stein and friend Alice B. Toklas were scheduled for a reading but were sleeted in at Waukesha airport-- or so the story goes. Perhaps the strength of reputation lies in the reading series of local, national and international writers who have read their works which were broadcast live on stations WSUI and WOI and which was the only regular literary series of its kind. All of this could not have been possible without a loyal customer base and a dedicated staff. We thank our customers for their continued support, and welcome our new customers.
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