Join Me on the Wade in the Water Book Tour

Five Days and Five Bookstores with Nyani Nkrumah

Hello friends,

A few weeks ago Rooted contributor and owner of Friendly City Books Emily Liner called me with a proposition—to join author Nyani Nkrumah on a statewide book tour for her debut novel Wade in the Water. Perhaps I should have asked a few more questions or thought about it for a day or two. Instead, I gave Emily a resounding “yes,” remembered that I should probably check my calendar before wholeheartedly committing to multi-day plans, checked said calendar, and then sent a follow-up email with an even more enthusiastically resounding “YES.”

My blind trust in Emily Liner’s vision has proven to be spot on, because y’all, this book! It’s powerful and brave and asking all the hard (and, therefore, exactly right) questions. I have to know what compelled Nyani Nkrumah—who was born in Boston, and raised in Ghana and Zimbabwe—to write such a deeply vulnerable and compassionate book about Mississippi. As readers of Rooted know, it’s not easy to capture Mississippi’s complexity, especially if you’re not from here. But Nkrumah captures the Deep South’s beauty and contradictions and tensions in her hard-to-put-down coming-of-age novel. (How did she do it? I plan to ask her!)

The book tour kicks off in Columbus at Friendly City Books on Monday, the 11th of September, at 5:30 pm.

From there, we're visiting Off Square Books in Oxford on Tuesday at 5:30 pm, Story Books in Cleveland on Wednesday at 5:30 pm (Brittany Meador, owner of Story Books will moderate this event), and Lemuria Books in Jackson on Thursday at 5 pm, and then we'll wrap it up on the Coast at Pass Books in Pass Christian on Saturday at noon. 

Because Emily Liner is both brilliant and big-hearted, she and the FCB team have found a way to give away FREE copies of Wade in the Water to high school, college, and graduate students at each tour stop while supplies last. If you’d like to chip in to FCB’s book giveaways, you can donate to the Friendly City Books Community Connection, a special project of the CREATE Foundation.

And if you’re not able to make any of these in-person events, you can order your own signed copy of Wade in the Water at friendlycitybooks.com/shop.

I hope to see you on the road!

-Lauren