About The Event
Avid Bookshop and Hub City Press invite you to ATHICA on Wednesday, May 28 from 7:00-8:00pm for a conversation with Martha Park and Josina Guess about climate crisis, faith, the South. This reading will celebrate Martha's new book World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After. A reading will be followed by a conversation with Josina Guess, assistant editor at Sojourners Magazine. Avid Bookshop will have copies of World Without End for sale at the event, though we do recommend ordering your copy before the event to guarantee your copy. This event is free and non-ticketed, though seating will be limited.
For accessibility requests, contact events@avidbookshop.com. Please submit your request at least two weeks before the event.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Martha Park is a writer and illustrator from Memphis, Tennessee. She received an MFA from the Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins University, and was the Spring 2016 Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry. She has received fellowships and grants from the Religion & Environment Story Project, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Her collaborative illustrated journalism has been recognized with an EPPY Award for Best use of Data/Infographics and was a finalist for the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Insight Award for Visual Journalism. Martha’s work has appeared in Orion, Oxford American, The Guardian, Grist, Guernica, The Bitter Southerner, ProPublica, and elsewhere.
ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER:
Josina Guess is an assistant editor at Sojourners Magazine. Her essays, book reviews, features, and profiles are also in The Bitter Southerner, Oxford American, Fourth Genre, Ecotone, Christian Century, and more. She is a contributor to Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience in a Time of Pandemic edited by Valerie Boyd, Lookout Books, 2022. Guess is a winner of the 2022 Georgia Writers Association John Lewis Writing Grant, the 2022 Nancy and Randall Burkett Award for Research in Black Print Culture in the Stuart A. Rose Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University, and is a 2023 graduate of the low residency narrative nonfiction MFA program and host of Hear-Tell, a podcast of the University of Georgia Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. She lives near Athens, Georgia, with her husband, their four children, and several goats, chickens, cats, and dogs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
When Martha Park’s father announces he is retiring from the ministry after forty-two years, she moves home to Memphis to attend his United Methodist church for his last year in the pulpit. She hopes to encounter a more certain sense of herself as secular or religious. Instead, she becomes increasingly compelled by her uncertainty, and grows curious whether doubt itself could be a kind of faith that more closely echoes a world marked by loss, beauty, and constant change. In illustrated essays, World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After explores the intersections of faith, motherhood, and the climate crisis across the South. From man-made wetlands in Arkansas to conservation cemeteries in South Carolina, from a full-scale replica of Noah’s Ark in Kentucky to the reenactment of the Scopes Monkey Trial, Park chronicles the ways the faith in which she was raised now seems like an exception to the rule, exploring this divide with compassion and empathy. For fans of Margaret Renkl and Lisa Wells, World Without End considers the ways religion shapes how we understand and interact with the world—and how faith can compel us all to work to save the places we love.
ABOUT ATHICA:
ATHICA: Athens Institute for Contemporary Art is an independent, non-profit gallery promoting and supporting innovative contemporary art and artists through exhibitions, education, and events.
For more information, go to the Avid Bookshop website.