Time: Doors open at 6:00pm, event starts at 7:00pm
Location: Open Book, Target Performance Hall, 1011 South Washington Avenue
Book launch celebration for This Is Where I Am: A Memoir by Zeke Caligiuri
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Prison is where Zeke Caligiuri is. Powderhorn Park in South Minneapolis, dubbed “Murderapolis” the year he turned eighteen, is where he comes from. It was the same neighborhood his father grew up in but had changed dramatically by the early 1990s. Yet in Zeke’s family, father and mother and grandmother kept things together while all around them the houses decayed and once-safe streets gave way to the crush of poverty and crime.
This Is Where I Am is Zeke Caligiuri’s clear-eyed account of how he got from there to here, how a boy who had every hope went from dreaming of freedom to losing it, along with nearly everything and everyone he loved. Tenderhearted in its reflections on his lost childhood, brutally candid in its description of a life of hanging and hustling, Zeke’s memoir recreates a world of tagging and goofing gone awry, of moving from smoking pot to unsuccessful attempts at dealing crack, of watching his father weep at the funeral of a seventeen-year-old boy, of going to jail: first strike. It is a place where, when asked what he's going to do with his life, a friend can only answer: “What the fuck are you talking about?”
This Is Where I Am is Zeke's own answer: he is going to tell his story, every sharp detail and sobering word, with the natural grace of a gifted writer and the hard-won wisdom of hindsight.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Zeke Caligiuri is the recipient of several awards through the annual PEN Prison Writing Contest. His work has been published in the collection Prison Noir, edited by Joyce Carol Oates; From Education to Incarceration: Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline; and From the Inside Out: Letters to Young Men and Other Writings. He is incarcerated at the Faribault Correctional Facility in Minnesota, where he continues to write.
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