United States of Rejection: Alison Kinney with Anjali Enjeti

Join us for an evening with Alison Kinney to celebrate the release of her book, United States of Rejection: A Story of Love, Hate, and Hope, an exploration of real-life, relatable rejections through reporting and lively storytelling. She'll be in conversation with Anjali Enjeti. This event is free and open to the public, but registration is requested.

This event will take place at Decatur Library after the library has closed for the day. Please enter through the Ground Floor, rear doors (from the lower level of the parking lot).

About the Book: This is a love-hate story about personal and political relationships in the United States, told through the intimate stories of both the rejectors and the rejected: lovers, families, neighbors, and a nation and its people. Although we’re taught not to care about others’ opinions, rejection always hurts, and it hurts some people a lot more than others. To prove it, this book marshals contemporary neuroscience, the Founding Fathers’ rejection advice, and four centuries of personal narratives, many of them hilarious, many more heartbreaking. These rejection and acceptance stories span loving and disastrous American first encounters, soldiers and dancers rejected on front lines and chorus lines, playground bullies invoked before the Senate, and generations of lovers and patriots battling or swiping right to defend their loved ones and their country. Abraham Lincoln wrote, “The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more evil, than of good.” But rejection is often unjust, often deserved, and unusually complicated, depending on who’s rejecting whom and why. In laboratories, diaries, self-help manuals, auditions, lawsuits, and wars, we find models for “getting past” rejections, not just through personal resilience, but also through creating accountability and justice. United States of Rejection begins with heartbreak and ends with hope: an urgent self-improvement program for changing our relationships and the future of our messy nation.

About the Author: Alison Kinney is the author of three nonfiction books: United States of Rejection: A Story of Love, Hate, and Hope, a cultural history of personal and political rejection and acceptance in our nation; Hood; and Avidly Reads Opera. Her writing on culture, history, the arts, and social justice has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, The Guardian, The New York Times, Lapham's Quarterly, Harper's, and other publications. She teaches creative nonfiction at Eugene Lang College, The New School.

About the Conversation Partner: Anjali Enjeti is the award-winning author of The Parted Earth and Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change. Her third book, Ballot, describes voting and voting rights from her perspective as a Georgia voter, poll worker, and electoral organizer, who has volunteered for the campaigns of Jon Ossoff, Stacey Abrams, Reverend Raphael Warnock, and others. Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Harper's Bazaar, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing in the MFA programs at Antioch University in Los Angeles and Reinhardt University in Waleska, Georgia.