Boston Book Festival Announces Its 2015 ‘One City, One Story’ Selection
Photo by Boston Book Festival on Flickr
Boston Book Festival organizers have announced “Home Movie” by Jennifer De Leon as their selection for this year’s “One City One Story,” an annual attempt to unite the city through a shared reading experience.
As in previous years, the short story will be distributed for free at various places around Boston, including Boston Public Library branches, bookstores, community organizations, cultural events, and Dunkin’ Donuts locations. It will be available in print in both English and Spanish. Online, people will be able to download English, Russian, Mandarin, and Portuguese versions.
“As a daughter of Guatemalan immigrants, I’m glad to expand the Boston Book Festival further into the Latin community. Ours is a culture of storytelling and story celebrating, so I feel honored to be part of that tradition on such a wide scale,” says De Leon, who was born in the Boston area, in a press release. “The fact that stories will be printed in Spanish is icing on the cake.”
De Leon, who teaches at local creative writing center GrubStreet and the Boston Teachers Union School in Jamaica Plain, also received the Boston Public Library’s Children’s Writer-in-Residence fellowship earlier this month.
“Home Movie,” first published in 2012 in The Briar Cliff Review, touches upon themes of immigration, home, and memory, as told through the story of two immigrants, a husband and wife.
Readers are encouraged to participate in a town hall-style discussion with De Leon at the upcoming Boston Book Festival in October.
Copies of “Home Movie” will be available in late August. A full list of locations will be posted on bostonbookfest.org. The 2015 Boston Book Festival takes place October 23-24 at Copley Square.
