Sonora Jha with Ijeoma Oluo
We are delighted to be helping with this publication launch of Seattle writer and professor Sonora Jha, this evening with her much-anticipated book (see Rebecca Solnit’s description below), How to Raise a Feminist Son: Motherhood, Masculinity, and the Making of My Family (Sasquatch). Making this even more of an occasion is that she will be joined on conversation by award-winning, bestselling Seattle author Ijeoma Oluo, author of So You Want to Talk About Race and the more recent, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, and herself knowledgeable on the subject at hand in Sonora Jha’s new book. For Sonora Jha, who was raised in Mumbai and worked as a journalist in Singapore before coming to Seattle, where she is a professor of journalism at Seattle University, this also marks her U.S. publishing debut. Her excellent novel, Foreign (which Elliott Bay carries), was published to high praise in India.
“You can’t punish your way to a more feminist world, I’ve long believed; you have to create, encourage, invent that world, especially in how you raise kids, but that’s only one reason Sonora Jha’s book is exhilarating and inspiring. It’s a beautiful hybrid of memoir, manifesto, instruction manual, and rumination on the power of story and possibilities of family. I can’t wait to put it in the hands of everyone raising kids or thinking about how we do it and how it could be different.” —Rebecca Solnit.
And Ijeoma Oluo, herself: “In How to Raise a Feminist Son, Jha weaves her own fascinating, sometimes heartbreaking, and always beautiful story of raising her own feminist son with careful research, insightful interviews, and helpful advice. There were countless times in reading this book where I found myself reevaluating things I had told my own sons and setting new goals for things I would teach them in the future. True love sees you for who you are, and true love holds you to account when you fall short of who you can be, because true love knows what you are capable of. This book is a true love letter, not only to Jha’s own son but also to all of our sons and to the parents–especially mothers–who raise them.”
Presented by Town Hall Arts & Culture in partnership with Elliott Bay Book Company.
