Join us TONIGHT at 7:00pm in room L160 of the Chazen Museum's Elvehjem Building (800 University Ave, Madison) for a reading and Q&A with Ayana Mathis, reading from her novel The Twelve Tribes of Hattie.

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is a New York Times best-selling novel and a 2012 Oprah's Book Club 2.0 selection, about which Marilynne Robinson writes, "The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is a vibrant and compassionate portrait of a family hardened and scattered by circumstance and yet deeply a family. Its language is elegant in its purity and rigor. The characters are full of life, mingled thing that it is, and dignified by the writer's judicious tenderness towards them. This first novel is a work of rare maturity."

In her New York Times review, Michiko Kakutani similarly writes, "Ms. Mathis has a gift for imbuing her characters' stories with an epic dimension that recalls Toni Morrison's writing, and her sense of time and place and family will remind some of Louise Erdrich, but her elastic voice is thoroughly her own—both lyrical and unsparing, meditative and visceral, and capable of giving the reader nearly complete access to her characters' minds and hearts."

Don't miss this reading! To learn more about the event, visit our Facebook page!  To learn more about Ayana, here is a Q&A with her.