Notes on Her Color: A Novel (Virtual)

One of Electric Literature’s “Books by Women of Color to Read This Year” and one of Goodreads’ “A Buzziest Debut Novel of the Year”, this debut novel swirls Florida kitsch with magical realism. Notes on Her Color is a lushly written story about Gabrielle, a young Black and Indigenous woman who learns to change the color of her skin. Having inherited that ability from her mother, she is told by her mother to pass into white. But this vital mother-daughter bond implodes when her mother is hospitalized for a mental health crisis. Separated from her mother for the first time in her life, Gabrielle must learn to control the temperamental shifts in her color on her own. Following her journey to a world beyond her family’s carefully-coded existence, this haunting tale shows how love, in its best sense, can be a liberating force from destructive origins. 

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Copies of Notes on Her Color are available for purchase through the Mark Twain Store; proceeds benefit The Mark Twain House & Museum. Books will be shipped after the event. We regret that we are NOT able to ship books outside the United States as it is cost-prohibitive to do so. 

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About the Author: Jennifer Neal is an American-Australian author, artist, and occasional stand-up comedian. She is a graduate of The Florida State University, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She has written for NPR, Playboy, Gay Magazine, The Cut, The Root, and many other publications. She is a MacDowell Fellow and a Pushcart Prize-nominated essayist. She lives in Berlin (for now) where she works as a freelance producer and translator. 

About the Moderator: Vivian Nabeta began her professional career at Hartford Stage, a two-time Tony award winning regional theater, and has since gone on to work for other nationally and internationally known arts and culture organizations such as the Amistad Center for Arts & Culture, and the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. She now serves as the Director of Marketing and Public Relations at Capital Community College in Hartford, CT. Vivian has a Bachelor of Arts in Theater Studies from the University of Connecticut and a Master of Arts in American Studies from Trinity College. 

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Programs at The Mark Twain House & Museum are made possible in part by support from CT Humanities; the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development, Office of the Arts; Ensworth Charitable Foundation, Bank of America, N.A., Trustee; the Greater Hartford Arts Council’s United Arts Campaign; The Hartford; The Mark Twain Foundation; The National Endowment for the Humanities; and Travelers.