One Book One Community 2021

The East Baton Rouge Parish Library’s fifteenth annual "One Book One Community" parish-wide reading celebration brings its literary selection close to home this year, focusing on a pair of powerful stories authored by New Orleans natives and set in and around the Crescent City.

In her National Book Award-winning memoir, The Yellow House, Sarah M. Broom conflates her familial history with the home in which it took place, transposing the experiences of the house's occupants against the backdrop of her once-promising New Orleans East neighborhood. Simultaneously, Broom's story invites readers into the complicated, often corrupt history of the city itself, during the decades leading up to and post-Hurricane Katrina. In an interview, Broom said, “A book is like a house; it needs a support, structure, beams, entrances and exits, all these layers of construction and form.” In this way, Broom expands the capacity of the memoir genre. 

Author Margaret Wilkerson Sexton is also exploring the evolution of racial tensions in the city across generations in her 2019 bestselling novel The Revisioners. The story centers upon the relationship between two Black women who, though they live more than a century apart, are connected by their shared blood and experiences. 

Both works place Black life at the center of their stories, grounded by familial lineage and a sense of place. In both fiction and nonfiction forms, characters reckon with race, class, and generational trauma; through this layered interrogation of cultural and collective memory, each narrative presents the context necessary for an accurate historical understanding of the past in the absence of reliable archives. 

Read the books, then get ready to join a much-anticipated in-person talk with both authors, which will be held at the Main Library on May 15, giving patrons the opportunity to hear from two of the most prominent voices in literature. For more information on "One Book One Community" and the full schedule of events at library branches across the parish, visit ebrpl.com or readonebook.org.