* At the request of the presenter, masks are recommended at this event and will be provided at the door.*

Celebrate the release of American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life with author Jennifer Lunden, in conversation with Jane Brox. Praised by the Washington Post as “[a] rigorous cultural critique…compelling, detailed, and absorbing,” this wide-ranging, genre-crossing literary mystery interweaves Lunden’s quest to understand the source of her own condition with her telling of the story of the chronically ill 19th-century diarist Alice James—ultimately uncovering the many hidden health hazards of life in America.

Copies of the book will be available for sale (cash/check only) and signing by the author, courtesy of Gulf of Maine Books.

Jennifer Lunden is an author, poet, Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW), and former therapist. She is the recipient of the 2019 Maine Arts Fellowship for literary arts and the 2016 Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholarship in Nonfiction. Lunden, a dual citizen, has also been awarded three grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, one from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and fellowships from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, Monson Arts, Hewnoaks, and the Dora Maar House in the south of France.

Jane Brox’s fifth book, Silence, was selected as an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times Book Review and received the Maine Literary Award for Nonfiction.  Her previous book, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2010 by Time magazine.  She is also the author of Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm; Five Thousand Days Like This One, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction; and Here and Nowhere Else, which won the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Brox has received the New England Book Award for nonfiction, and her essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies including Best American Essays, The Norton Book of Nature Writing, The Georgia Review and NewYorker.com.  She has been awarded grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Maine Arts Commission. She lives in Brunswick, Maine.