As part of of our PEN-demonium series on writing, join local author Amy Kolen as she discusses her new book, Inside Voices: A Prison Choir, My Mother, and Me, about how volunteering with a prison choir gave her the tools she needed to care and advocate for her mother, who was recovering from a stroke and approaching the end of her life. She'll be in conversation with fellow local author, John "Jack" Vernon. After their conversation, we'll show the award-winning documentary, The Inside Singers, about the choir. The documentary was produced, filmed, and edited by Amy's son, Daniel.

About Inside Voices: For fifteen months Amy Kolen traveled between two very different worlds: a medium-security men’s prison, where she participated as an outside singer in the prison choir, and the confines of her mother’s room in a health center, where her mother required round-the-clock care following a massive stroke. The author realizes the limits of her turbulent relationship with her mother, Lillian, while navigating her new role as an initially reluctant advocate for a woman with a diminished voice. At the same time, she welcomes the community within the prison walls as a place of acceptance and freedom. Working with the inside singers provides the expanding perspective she needs to approach her mother in a new light, eventually finding self-affirmation, clarity, and grace during the final fifteen months of Lillian’s life. Told with unflinching honesty, Inside Voices speaks to our longing for human connection and is a testament to how embracing new experiences with “beginner's mind” can deepen understanding and bring inner peace.

About Amy Kolen: Amy Kolen’s essays have been published in several anthologies, including Best American Essays, 2002. Her work has also appeared in various publications, including Orion Magazine, The Missouri Review, Bayou, The Massachusetts Review, and The Florida Review, and has been shortlisted in Best American Essays, 2009. Holding an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa, she sang with the Oakdale Community Choir for four years.

About John Vernon: John Vernon is a novelist, memoirist and critic whose novels have explored both real and imagined signature moments in American history, from John Wesley Powell’s 1869 voyage of discovery through the Grand Canyon in The Last Canyon, to an 1872 confab between the mother and father of American poetry, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, in Peter Doyle, to Billy the Kid’s 1881 escape from the Lincoln County jail in Lucky Billy, to Baby Doe Tabor’s years of exile in a Leadville, Colorado mining shack in All for Love: Baby Doe and Silver Dollar.  Two of his books have been named New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and he has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts grants.  His work has appeared in Harper’s, Poetry, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times, and many other magazines, journals and newspapers.

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