Hybrid Event: United States of Rejection, Alison Kinney

Note on Format: This hybrid event will have both an in-person component with limited seating as well as a virtual broadcast via Zoom Webinar. Both in-person and virtual attendees will be able to pose questions to the author during audience Q&A.

Pre-order your copy of United States of Rejection for the event in Eventbrite check-out as an add-on to your ticket.

ABOUT UNITED STATES OF REJECTION

This is a love-hate story about personal and political relationships in the United States, told through the intimate stories of both the rejectors and the rejected: lovers, families, neighbors, and a nation and its people. Although we’re taught not to care about others’ opinions, rejection always hurts, and it hurts some people a lot more than others. To prove it, this book marshals contemporary neuroscience, the Founding Fathers’ rejection advice, and four centuries of personal narratives, many of them hilarious, many more heartbreaking. These rejection and acceptance stories span loving and disastrous American first encounters, soldiers and dancers rejected on front lines and chorus lines, playground bullies invoked before the Senate, and generations of lovers and patriots battling or swiping right to defend their loved ones and their country.

Abraham Lincoln wrote, "The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more evil, than of good." But rejection is often unjust, often deserved, and unusually complicated, depending on who’s rejecting whom and why.

In laboratories, diaries, self-help manuals, auditions, lawsuits, and wars, we find models for getting past rejections, not just through personal resilience, but also through creating accountability and justice.United States of Rejection begins with heartbreak and ends with hope: an urgent self-improvement program for changing our relationships and the future of our messy nation.

Alison Kinney is the author of United States of Rejection: A Story of Love, Hate & Hope and two other nonfiction books. Her writing on cultural history, politics, the arts, and social justice has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, Lapham’s Quarterly, The New York Times, and other publications. She teaches creative nonfiction at Eugene Lang College at The New School.

Bridget Todd is an author, creator, host, and producer who crafts compelling digital content at the intersection of technology, culture, and identity. A proud Washington DC native, Bridget also co-hosts City Cast DC, a daily podcast about news and culture in the District. A trusted voice in technology, Bridget has worked directly with platforms like Reddit, Twitter, Meta, and TikTok to champion safety, equity, and meaningful representation online. Her work on technology, race, and gender has been featured in outlets like The Atlantic, Newsweek, The Nation, and The Daily Show. Bridget is a Technology in the Public Interest Fellow at the MacArthur Foundation, and an affiliate at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. You can pre-order her forthcoming audiobook, Love at First Prompt, through libro.fm here.