Clifford Thompson and Susan Cheever in conversation

Clifford Thompson and Susan Cheever in conversation

By Community Bookstore

Join Clifford Thompson and Susan Cheever at Community Bookstore for a conversation on Jazz June and When All the Men Wore Hats.

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Location

Community Bookstore

143 7th Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11215

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Highlights

  • 1 hour
  • In person

About this event

Arts • Literary Arts

PLEASE NOTE THAT AN RSVP DOES NOT GUARANTEE YOU A SEAT. We can accommodate approximately 50 seated and 80 standing. Please plan to arrive early if you require a seat.

About the books:

Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in Essays traces a life, not by recounting its major events but by going deep into its representative moments: the moments of wonder, hope, fear, uncertainty, humor, love, and epiphany that make up human experience. Along the way, as a son of a widowed mother, as a young man in the big city, as a husband and father, as an aging empty nester, and as an artist, the author discovers, with each new role, more of who he is. A lover of the arts, he offers creative reflections on literature, music, and film; a Black American whose life is informed but not defined by race, he embraces Black culture while remaining defiantly himself.

In When All the Men Wore Hats, Susan Cheever looks back on her father’s work and seeks to understand the connections between art and life. How did a bit of local gossip, a slice of Greek myth, and a new translation of Madame Bovary somehow become a brilliant gem like “The Country Husband” or “The Swimmer”? In her 1984 book Home Before Dark, published two years after her father’s death, Cheever wrote movingly about her father and the secrets he kept, but here, years later, she tells the story of the remarkable stories themselves, six of which appear in full in the book’s appendix.

About the authors:

Clifford Thompson's books include What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man's Blues (2019), and Big Man and the Little Men, a graphic novel which he wrote and illustrated. His new book is Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in Essays (2025). Thompson is a painter and, since 2020, a member of Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City. His first solo show was held at Blue Mountain in the spring of 2023. For over a dozen years he served as the editor of Current Biography, and he has taught creative nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College, the Vermont College of Fine Arts, the Bennington Writing Seminars, New York University, Columbia University, Queens College, and Gotham Writers. Since 2015 he has been a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. He lives in Brooklyn.

Susan Cheever is the author of many books on American history, the most recent of which is Drinking in America: Our Secret History, published in 2015. She is also the author of numerous novels; My Name Is Bill: Bill Wilson—His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous, a biography of the Alcoholics Anonymous cofounder Bill Wilson; and Home Before Dark, a memoir about her father, John Cheever. She teaches at Bennington College and the New School in their MFA programs.

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Free
Nov 5 · 7:00 PM EST