Debut author Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn who will discuss and sign her new memoir: Loose of Earth. Blackburn will be in conversation with local author and poet Karin Anderson. This in-person event is open to the public and will take place at the bookshop.
Registration is required for this free event. Reserve your spot on Eventbrite here.
Copies of the book will be available to purchase at the event. You may also pre-order your signed copy of Loose of Earth to pick up at the event by either calling the store at 801-484-9100 or ordering online. If you cannot make this event, signed copies of Loose of Earth may be ordered from our website. Please specify in the comments if you would like your copy personalized. Places in the signing line are reserved for those who purchase a copy from The King's English.
About the book:
Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn was the oldest of five children, a twelve-year-old from Lubbock, Texas, whose evangelical family eschewed public education for homeschooling, and wove improbable scientific theories into literal interpretations of the Bible. Then her father, a former air force pilot, was diagnosed with cancer at the age of thirty-eight, and, “it was like throwing gasoline on the Holy Spirit.” Stirred by her mother, the family committed to an extreme diet and sought deliverance from equally extreme sources: a traveling tent preacher, a Malaysian holy man, a local faith-healer who led services called “Miracles on 34th Street.”
What they didn’t know at the time was that their lives were entangled with a larger, less visible environmental catastrophe. Fire-fighting foams containing carcinogenic compounds had contaminated the drinking water of every military site where her father worked. Commonly referred to as “forever chemicals,” the presence of PFAS in West Texas besieged a landscape already burdened with vanishing water, taking up residence in wells and in the bloodstreams of people who lived there. An arresting portrait of the pernicious creep of decline, and a powerful cry for environmental justice, Loose of Earth captures the desperate futility and unbending religious faith that devastated a family, leaving them waiting for a miracle that would never come.
