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A conversation with Roxana Robinson

Join us on Zoom for a conversation with author Roxana Robinson.

This event will be broadcast live on Zoom. Registration and an email address are required to receive the link to participate. 

Order your copy of Dawson's Fall from Mac’s Backs – Books on Coventry: macsbacks.com/book/9781250619662

About the author:

Roxana Robinson is the author of more than ten books, including the novels Sparta and Cost; short story collections; and the biography Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Vogue, among other publications. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and she was president of the Authors Guild from 2014 to 2017. She teaches in the Hunter College MFA program and divides her time among New York, Connecticut, and Maine.

In Dawson’s Fall, a novel based on the lives of Roxana Robinson’s great-grandparents, we see America at its most fragile, fraught, and malleable. Set in 1889, in Charleston, South Carolina, Frank Dawson attempts to navigate the country’s new political, social, and moral landscape.

Dawson, a man of fierce opinions, came to this country as a young Englishman to fight for the Confederacy in a war he understood as a conflict over states’ rights. He later became the editor of the Charleston News and Courier, finding a platform of real influence in the editorial column and emerging as a voice of the New South. As he wrangled diligently in his columns with questions of citizenship, equality, justice, and slavery, his newspaper rapidly lost readership, and he was plagued by financial worries. In the end, Dawson was felled by the very violence he vehemently opposed.