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Meet Author Linda Kass in conversation with Kelly Fishman

Join us when author Linda Kass visits to discuss her new book, Bessie, with Kelly Fishman of the Anti-Defamation League.

About the author:

Linda Kass began her career as a magazine writer and correspondent for regional and national publications. Her work has previously appeared in TIME, The Detroit Free Press, Columbus Monthly, and, more recently, Full Grown People, The MacGuffin, and Kenyon Review Online. She is the author of the historical World War II novel Tasa’s Song (2016) and is the founder and owner of Gramercy Books, an independent bookstore in central Ohio.

In Bessie, just days after the close of World War II, Bess Myerson—, the college-educated daughter of poor Russian Jewish immigrants living in the Bronx—, is competing in the Miss America pageant. At stake: a $5,000 scholarship. The tension and excitement in Atlantic City’s Warner Theatre is palpable, especially for traumatized Jews rooting for one of their own. So begins Bessie.

Drawing on biographical and historical sources, Bessie reimagines the early life of Bess Myerson, who, in 1945 at age twenty-one, remarkably rises to become one of the most famous women in America. This intimate fictional portrait reveals the transformation of the nearly six-foot-tall, self-deprecating yet talented preteen into an exemplar of beauty—, a peripheral quality in her world, where success is measured by intellectual attainment. Yet it is the focus on her beauty, and the secular world of pageantry, that she must choose to escape her roots and fulfill her fierce desire to achieve and become someone for whom great things happen.

Linda Kass will be in conversation with Kelly Fishman, the Regional Director for the Anti-Defamation League’s Cleveland office serving Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, & Western Pennsylvania. In addition to her work now at ADL, she is also currently working on her Doctor of Education degree in diversity and equity in education through the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and writing a chapter for a freshman DEI textbook for West Virginia University. 

Books will be available for purchase courtesy of Mac's Backs - Books on Coventry.