Madison BookBeat host Stu Levitan welcomes National Book Award- winner Sarah M. Broom, author of The Yellow House, just out in a new paperback edition from Grove Atlantic. Her new virtual book tour starts tomorrow night at 7 in a Crowdcast conversation presented by our friends at the Wisconsin Book Festival.

{MUSIC – Ellis Marsalis}

Ellis Marsalis, of blessed memory, and his eldest son Branford, at the WWOZ Piano Night last April, asking the musical question, “Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?”

But what does it mean to be from New Orleans? Indeed, what does it mean to be from anywhere? And what does it mean when the place you’re from no longer exists?

In 1961, a 19-yo New Orleanian widow named Ivory Soule Webb, eight months pregnant with her third child, bought a camelback shotgun house at 4121 Wilson Avenue in the sprawling new development known as New Orleans East, seven miles but a world away from the fabled French Quarter. Ivory Mae and her second husband Simon Broom moved in with their blended family in 1964, and had some kids of their own. They named the twelfth and final child, born in the final hours of 1979, Sarah Monique.

The house eventually acquired new yellow siding, but inside was never finished and in constant disrepair, especially after Simon died just six months after Sarah was born. The house survived Hurricane Betsy in 1965, but would not last long after the water of Katrina and the federal flood forty years later.

What that house meant to one family, and what its loss means to the entire country, is the business that occupies Sarah M. Broom in her extraordinary debut, The Yellow House. Part narrative nonfiction, part memoir, it is also a profound meditation on race, place and class.  Published to enthusiastic, almost ecstatic acclaim last summer, it has enjoyed many printings and garnered Sarah the aforementioned National Book Award for Nonfiction and the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle.

Sarah M. Broom received her undergraduate degree in anthropology and mass communications from the University of North Texas and a Master’s degree in Journalism from UC-Berkeley. She’s been a newspaper and magazine journalist from Rhode Island to Hong Kong, an editor at the Oprah Magazine, has taught nonfiction at Columbia University, worked for the mayor of New Orleans and a radio station in Burundi and as Executive Director of the global nonprofit, Village Health Works. She is married to the film director Dee Rees, with homes in Harlem and the Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans.

It is a pleasure and a privilege to welcome to Madison BookBeat, National Book Award-winner Sarah M. Broom