Veronica Chambers at Patrick F. Daly Magnet School for the Arts

At 6 p.m. on Monday, April 8th, author Veronica Chambers, best known for her 1997 memoir Mama’s Girl, will be speaking in the library at P.S. 15, Patrick F. Daly Magnet School for the Arts, located at 71 Sullivan Street. Hosted by Friends of P.S. 15, the event is free and open to the public. Chambers, born in Panama, was raised in Brooklyn.

Her memoir Mama’s Girl is set on the streets of Chambers’s 1970s Brooklyn and examines her close relationship with her mother along with her experience and identity as Afro-Latina. The New Yorker called Mama’s Girl “a troubling testament to grit and mother love… one of the finest and most evenhanded in the genre in recent years.” Chambers, a prolific writer, has written and collaborated on books covering a variety of topics from slavery to Japanese geishas. She has also published books specifically for teens and children. Additionally, she has written a novel, Miss Black America, and worked with Robin Roberts on her memoir, Everybody’s Got Something.

Most recently, she edited The Meaning of Michelle, which was named a top-ten nonfiction book of 2017 by TIME. She will be discussing three of her books: Celia Cruz, Queen of Salsa; The Go-Between; and Resist. Currently, she is a JSK Knight fellow at Stanford University.