Pulitzer Prize-winning Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. is author of the best-selling novels Before I Forget and Freeman, the memoir Becoming Dad, and Forward From This Moment: Selected Columns, all of which have been released by Bolden—the African-American imprint of Agate, based in Evanston. The significance of such an accomplished author continuing to publish with a small independent press isn’t lost on Agate founder Doug Seibold. “When a writer like Leonard says I want to stay with you and keep working with you, it’s really important,” he says. On October 13, Pitts’s latest Bolden title hits shelves. Grant Park is a suspenseful novel about a newspaper columnist who’s abducted by white supremacists after posting a subversive column (against his editors’ wishes). The narrative jumps between Martin Luther King’s final days in Memphis in 1968 and the eve of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential election.
Pitts reads Wed 10/14, 6 PM, Harold Washington Library, 400 S. State, 312-747-4300, chipublib.org, free.