The Oxford American is excited to kick off its new South Words series tonight (October 15) with Sarah M. Broom, author of The Yellow House.

Moderating the discussion is the 2019-2020 OA Jeff Baskin Fellow, KaToya Ellis Fleming. Doors to the Ron Robinson Theater open at 6 PM, and there will be a book signing after the reading.

This special event is free and open to the public.

The Presenting Sponsor is the UCA College of Fine Arts and Communication, and the reading series is presented in partnership with the Central Arkansas Library System’s Six Bridges Book Festival. Additional season partners include the Clinton School of Public Service, Arkansas Arts Council, Division of Arkansas Heritage, and Villa Vue at SoMa.

Sarah M. Broom is a writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Oxford American, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. A native New Orleanian, she received her Masters in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. She was awarded a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2016 and was a finalist for the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction in 2011. She has also been awarded fellowships at Djerassi Resident Artists Program and The MacDowell Colony. She lives in New York State. Her novel The Yellow House is a brilliant, haunting and unforgettable memoir from a remarkable new talent about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a shotgun house in New Orleans East.

KaToya Ellis Fleming is the recipient of the 2019-2020 Oxford American Jeff Baskin Writers Fellowship. She is a Georgia native with a BA in English from Spelman College and an MFA in Narrative Nonfiction Writing from the University of Georgia. Her work focuses on race and culture in the American South.