All are invited to the first LitMarquette event of the spring semester, a celebration and reading of Amina Gautier’s award-winning new book, “The Best That You Can Do.” The event will be held Thursday, Feb. 1, from 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. in the 707 Hub.
Gautier is the 2023-24 AMUW Women’s Chair in Humanistic Studies and an associate professor of English at the University of Miami. She is a scholar of 19th-century American literature and an award-winning fiction writer.
“The Best You Can Do” is a collection of short stories that elaborate the realities of a diasporic existence, split identities, and the beautiful potency of meaningful connections. Primarily told from the perspective of women and children in the Northeast who are tethered to fathers and families in Puerto Rico, these stories explore the cultural confusion of being one person in two places — of having a mother who wants your father and his language to stay on his island but sends you there because you need to know your family.
“Winner of the 2023 Soft Skull-Kimbilio Publishing Prize, Amina Gautier brings an incredible attention to the interior lives of her characters,” wrote Michael Welch of the Chicago Review of Books. “Her work is consistently filled with moments of nostalgia and discontent, as she refuses to shy away from the problems of individual and collective displacement.”
