Upcoming Events: Where You Can Find Us
Here’s a look at our upcoming online events, plus third-party event where you can find our authors and editors! [You may also view past events by using the month view and scrolling back.]
STORIES ON SUNDAY: The One Who Loves You: Growing Up Biracial in a Black and White World (Shannon Luders-Manuel)
March 30 @ 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm EDT
Enjoy a reading, then hear the story behind the stories during Stories on Sunday with Shannon Luders-Manuel author of The One Who Loves You: Growing Up Biracial in a Black and White World. (Please note the date change! This is now scheduled for 3/30)
About the Book: As a child, Shannon Luders-Manuel felt like an outsider in every environment she entered. Born to a Black father and white mother who separated when she was three, Luders-Manuel grew up with her white extended family, in largely white areas of California. Throughout her life, she yearned to understand her charismatic, transient father—whose promises were rarely kept, who struggled with alcohol and violence, and whose love she desperately needed. How could she find a place among two worlds—one white and one Black—when they felt so different?
Luders-Manuel sought guidance in Baptist religion, becoming a born-again Christian at age fourteen, and eventually found herself in an abusive relationship. When her father entered hospice care when she was just twenty-four, she became his caretaker despite their long estrangement and hoped to find connection while she still could. Instead, she learned that neither man nor God could give her the home she needed—she would have to build her own sense of self.
The One Who Loves You eloquently speaks not only to mixed-race individuals but to anyone who struggles with being labeled by others and to those who seek to reconcile the most contradictory parts of their own identities.
We hope you will join us! Note: All registered attendees will get a link to the recording, so be sure to register even if you cannot make it life.
About the Series: Stories on Sundays are bi-monthly readings from a recent/forthcoming work of creative nonfiction followed by an author interview + audience Q&A. Your registration helps fund our contributor payments and other costs associated with running our journal.
Shannon Luders-Manuel is the author of The One Who Loves You: A Memoir of Growing Up Biracial in a Black and White World, published in February 2025 by Lawrence Hill Books, an imprint of Chicago Review Press. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, JSTOR Daily, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She holds an M.A. in English literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and lives in Los Angeles.
All Stories on Sundays speakers have a connection to Hippocampus Magazine and Books; Shannon was a past scholarship recipient to our in-person conference for creative nonfiction writers, HippoCamp.
