Ingrid Rojas Contreras: The Man Who Could Move Clouds

In-person & virtual author event
* Friday, March 31, 1:00 pm

In conversation with Margo Candela

Join us in person or on Zoom to hear National Book Award Finalist Ingrid Rojas Contreras talk about her new memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds. She’ll be in conversation with fellow acclaimed local writer Margo Candela, author of The Neapolitan Sisters.

“Rojas Contreras reacquaints herself with her family’s past, weaving their stories with personal narrative, unraveling legacies of violence, machismo and colonialism… In the process, she has written a spellbinding and genre-defying ancestral history.”—New York Times Book Review.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor’s choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Buzzfeed, Nylon, and Guernica, among others.

Margo Candela was born and raised in Los Angeles and began her writing career when she joined Glendale Community College’s student newspaper. She transferred to San Francisco State University as a journalism major, and upon graduation began writing for websites and magazines before writing her first two novels, Underneath It All and Life Over Easy. She returned to Los Angeles to raise her son and wrote More Than This and Goodbye to All That. The Neapolitan Sisters is her fifth novel and her first after a decade-long hiatus from writing. She now lives in San Francisco.

The Neapolaton Sisters – Three sisters. Three vastly different lives. A maelstrom of family secrets. For fans of María Amparo Escandón and Laurie Frankel, Margo Candela pens a riotous, provocative tale of family and sisterhood. Growing up with a kind but alcoholic father and a suspicious, passive aggressive mother, the Bernal  sisters each developed their own way of coping: Dulcina had her art and drugs and alcohol, Claudia plunged into her studies and fled to Princeton, and Maritza watched one Disney movie after another in between devouring romance novels.

Told in alternating points of view, The Neapolitan Sisters is a humorous yet moving look at what it means to be a sister, daughter, and ultimately, your own self, despite the pressures that come with being part of a family.

Academic Center (AC) 255, in the center of the campus near College of Marin Library. Free refreshments. Great vibe. Several lucky winners will go home with a free autographed copy of the book!

We wish we could say we scheduled Ms. Rojas Contreras’ appearance on purpose this way, but it is just a happy coincidence: the event is on Cesar Chavez Day! What better way to celebrate the life of the great Latinx labor leader? He would have been 96 on this day.

Join us for this eighth season of the ESCOM Friday Author Series, an inter-generational, warmhearted  gathering: the audience is always a wonderful mix of Emeritus Students of College of Marin, College of Marin students of all ages, and members of the public. All we need to make it perfect: you.