Our fall selection of the MARCH Book Club will be Toward Camden by Mercy Romero, a profound meditation on the cultural geographies of a city and the frelationships that weave and bind that city together. During the first hour, participants will discuss the book in small groups and identify questions they would like to explore with Romero, who will join for the second half of the evening. From 6 – 7 PM Romero speak on the inspiration for, research process of, and important ideas that have emerged from writing about and in Camden before taking questions from the audience and signing books at the conclusion of the event.
Please join us on Sunday, October 6 from 5-7 PM at Rutgers–Camden, at the Campus Center in West A (lower level). Food and drink provided!
MARCH is excited to be able to offer free copies of Toward Camden for Book Club participants. Please indicate when registering if you would like a free copy and someone from MARCH will reach out to determine the best way to get your copy to you.
About Toward Camden
In Toward Camden, Mercy Romero writes about the relationships that make and sustain the largely African American and Puerto Rican Cramer Hill neighborhood in New Jersey where she grew up. She walks the city and writes outdoors to think about the collapse and transformation of property. She revisits lost and empty houses—her family’s house, the Walt Whitman House, and the landscape of a vacant lot. Throughout, Romero engages with the aesthetics of fragment and ruin; her writing juts against idioms of redevelopment. She resists narratives of the city that are inextricable from crime and decline and witnesses everyday lives lived at the intersection of spatial and Puerto Rican diasporic memory. Toward Camden travels between what official reports say and what the city’s vacant lots withhold.
About Mercy Romero
Dr. Mercy Romero is Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California Irvine. Dr. Romero’s work has been recognized by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the National Endowment for the Humanities and Ford Foundation, and by the Mellon Foundation and Flamboyan Foundation that selected Dr. Romero as one of the inaugural Letras Boricuas fellows. The centerpiece of Dr. Romero’s work is her book Toward Camden, a beautiful and thought-provoking combination of memoir and scholarly study of place that Publishers Weekly called “elegiac yet hopeful” and “full of power.” Reflecting on her own experience growing up in Camden’s Cramer Hill neighborhood, Dr. Romero thinks deeply about Camden’s place in personal and public histories and asks the reader to consider what stories might emerge if we think from the perspective of residents’ everyday lives.
Date & Time
October 6, 2024
5:00 pm-7:00 pm
Location
Campus Center
West A (Lower Level)
326 Penn St.
Camden, NJ
Admission Information
Free event. Registration required.