Join The Muse Writers Center for a virtual reading and Q&A with author Joanna Eleftheriou, moderated by Muse teacher Dana Staves. This event will be held live on Zoom and a recording will be available on the Muse YouTube channel afterwards.

Register to attend the Zoom webinar.

In this winning and contemplative collection, Eleftheriou considers her divided self in a variety of ways… A fine collection of essays on identity, at once wide-ranging and site-specific.

—Kirkus Reviews

About the author: Joanna Eleftheriou is the author of This Way Back. She has published essays and poems in Arts & Letters, Assay, Bellingham Review, and Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology from Middle America. She lives in Newport News and teaches at Christopher Newport University and the Writing Workshops in Greece. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram as @joannaessayist.

About the book: Going back to her ancestral homeland, a Greek American girl discovers she is a lesbian in love with God, so her questions about home and belonging will not be easily answered.

This Way Back dramatizes a childhood split between Queens, New York, and Cyprus, an island nation with a long colonial history and a culture to which Joanna Eleftheriou could never quite adjust. The book avows a Greek-Cypriot- American lesbian’s existence by documenting its scenes: reenacting an 1829 mass suicide by jumping off a school stage onto gym mats at St. Nicholas, harvesting carobs on ancestral land, purchasing UNESCO-protected lace, marching in the island’s first gay pride parade, visiting Cyprus’s occupied north against a dying father’s wish, and pruning geraniums, cypress trees, and jasmine after her father grew too weak to lift the shears. While the author’s life binds the essays in This Way Back into what reads like a memoir, the book questions memoir’s conventional boundaries between the individual and her community, and between political and personal loss, the human and the environment, and the living and the dead.

Please note: This class or event will be held online (using Zoom or a similar live platform). To participate, students or attendees should have a stable internet connection. Class participants: you should have a computer or device with a webcam and microphone; and your Zoom link will be automatically sent to you after you register. Check your spam box if you don't see it.