Join us for this virtual author talk where Ingrid and Lupi ta will discuss the inspiration for Ingrid's memoir \;The Man Who Could Move Clouds\, \;longlisted \;for the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction and Time Best Book of the Summer.
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\n\n< p> \; \;\nAbout the Author
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Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá\;\, Colombia. Her d ebut novel \;Fruit of the Drunken Tree \;was the silver m edal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards and a \;N ew York Times \;editor's choice. Her essays and short stories have app eared in the \;New York Times Magazine\, \;The Believer\, and \;Zyzzyva\, among others.
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\nAbout the Book
\nFor Ingrid Rojas Contreras\, magic r uns in the family. Raised amid the political violence of the 1980s and '90 s Colombia\, in a house bustling with her mother's fortune-telling clients \, she was a hard child to surprise. Her maternal grandfather\, Nono\, was a renowned curandero\, a community healer gifted with what the family cal led "the secrets": the power to talk to the dead\, tell the future\, treat the sick\, and move the clouds. And as the first woman to inherit "the se crets\," Rojas Contreras' mother was just as powerful. Mami delighted in h er ability to appear in two places at once\, and she could cast out even t he most persistent spirits with nothing more than a glass of water.
\n< p>This legacy had always felt like it belonged to her mother and grandfath er\, until\, while living in the U.S. in her twenties\, Rojas Contreras su ffered a head injury that left her with amnesia. As she regained partial m emory\, her family was excited to tell her that this had happened before: Decades ago Mami had taken a fall that left her with amnesia\, too. And wh en she recovered\, she had gained access to "the secrets."\nIn 2012 \, spurred by a shared dream among Mami and her sisters\, and her own powe rful urge to relearn her family history in the aftermath of her memory los s\, Rojas Contreras joins her mother on a journey to Colombia to disinter Nono's remains. With Mami as her unpredictable\, stubborn\, and often amus ing guide\, Rojas Contreras traces her lineage back to her Indigenous and Spanish roots\, uncovering the violent and rigid colonial narrative that w ould eventually break her mestizo family into two camps: those who believe "the secrets" are a gift\, and those who are convinced they are a curse.< /p>\n
Interweaving family stories more enchanting than those in any nove l\, resurrected Colombian history\, and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality\, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the i ncomprehensible and into her inheritance. The result is a luminous testame nt to the power of storytelling as a healing art and an invitation to embr ace the extraordinary.
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\nAbout the Moderator
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