Join the Library and Loyalty Bookstores fo r a special conversation with Princeton University's Laurence Ralph for his new book Sito: An American Teenager and t he City that Failed Him. In conversation with poet and author Clint Smith\, Ralph will discuss this new account o f the lived experience of urban danger\, and about anger\, fear\, grief\, vengeance\, and ultimately grace.
\nCopies of the book will be avail able for sale and signing. A limited number of copies of the book will be available for free courtesy of the DC Public Library Foundation. \;
\nA riveting and heart-wrenching story of violence\, grief and the American justice system\, exploring the systemic issues tha t perpetuate gang participation in one of the wealthiest cities in the cou ntry\, through the story of one teenager. \;
\nIn September of 2 019\, Luis Alberto Quiñ\;onez&mdash\;known as Sito&mdash\; was shot to death as he sat in his car in the Mission District of San Francisco. He was nineteen. His killer\, Julius Williams\, was seventeen. It was the se cond time the teens had encountered one another. The first\, five years be fore\, also ended in tragedy\, when Julius watched as his brother was stab bed to death by an acquaintance of Sito&rsquo\;s. The two murders merited a few local news stories\, and then the rest of the world moved on.
\n< p>But for the families of the slain teenagers\, it was impossible to move on. And for Laurence Ralph\, the stepfather of Sito&rsquo\;s half-brother who had dedicated much of his academic career to studying gang-affiliated youth\, Sito&rsquo\;s murder forced him to revisit a subject of scholarly inquiry in a profoundly different\, deeply personal way.Laurence Ralph \;is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University\, where he is the Direc tor for the Center on Transnational Policing. Before that\, he was a tenur ed professor at Harvard University for eight years. He is the author of&nb sp\;Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago \;(2014 ) and \;The Torture Letters: Reckoning With Police Violence \;(202 0)\, both published by University of Chicago Press. He is currently a Gugg enheim Fellow\, a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study\, a nd a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton\; he has also been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim National Science Fo undation\, the Carnegie Corporation\, and the Ford Foundation. He lives in Princeton\, New Jersey with his wife and daughter. \;
\nClint Smith is the #1 New York Times bestsellin g author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slaver y Across America\, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for No nfiction\, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism\, the Stowe Prize\, the D ayton Literary Peace Prize\, and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2021. He is also the author of two books of poetry\, the New York Times bestselling collection Above Ground and Counting Descen t\, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
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