What Gigi Amateau is reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Gigi Amateau, author of Come August, Come Freedom: The Bellows, The Gallows, and The Black General Gabriel.

Her entry begins:

Oh, to choose which to share! I have five stacks of books to read in my office and a couple of different stacks upstairs. Being surrounded by books I love makes me so happy. Here are five that I’m enjoying right now:

Non-fiction: No Time to Lose: A Timely Guide to the Way of the Bodhisattva by Pema Chodron. I started reading this when I was on a writing retreat at The Porches in Norwood, Virginia earlier this summer. There is so much suffering and violence in the world and it is hard to know how to make sense of our times and, I think, it’s easy to feel like we are small and inconsequential when it comes to making things better. I’m Christian, Pema Chodron is Buddhist, and her heart has something important to say to mine. She inspires me to work with my mind and my...[read on]

About Come August, Come Freedom, from the publisher:

In a time of post-Revolutionary fervor in Richmond, Virginia, an imposing twenty-four-year-old slave named Gabriel, known for his courage and intellect, plotted a rebellion involving thousands of African- American freedom seekers armed with refashioned pitchforks and other implements of Gabriel’s blacksmith trade. The revolt would be thwarted by a confluence of fierce weather and human betrayal, but Gabriel retained his dignity to the end. History knows little of Gabriel’s early life. But here, author Gigi Amateau imagines a childhood shaped by a mother’s devotion, a father’s passion for liberation, and a friendship with a white master’s son who later proved cowardly and cruel. She gives vibrant life to Gabriel’s love for his wife-to-be, Nanny, a slave woman whose freedom he worked tirelessly, and futilely, to buy. Interwoven with original documents, this poignant, illuminating novel gives a personal face to a remarkable moment in history.

An 1800 insurrection planned by a literate slave known as "Prosser’s Gabriel" inspires a historical novel following one extraordinary man’s life.

Learn more about the book and author at Gigi Amateau's website.

Read--Coffee with a canine: Gigi Amateau & Biscuit and Cola.

Writers Read: Gigi Amateau.

--Marshal Zeringue