Dear USC Rossier Faculty, Staff, and Students,
I’m pleased to share the next book we will be reading and exploring as a community in our USC Rossier Book Club: The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Please join us for our School-wide discussion in the USC Hotel’s Central Ballroom, Wednesday, April 15, from noon to 2 p.m. Lunch will be provided.
Please note: Book Club meetings are always accessible online! Just choose that option when you RSVP.
RSVP by Friday, March 27 by clicking on this link.
Complimentary copies of the book will be available in WPH 1102 Tuesday, March 10, 10 a.m.‒noon and 2 p.m.‒4 p.m., through Friday, March 27. *** Please note that by accepting the book, you are indicating your commitment to read it and participate in our discussion! *** At this time, we do not have audio copies available.
You are also welcome to join our discussion remotely. Please provide a mailing address if you will need the book shipped to you. A link to our virtual classroom will be provided closer to the date of our gathering.
You can find a brief synopsis of The Water Dancer here. Reviews of the book include:
- Rolling Stone: “What’s most powerful is the way Coates enlists his notions of the fantastic, as well as his fluid prose, to probe a wound that never seems to heal. ‘To forget is to truly slave,’ one character says. ‘To forget is to truly die.’ There’s an urgency to his remembrance of things past that brims with authenticity, testifying to centuries of bone-deep pain. It makes The Water Dancer feel timeless and instantly canon-worthy.”
- The Los Angeles Times: “Using a touch of magic to explain an effort of unimaginable terror and courage in escaping slavery, The Water Dancer at times feels like a spiritual companion to Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Underground Railroad. But instead of imagining a literal railroad in place of a treacherous, multi-stop effort to pull innocent people from the depths of slavery, Coates envisions the transcendent potential in acknowledging and retelling stories of trauma from the past as a means out of darkness.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a renowned American essayist, writer, and journalist. His non-fiction novel, Between the World and Me, won the 2015 National Book Award, the 2015 Kirkus prize for nonfiction, and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and a New York Times #1 Bestseller. Coates has written for The Atlantic, Time, Washington City Paper, and The Village Voice, and contributed to The Washington Post, O, The Washington Monthly, New York Times Magazine, and other publications. He lives in Paris, France. The Water Dancer is his first novel.
The Book Club is part of our initiative, “The Rossier Way,” which is designed to cultivate a culture of caring and support amongst faculty, staff, and students. I am hosting the Book Club events in partnership with Darline Robles, Associate Dean of Equity and Inclusion. Our goal is to select a work of fiction that helps us explore themes relevant to our mission to advance educational equity.
We look forward to hearing your perspective and a lively discussion in April.
Fight On!
Sincerely,
Karen Symms Gallagher, Ph.D.
Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean