Germantown Academy is pleased to announce that the next guest in the Head of School’s Distinguished Speaker Series will be PEN/Hemingway and NBCC’s John Leonard Award-winning author Yaa Gyasi. Ms. Gyasi will discuss her book, Homegoing, a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book, with the community on Tuesday, February 11 at 7pm in the Honickman Auditorium at Germantown Academy. This event is free and open to the public. Invite your friends, family, neighbors, book clubs and more!

Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery.

Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi’s extraordinary novel illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed—and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.