Eric Goodman

 

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

The Writer’s Story: 3:30PM,

The Garfield Book Company

Reading: 7PM,

The Regency Room

 

 

Eric Goodman is the author of four published novels, including In Days of Awe and Child of My Right Hand, which won a 2004 Book of the Year Award from ForeWord Magazine. His fifth novel, Twelfth and Race, will be published in March, 2012, by the University of Nebraska Press Flyover Fiction series.  His work has been awarded three Ohio Arts Council fellowships and residencies at the Headland Center for the Arts, the Ragdale Foundation and the MacDowell Colony.  Goodman has also published more than 150 essays and articles, with work appearing in publications including Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, GQ, Travel & Leisure, Saveur, and several anthologies. For the past decade, Goodman has directed the undergraduate and graduate creative writing program at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.  During that time he has organized and staged three major literary festivals: Diversity in African American Poetry (2003) , Translating Cultures: Latin American and Latina/o Writers Festival (2009), and Miami Bicentennial Writers Festival (2009).

 

On Twelfth and Race

Twelfth and Race is a novel about a mixed-race couple, set against the backdrop of race riots in the fictional Midwestern metropolis of Calhoun City, Missouri. It takes as its intersecting American themes race, love and history.

 

Praise for Eric Goodman

In his timely new novel, Twelfth and Race, Eric Goodman brilliantly dramatizes the complex workings of the skin-game in our supposedly 'post-racial' America. His richly drawn characters, black and white, male and female, are conflicted beings, who strive to make a way in a dark, narrow world where few ways are possible. Read and see what they see, read and feel what they feel. This is fiction at its best, prose that touches, prose that asks us to think more about who we are, that demands that we be more than we are. A significant achievement.

   —Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Rails Under My Back and Holding Pattern

 

Eric Goodman masterfully plots an inter-racial love story with multiple intersecting themes of inter-racial hatred, race riots, and complex family relations.  The story becomes a wonderful puzzle, leaving us wondering who has stolen whose identity. There’s an amazing amount of wit, soul, candour and erotic and intoxicating energy in this deeply probing and suspenseful novel. An amazingly and gloriously fulfilling read.

    —Josip Novakovich, author of April Fool's Day

 

 

Set in a racially divided city, the narrative—with its many surprising twists and turns—weaves through the difficult terrain of interracial romance between flawed but lovable characters trying to make sense of the jigsaw puzzle of their lives.  I know of no other writer who has put all the race cards on the table with such honesty and humanity.  Twelfth and Race may very well be a first of its kind.

    —Jim Heynen, author of One Room