As the winter nights start to draw in, something a little chillier for your Thursday night literary fare! We’re very pleased to welcome authors Kali White and Paul Renfro to discuss their latest books - one fiction, one nonfiction - which examine terrible crimes against children and their impact, both on the communities where they take place, and on society at large. This will be a fascinating discussion.
For free registration to this event, please click here.
Kali White is the author of the novels The Monsters We Make (Crooked Lane, 2020) and The Good Divide and The Space Between (as Kali VanBaale). She’s the recipient of an American Book Award, an Eric Hoffer Book Award, an Independent Publisher’s silver medal for fiction, and a State of Iowa major artist grant. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The Coachella Review, The Chaffey Review, Midwestern Gothic, Nowhere Magazine, Poets&Writers, The Writer, The Writers’ Chronicle, A&E Network Real Crime series, and several anthologies. Kali holds an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a faculty member of the Lindenwood University MFA Creative Writing Program. She lives in Iowa with her family. The Monsters We Make tells the story of how in the early 1980s, a pair of paperboy kidnappings rocks a small midwestern city, bringing secrets to the surface for a single mother, her two children, and a local cop. The abductions set in motion an unpredictable chain of events for all involved, with violent, devastating outcomes. Inspired by the real-life Des Moines paperboy cases, The Monsters We Make explores the effects of one crime exposing another, and how the watershed cases of our childhoods can change us forever. From Booklist: “An air of menace laced with melancholy hangs over every page, a mourning for a more innocent time that perhaps never was real. The monsters were always there; we just couldn’t see them.”
Paul Renfro is an Assistant Professor of History at Florida State University and received his PhD in history from the University of Iowa, where he was a Louis Pelzer Dissertation Fellow. His debut book, Stranger Danger, reveals how a moral panic focused on child kidnapping and exploitation gripped the U.S. beginning in the late 1970s, and demonstrates how this panic—fueled by bereaved parents, politicians from across the political spectrum, and the news media entities—led to the development of punitive and expansive new laws, programs, and practices designed to protect children from dangerous “strangers.” Linda Gordon of New York University said Stranger Danger “…shows that panics about strangers kidnapping, molesting, and murdering kids may have made children less safe, by obscuring the fact that it is overwhelmingly often parents and close relatives who do these things. …demonstrating how right-wing activists used these panics to promote their anti-gay and anti-feminist agenda and to expand the carceral and surveillance state in ways that do little to protect children.”
