Pub Day Talk: Brown White Black by Nishta J. Mehra with Allison Punch

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Join Old Town Books for a paperback pub day launch conversation celebrating Nishta J. Mehra's essay collection Brown White Black: An American Family at the Intersection of Race, Gender, Sexuality and Religion, an intimate portrayal of what it means to be a queer, multi-racial family, South Asian American in the United States, and more. Mehra will be joined in conversation by DC bookstagrammer Allison Punch.

About the Event

Nishta J. Mehra and Allison Punch will discuss Mehra's debut essay collection Brown White Black with event attendees, starting with Allison's own questions for Nishta followed by questions from the audience. This event is free and open to the public. You can preorder a paperback copy of Brown White Black from Old Town Books here.

About the Hosts

Nishta J. Mehra: was raised among a tight-knit network of Indian immigrants in Memphis, Tennessee. She is the proud graduate of St. Mary's Episcopal School and holds a B.A. in Religious Studies from Rice University and an M.F.A in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. An English teacher with over a decade of experience in middle and high school classrooms, she lives with her wife, Jill, and their child, Shiv, in Phoenix.

Allison Punch: Allison Punch is a reader, writer and Michigander living in the DC area. She was awarded the Deacon Maccubin Young Writers Award in 2016. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Argot Magazine and Breadcrumbs Magazine. She helped produce Old Town Books's first Emerging Writers Festival and reviews books on Instagram at @allisonreadsdc.

About the Book

Brown White Black is a portrait of Nishta J. Mehra's family - her wife, who is white; her adopted child, Shiv, who is Black; and their experiences dealing with America's rigid ideas of race, gender, and sexuality. Her clear-eyed and incisive writing on her family's daily struggle to make space for themselves amid racial intolerance and stereotypes personalizes some of America's most fraught issues. Mehra writes candidly about her efforts to protect and shelter Shiv from racial slurs on the playground and from intrusive questions by strangers while educating her child on the realities and dangers of being Black in America. In other essays, she discusses growing up in the racially polarized city of Memphis; coming out as queer; being an adoptive mother who is brown; and what it's like to be constantly confronted by people's confusion, concern, and expectations about her child and her family. Above all, Mehra argues passionately for a more nuanced and compassionate understanding of identity and family.