Tue, Jun 06
|Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeehouse
Cynthia Sylvester, The Half-White Album
Cynthia Sylvester's debut collection explores lives lived between worlds. At its heart,The Half-White Album is a healing ceremony of the author’s own creation, a process grounded in music that celebrates what it is to be human and imperfect and to love imperfectly.
Date, Time & Location
Jun 06, 6:00 PM MDT
Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeehouse, 202 Galisteo St, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA
About the Event
This will be an in-store event and live-streamed to Zoom and our Facebook page. Register here for Zoom.
Cynthia will be in conversation with Santa Fe poet Tina Carlson, whose book Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery will publish in August.
Purchase The Half-White Album online here or call the store to order (505) 988-4226. Signed copies will be available after the event.
Humorous, heartbreaking, and rooted in the high desert of the Southwest, this powerful debut collection is an experience told through story and music. Sylvester gives readers a poignant view of the path her characters travel between the secular and the spiritual, between the traditional and the contemporary, between worlds lost and the ones they find themselves in. The characters journey to the beat of the nomadic band, The Covers. Structured around ten concerts, the book is narrated by multiple characters in the Dinétah and in the city of Albuquerque, but a mother-daughter relationship provides a throughline. At its heart, The Half-White Album is a healing ceremony of the author’s own creation, a process grounded in music that celebrates what it is to be human and imperfect and to love imperfectly.
About the Poets
Cynthia J. Sylvester is an enrolled member of the Diné, born into the Kiyaa'áanii Clan for the Bilagáana Clan. She is a native of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her flash fiction and short stories have appeared in ABQ in Print, Leon Literary Review, Lunch Ticket, As Us Journal, and Bosque—The
Magazine, among others.
Tina Carlson is a Santa Fe poet and psychiatric nurse practitioner. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies such as Blue Mesa Review, Bosque, Dark Mountain, Best of Kore Press, 2012, Black Lawrence Press, Noetic Press, and the Telebooth Poetry Project. Her first book, Ground, Wind, This Body (University of New Mexico Press, 2017) explores the destructive effects of war on a family when the embattled veteran has received no help after coming home, as well as themes of nature as redemption, international adoption, and dreams. Tina’s new book, A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery publishes on August 15, 2023 - we will be taking pre-orders at the event.