Janet Reitman — The Inheritance: An American Tragedy in Five Acts - With Annie Karni — at Conn Ave
About This Event
A stunning work of narrative nonfiction that traces the lives of nine Americans over three decades, offering a vivid account of a nation in crisis—from award-winning New York Times Magazine writer Janet Reitman A thrill-seeking former Navy pilot chases adventure in Afghanistan, while in suburbia, his teenage son spirals into extremism. The grandson of African freedom fighters joins the FBI to save America from terrorism and ends up terrorizing the African immigrants he’d sworn to protect. A young Marine who sees himself as a true-blue American goes to war in Iraq, comes home broken, and is reborn as white nationalist. An idealistic young attorney defends a Palestinian engineer she believes is wrongly accused of funding Hamas. These four people, and five others, struggle to find their way in a country reimagining itself in the wake of 9/11. In The Inheritance, Janet Reitman, the bestselling author of Inside Scientology, delivers an intimate and urgent account of American disillusionment—and a paean to hope. From the bucolic suburbs of Boston to the immigrant enclaves of Dallas, from the deserts of Iraq to the encrypted chatrooms that fuel hatred and extremism, The Inheritance unfolds in repeating narratives of people moving through the decades, from the end of the Reagan era to the present day, painting a sweeping and deeply affective portrait of how a country revered for its democratic ideals became a nation defined by its fears. Rigorously reported and brimming with novelistic detail, The Inheritance reveals the hidden cost of the war on terror, exposing the psychic wounds that haunt us to this day.Janet Reitman is an award-winning journalist and contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. Formerly a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, she has twice been a finalist for the National Magazine Award and was a fellow at the New America Foundation. Reitman’s previous book, Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion, was a national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book.Reitman will be in conversation with Annie Karni, a congressional correspondent and a former White House correspondent for The New York Times. She is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller “Mad House: How Donald Trump, MAGA Mean Girls, a Former Used Car Salesman, a Florida Nepo Baby, and a Man with Rats in His Walls Broke Congress”This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.
About the Venue
Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose
Politics and Prose is a beloved and award-winning staple for book lovers around the nation's capital and the world. So Many Books, So Little Time.
Visit store pageMore at Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose
Claudia Castro Luna — The Flowers Along the Way: A Memoir — at Conn Ave
This event will be in partnership with Salvadoran Cultural Institute.Passionately demonstrating the dormant trauma of political violence and the redemption waiting beyond itFrom El Salvador’s lush countryside to the streets of Oakland, California, a young mother wrestles with the intersecting forces of memory, history, and language in order to chart a new path for herself and her growing family. Fleeing political unrest and civil war violence in El Salvador, fourteen-year-old Claudia Castro Luna arrived in the United States with her family in 1981. Two decades later, holding her two-year-old and pregnant with her second child, she survives a public shooting by hiding behind shrubs in front of her house in Oakland. This event unleashes disorienting and traumatic memories, plunging her into a journey of discovery as she grapples with PTSD, recovers family stories, and begins to make sense of all that was torn asunder within her by the experiences of war and emigration. Beauty, longing, fear, and joy entwine in this powerful story of love, self-determination, and the search for home.CLAUDIA CASTRO LUNA is a 2019 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, a former Washington State Poet Laureate, and Seattle’s inaugural Civic Poet. She is the author of the poetry collections Green, the World; Cipota Under the Moon; Killing Marías; One River, A Thousand Voices; and This City, a chapbook. Her nonfiction has appeared in anthologies, journals, and newspapers. Born in El Salvador, Castro Luna lives and dreams in English and Spanish.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.
Roberto Tejada & Christina Wiginton — Art & Water: Volume 2 - with Kaira M. Cabañas — at Conn Ave
Essays, personal meditations, and images that explore water in all its renewing, destructive, corrosive, and connecting powerWater and its transmutations link the contributions in Art & Water, the second volume in the series Art & from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. The series situates the study of art at the intersection of various disciplines—here, they include modernist literature, poetry, film, and both natural and built environments. Essayists use water to address hydrolatry practices in India; ritual objects and practices of enslaved Afro-Surinamers; traces of millstones in the architecture of Seville; and visualizations of sea-level change in the nineteenth-century United States. Their research places art within broader conversations in the humanities considering a water-oriented rather than terrestrial historical framework.The book is enlivened by first-person narratives that examine deeply embedded meanings of water. Continuing the series’ tradition of exciting book design, an enclosed poster from Brazilian multimedia artist Aline Motta addresses ancestry, memory, and belonging across the Black Atlantic while compellingly conjuring water’s capacity to transform, bring together, and renew. Water as a connective theme offers a fitting lens to advance understandings of how art, as both material object and practice, remains entangled with the natural, supernatural, and scientific—and, like water, remains inseparable from our daily lives.Distributed for the National Gallery of Art, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual ArtsRoberto Tejada is an award-winning poet and the author of art histories that include Along the Diagonal: Art / Essays / América (2026), National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (2009) and Celia Alvarez Muñoz (2009), as well as the poetry collections Carbonate of Copper (2025), Why the Assembly Disbanded (2022) and Exposition Park (2010). A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, Tejada serves as the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston, where he teaches creative writing and art history.Christina Wiginton is an art book publishing specialist focused on color-critical print production for visually ambitious museum publications and nonfiction books. She has worked extensively in illustrated book development, first at the Smithsonian Institution and now at the National Gallery of Art.Tejada and Wiginton will be in conversation with Kaira M. Cabañas, the award-winning author of several volumes, including Immanent Vitalities: Meaning and Materiality in Modern and Contemporary Art (2021), which received the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award. Her previous work, Learning from Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art (2018), was recognized as a finalist for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. Since 2023, she has served as Associate Dean for Academic Programs and Publications at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.This event is free with first come, first serve seating. To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.
Brian Jay Jones — The Capitol: The Surprising Biography of an American Building - with David O. Stewart — at Conn Ave
An in-depth exploration of history of the US Capitol building and the incredible personalities who built it, full of dramatic stories, surprising facts, and offering a powerful testament to what the Capitol has meant to generations of Americans, and how it’s endured.The Capitol is a unique biography of a place, encompassing architecture, history, politics, popular culture, and race in a fascinating exploration of our Capitol's secret history; a history rife with political intrigue, assassination attempts, thwarted bombings, and gunmen on the run. Never mind ghostly cat prints, mysteriously bloodstained steps, and charming “fairy doors” that have delighted visitors for hundreds of years. Spanning across three centuries of American history, it focuses on iconic and easily recognizable names and personalities from the past—from George Washington to Davy Crockett to Ronald Reagan—as well as countless colorful characters readers may not have heard of before, with a focus on restoring the stories of enslaved people and recognizing their contributions. The story of the Capitol is the story of America itself, and, for the first time, that story will be told in this sweeping, aspirational biography of the building at the very heart of the American experiment.Brian Jay Jones is the critically acclaimed, bestselling biographer of some of the world’s most iconic creative geniuses. Born in the Midwest and raised in the Southwest, Brian has a degree in English from the University of New Mexico. He spent more than two decades as a public policy analyst and speechwriter for thought leaders and elected officials at all levels of government, including nearly ten years in the US Senate. He presently lives in New Mexico.Jones will be in conversation with David O. Stewart, who has published eleven award-winning and best-selling books of history and historical novels. In 2023, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Washington Independent Review of Books. His most recent fictional series, the Overstreet Saga, is inspired by family stories his mother told. He lives in Maryland with the light of his life, Nancy Floreen; they have three children and six grandchildren.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.