Featured image for post: New York Times Bestselling Author Christina Baker Kline Will Speak at Barton’s Friends of Hackney Library Event on April 12

New York Times Bestselling Author Christina Baker Kline Will Speak at Barton’s Friends of Hackney Library Event on April 12

WILSON, N.C. — March 21, 2016 – The Barton College Friends of Hackney Library will host New York Times bestselling author Christina Baker Kline at its annual spring lecture/dinner event on Tuesday, April 12. A book signing and wine reception will be held from 6 p.m. – 6:30 p.m., and the program will begin at 6:30 p.m. Dinner will follow at 7:15 p.m. The event will be held in Hardy Alumni Hall on the Barton College campus.

Admission for the event is $35 per person. Admission for members of the Friends of Hackney Library and for Barton College faculty, staff, students and their spouses is $30 per person. Space is limited, and reservations must be received by April 4.

For information about invitations for the event, please contact Luann Clark at (252) 399-6329 or email the Friends at fohl@barton.edu. This event is sponsored in part by BB&T.

About the Author —

Kline is the author of five novels, including the #1 New York Times bestselling “Orphan Train,” described as “absorbing” and “moving,” respectively, by Publishers Weekly and Booklist. The novel “weaves contemporary and historical fiction into a compelling story about loss, adaptability, and courage” according to Library Journal, as it explores the interactions between Molly, a present-day teen in foster care, and the elderly Vivian, who was orphaned as a young child and sent out for adoption on an orphan train like that of the title. As Booklist explains, “[t]hese trains carried [orphan] children to adoptive families for 75 years, from the mid-nineteenth century to the start of the Great Depression….Kline illuminates a largely hidden chapter of American history, while portraying the coming-of-age of two resilient young women.”

Her other novels include “Bird in Hand,” “The Way Life Should Be,” “Desire Lines” and “Sweet Water.” She is currently at work on a novel based on the iconic painting Christina’s World, by Andrew Wyeth.

In addition to her five novels, Kline has written and edited five nonfiction books. She commissioned and edited two widely praised collections of original essays on the first year of parenthood and raising young children, “Child of Mine” and “Room to Grow,” and a book on grieving, “Always Too Soon.” She is the coeditor, with Anne Burt, of a collection of personal essays titled “About Face: Women Write About What They See When They Look in the Mirror,” and Kline and her mother, Christina Looper Baker, are co-authors of “The Conversation Begins,” a book on feminist mothers and daughters. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Money, More, and Psychology Today, among other publications.

Born in Cambridge, England, Kline was raised in Cambridge as well as in the American South and Maine. She is a graduate of Yale, Cambridge, and the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow in Fiction Writing. She has taught fiction and nonfiction writing, poetry, English literature, literary theory, and women’s studies at Yale, NYU, and Drew University, and she served as Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University for four years. She is a recipient of several Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellowships and Writer-in-Residence Fellowships at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Kline supports a number of libraries and other associations in New Jersey and Maine, and she is a member of the Advisory Board for Roots & Wings, a nonprofit organization that provides support for at-risk adolescent and aged-out foster care youth.

Kline and her husband, David Kline, live in Montclair, N.J., and in Maine. They have three sons.

For more information about the Willis N. Hackney Library and its schedule of events, please contact George Loveland, director of Hackney Library, at 252-399-6501 or gwloveland@barton.edu.

END