An Evening with Author Evelyn Elwell
September 30 @ 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Come join us for an evening with author Evelyn Elwell Uyemura, author of A Girl From Lynn. This young adult novel follows Kit Newhall as she navigates injury to her father and the loss of her job in the Lynn shoe factories of the 1850s era.
From the author: “The shoe shops have begun installing sewing machines to replace the hand work that girls like Kitt and her mother had done at home for decades, and Kitt finds herself embroiled in the labor unrest that culminates in the Lynn Shoemaker’s Strike of 1860.
She crosses paths the Hutchinson Family Singers and Anna Murray Douglass, the wife of Frederick Douglass, and others working for Abolition and the Underground Railroad in Lynn. She also crosses paths with an impassioned young man named Daniel Allen. Will he live up to his high ideals?
The novel touches upon women’s role in the labor movement, the connections between labor, abolition, and women’s rights, and the beginnings of the Civil War, as well as the realities of medical issues in the 1850s and 60s.”
Evelyn was raised in Lynn and has spent the last 30+ years in Southern California, where she taught English and ESL at El Camino Community College. Evelyn is a frequent visitor to Pittsfield, where she has family ties. She will be speaking in the Warren Community Room at 6PM on September 30th. Come hear some fascinating history as well as about writing a novel!
This event is free and open to the public.