Odyssey Events

Blues singer Shug Avery says, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” Rediscover this groundbreaking 1982 classic, the first Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction awarded to a Black woman. Many of us now know it for its movie versions or for its musical theatre adaptation on Broadway, but going back to the original epistolary novel proves surprisingly moving and relevant. The novel focuses on two resilient sisters surviving abuse and writing letters to each other while separated by an ocean.

This 2026 blockbuster novel traces two motherless girls, “cradle friends” since birth, searching for family in the face of adversity. Born in Mississippi, the girls traverse the South in the 1950s and 1960s, struggling to become women without mothers to guide them. Vernice’s path takes her to Spelman College in Atlanta, while Annie’s search for her mother sends her to Memphis. The New York Times hailed Kin as “a lush, beautiful novel about found family.” Like The Color Purple from nearly a half-century earlier, Kin features the narrative voices of two women (in this case, close enough to be sisters) and asks its readers to redefine family.