Gwinnett County Public Library Adult Programs

Join bestselling author Lynn Cullen as she discusses her newest historical fiction novel, When We Were Brilliant, about the determination and friendship of Marilyn Monroe and Eve Arnold.

They were an unlikely pair—a blond bombshell and a photographer determined to be taken seriously—but Marilyn Monroe and Eve Arnold would make a deal that would change their lives in this dazzling new novel from the national bestselling author of Mrs. Poe and The Woman with the Cure.

In 1952, Norma Jeane Baker follows documentary photographer Eve Arnold into a powder room on the night they first meet. She has a proposition for her. Norma Jeane created Marilyn Monroe to be photographed, and she wants Eve to do it. Eve is better than anyone she’s seen at revealing a person’s inner truth. Together they can help each other. Together, she says, they can make something brilliant.
Skeptical of this cipher of a young woman, Eve demurs. She’s looking for more serious subjects than this ambitious starlet. But she keeps getting drawn back into Marilyn’s orbit, and the women come to recognize something in each other—something fundamental. Nothing will get in the way of what they want, and when Marilyn’s star takes off to teetering heights, neither will ever be the same.

A lavish and transporting novel, When We Were Brilliant captures the halcyon days of an icon and the grit of women determining their own futures as it explores the exceptional and complicated friendship between Marilyn Monroe and Eve Arnold.

• Books will be available for sale and signing.

Join author Radha Lin Chaddah as she discusses And the Ancestors Sing, a multigenerational novel of sacrifice, survival, and the unbreakable pull of home, set against the rapidly changing backdrop of post-Cultural Revolution China.

In 1978, as the Cultural Revolution fades into history, Lei is bartered away into marriage for two cartons of cigarettes and a handful of eggs. She finds herself in the unfamiliar village of her new husband where she is met with indifference. When a disaster upends their world, she and her husband are forced to join China’s vast wave of city-bound, rural migrants, leaving behind children whom they may never see again.
Sixteen-year-old LuLu arrives in Shanghai with nothing but ambition.

Denied a factory job and determined to keep her family from starving, she turns to sex work—navigating the dangers of the city’s underbelly with sharp wit and a fierce will to survive. When a powerful client offers her a chance at security, LuLu faces an impossible choice: seize a future that could lift her family from poverty, or risk everything for a life on her own terms.

Books will be available for sale and signing from Charis Books & More.

Join award-winning author Denny S. Bryce as she discusses her newest novel, Where the False Gods Dwell, inspired by choreographer Katherine Dunham's dance expedition, and the search for destiny turns into a struggle for survival.

Inspired by real-life legendary choreographer Katherine Dunham's groundbreaking expedition into the heart of Caribbean dance culture, this uniquely captivating novel imagines the experiences of three very different women who accompany her, hoping to find their destinies--yet finding themselves forced to survive a historic event . . .
Chicago, 1935. Othella is an orphaned con artist who needs to escape the city's brutal underworld . . . or else. Vivian Jean is a wealthy wife, student, and anthropologist eager to prove herself professionally and personally. Zinzi is a Jamaican labor union activist determined to bring change to her homeland's plantation system. Thanks to a series of fortunate mishaps and coincidences, all three join Dunham's voyage to the Maroon village of Accompong in Jamaica's Cockpit Country--and perhaps discover what they desperately want most.

Books will be available for sale and signing from Read It Again Books.

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Denny S. Bryce is an award-winning and bestselling author of historical fiction, including Can't We Be Friends, The Other Princess, and Wild Women and the Blues. She is also an adjunct professor in the MFA program at Drexel University, a book critic for NPR, and a member of the Historical Novel Society, Women’s Fiction Writers Association, and Tall Poppy Writers. Currently, she resides in Savannah, Georgia.

Moderator Anicka Austin is a choreographer and archivist based in Atlanta, Georgia. She attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a Carolina Academic Library Associates fellowship, graduating in May 2020 with a Master of Science in Library Science. Her choreographic work has been presented by Elevate Atlanta, The Lucky Penny (2015-2018), and Fulton County Arts and Culture and exhibited at Gallery 72, the Zuckerman Museum of Art’s Fine Arts Gallery, and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. As artist-researcher, she presented written scholarship and choreography on site-specific performance in Atlanta’s public spaces as Atlanta Art on the Beltline Scholar-in-Residence (2021-2022) and is co-author of Composite Harmonies: Reclaiming Memory Artifacts through Community Creative Practice (2025).