Please join us for a live talk with  author Anya Liftig, a performance artist who grew up straddling suburban Connecticut and rural Appalachia, as she discusses her memoir Holler Rat. Holler Rat, published in August 2023, landed on the USA Today best seller list and has been reviewed as an ideal alternative to JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy.

Liftig grew up with a foot in two very different worlds: While her mother’s upbringing was so rural that the other kids called her ​“holler rat,” her father came from a comfortable, upper-middle-class Jewish family. Liftig spent school years in affluent Connecticut and summers in the holler.Shaped by the experience, she would go on to win a scholarship to Yale and become an acclaimed artist, using provocative performances to explore the contradictions and unanswered questions of her life. But when the world Liftig was building for herself shattered, she was forced to reconcilewhere she’d come from with who she was and who she wanted to be.

A writer and artist, Anya Liftig has had her creative work exhibited at Tate Modern and MoMA, and published in The New York Times Magazine and BOMB. She has had fellowships at MacDowell and Yaddo and was awarded Franklin Furnace and Mertz Gilmore grants. She lives in Connecticut. Registration is required.