An Evening with Lauren Rhoades in Conversation with Alison Turner
Category: Event Calendar
Date and Time
- Tuesday, Jul 22, 2025 6pm - 7pm
Location
Old Firehouse Books
232 Walnut Street
Details
Join us at Old Firehouse Books as we give a warm welcome to Lauren Rhoades for her debut release, Split the Baby! Lauren will be in store on July 22nd from 6:00-7:00pm, joined by Alison Turner to discuss her book. We will have time at the end of the event for personalization of any copies bought. Books are available for purchase in store or online, but we do not ship internationally.
About the book:
In honest and captivating prose, Split the Baby chronicles the toll of divorce and family rupture from the perspective of a child who was nearly torn in two. Lauren Rhoades retells her experience of growing up caught between two homes run by equally strong women: a fervently Catholic stepmother and a deeply sensitive Jewish mother. Pulled toward radically distinct family cultures with rich but conflicting religious traditions, the young girl struggles to reconcile her stepmother's possessive charm with her mother's fierce and vulnerable love. Working with a trove of salvaged documents—including psychological evaluations, legal records, and personal family diaries—Rhoades searches for answers to questions of identity, spirituality, and the relationships that most deeply shape us. Ultimately, this debut memoir-in-pieces is a thoughtful story of learning to become whole again.
About Lauren Rhoades:
Lauren Rhoades is a writer, editor, and grantmaker living in Jackson, Mississippi. Originally from Denver, Colorado, Lauren has served with AmeriCorps, started Mississippi's first fermentation company, and helmed the Eudora Welty House & Garden. She is now director of grants at the Mississippi Arts Commission and a host of MPB’s The Mississippi Arts Hour. In 2022, Lauren founded Rooted Magazine, an online publication dedicated to telling unfiltered stories about what it means to call Mississippi home. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the Mississippi University for Women. Split the Baby is her first book.
About Alison Turner:
Alison Turner grew up in the mountains of Colorado, where she learned to endure large amounts of time in inclement weather waiting for buses. She is a community-engaged writer, researcher, and oral historian, and has a PhD in Literary Studies from the University of Denver. Her first collection of short stories, Defensible Spaces (Torrey House Press) was a 2024 Colorado Book Award finalist.
This event is produced by an outside organization and is unaffiliated with the Downtown Development Authority. The DDA website serves as a marketing outlet for events and promotions occurring inside the Downtown boundary. For questions regarding the event, please contact the event producer.
