Anya Liftig, a performance artist who grew up straddling suburban Connecticut and rural Appalachia, discusses her memoir Holler Rat. Books will be available for sale, and Cheshire residents can listen to the audiobook version with Libby prior to the program.

About Holler Rat: Anya 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 reconcile where 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 required.

Thanks to the Friends of the Cheshire Public Library for sponsoring this program!