The Friends of Hackney Library are delighted to host New York Times bestselling author Christina Baker Kline at their annual spring event on Tuesday, April 12, 2016. A book signing and wine reception will begin at 6:00 pm, followed by the program at 6:30 pm; dinner will follow at 7:15 pm. The event will be held on the campus of Barton College in Hardy Alumni Hall.

Kline is the author of five novels, including the #1 New York Times bestselling Orphan Train, described as “absorbing” and “moving,” respectively, by Publishers Weekly and Booklist. The novel “weaves contemporary and historical fiction into a compelling story about loss, adaptability, and courage” according to Library Journal, as it explores the interactions between Molly, a present-day teen in foster care, and the elderly Vivian, who was orphaned as a young child and sent out for adoption on an orphan train like that of the title. As Booklist explains, “[t]hese trains carried [orphan] children to adoptive families for 75 years, from the mid-nineteenth century to the start of the Great Depression….Kline illuminates a largely hidden chapter of American history, while portraying the coming-of-age of two resilient young women.”

Her other novels include Bird in Hand, The Way Life Should Be, Desire Lines and Sweet Water. She is currently at work on a novel based on the iconic painting Christina's World, by Andrew Wyeth.

In addition to her five novels, Kline has written and edited five nonfiction books. She commissioned and edited two widely praised collections of original essays on the first year of parenthood and raising young children, Child of Mine and Room to Grow, and a book on grieving, Always Too Soon. She is the coeditor, with Anne Burt, of a collection of personal essays called About Face: Women Write About What They See When They Look in the Mirror, and she is co-author, with her mother, Christina Looper Baker, of The Conversation Begins, a book on feminist mothers and daughters. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Money, More, and Psychology Today, among other publications.
 

Kline was born in Cambridge, England, and raised there as well as in the American South and Maine. She is a graduate of Yale, Cambridge, and the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow in Fiction Writing. She has taught fiction and nonfiction writing, poetry, English literature, literary theory, and women’s studies at Yale, NYU, and Drew University, and she served as Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University for four years. She is a recipient of several Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellowships and Writer-in-Residence Fellowships at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She supports a number of libraries and other associations in New Jersey and Maine, and is a member of the Advisory Board for Roots & Wings, a nonprofit that provides support for at-risk adolescent and aged-out foster care youth.

Kline and her husband, David Kline, live in Montclair, New Jersey and in Maine and have three sons.

Admission for the event is $30 each for Friends of Hackney Library members; for Barton faculty/staff, students, and spouses. For all other guests, admission is $35 each.

For more information about invitations for the event, please contact Luann Clark at (252) 399-6329, or email the Friends at fohl@barton.edu. Space is limited, and after invitations have been issued, reservations for the dinner must be received by April 6, 2016.

This event is sponsored in part by BB&T.