Sheila O'Connor reads from Evidence of V

Join Sheila O’Connor, Joe Horton, Mona Susan Power and Sun Yung Shin for a reading at Next Chapter Booksellers to celebrate the release of Sheila O’Connor’s new hybrid book Evidence of V: A Novel in Fragments, Facts and Fictions.

In an ambitious blend of fact and fiction, novelist Sheila O’Connor tells the story of V, a talented fifteen-year-old singer in 1930s Minneapolis. Drawing on the little-known American practice of incarcerating adolescent girls for “immorality” in the first half of the twentieth century, O’Connor follows V from her early work as a nightclub entertainer to her subsequent six-year state school sentence for an unplanned pregnancy. V endures injustices that will change the course of her life and the lives of her descendants.

Inspired by O’Connor’s research on her unknown maternal grandmother, "Evidence of V: A Novel in Fragments, Facts, and Fictions" is a poignant excavation of familial and national history.

Sheila O’Connor is a multi-genre writer whose books include novels for adults and young people. Her work has been honored with the Michigan Prize for Literary Fiction, Minnesota Book Award, International Reading Award, and Midwest Booksellers Award among others, and has been included in Best Books of the Year by Booklist, VOYA, Book Page, and Chicago Public Library, as well as selected as a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers’ title. O’Connor received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her work across genres has been recognized with the Loft Literary Center’s McKnight Fellowship, two Bush Artist Fellowships, and several Artist Initiative grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board. She is a professor in the Creative Writing Programs at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she serves as fiction editor for Water~Stone Review.

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