Named a must-read for the summer by USA Today, Good Housekeeping, New York Magazine, Publisher’s Weekly and Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Yanique comes to campus courtesy of BookMarks Festival in Winston-Salem.

The event, sponsored by the Department of English, Liberal Studies and the Honors Program, will be held Friday, Sept. 5, in the General Classroom Building Auditorium (A218) from 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. The event is free and open to the university community.

Yanique’s book chronicles three generations of the Bradshaw family in the Virgin Islands. Land  of Love and Drowning mesmerizes from the first sentence onward with stories of magic and lust, unknown connections and hidden mysteries, family legacies, and an island world undergoing historical changes. Yanique’s debut delves into the ways her characters survive, the fierce beauty her protagonists possess, and the deeply complicated bonds created by love and family secrets.

Yanique is from St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. The author of the story collection, How to Escape from a Leper Colony, she is a 2010 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award winner and was named by the National Book Foundation as one of 2011’s “5 Under 35.” She teaches at the New School and lives in Brooklyn and St.