Saturday Spotlight: Ona Gritz

We are pleased to introduce our new Saturday Spotlight Series at the Center City Barnes and Noble! This is a new event series focused on celebrating Philadelphia's amazing community of local authors with signings and meet-and-greets each Saturday at the Center City Barnes and Noble. Stop by the store, chat with the authors, and pick up a signed edition of their book!

We've cast our April 20th 1pm Saturday Spotlight on Ona Gritz, author of Everywhere I Look. Ona Gritz holds a Master of Arts in poetry from the creative writing program at New York University. She is the author, most recently, of August Or Forever, a Reader's Choice and Wishing Shelf finalist in middle grade fiction. Ona's nonfiction has appeared in Brevity, The Guardian, The New York Times, River Teeth, The Rumpus, The Utne Reader, and been named Notable in The Best American Essays and Best of the Year in Salon. Her earlier books include On the Whole: A Story of Mothering and Disability and Geode, a finalist for the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. She won the Poetry Archive Now Worldview 2020 Competition and has received many other honors for her poems, which have been widely anthologized. Ona lives with her husband, writer Daniel Simpson, near Philadelphia.

Everywhere I Look is a a beautifully rendered memoir of sisterhood, longing, true crime, and family secrets. In 1982, twenty-five-year-old Angie Boggs, pregnant with her second child, was brutally murdered, along with her husband and infant son. Ill equipped for the horror of that violence and the enormity of her loss, Angie's sister Ona, a college sophomore, felt numb. She also felt deeply ashamed of her inability to grieve. But shame, like her sister's absence, was something Ona knew well. For as long as she could remember, she'd felt ashamed of being their parents' blatantly favored child. The disabled daughter they'd coddled and protected while they alternately punished and neglected Angie, and finally sent her away. It wasn't until thirty years after the murders, both their parents gone and Ona nearly twice the age Angie was allowed to reach, that she developed the courage and a detective's compulsion to learn all she could about her sister's turbulent life and unthinkable death. The result is a profoundly moving reckoning and love letter.