Meet Kai Harris, Author of What the Fireflies Knew

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Join San Mateo County Libraries on Wednesday, February 8 from 6:30-7:30 pm to welcome Kai Harris, author of the coming-of-age novel, What the Fireflies Knew.

In the vein of Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones and Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, What the Fireflies Knew follows almost-eleven-year-old Kenyatta Bernice (KB), as she and her sister try to make sense of their new life in the wake of their father’s death and their mother’s disappearance.

Kai Harris is a writer and educator from Detroit, Michigan, Harris uses her voice to uplift the Black community through realistic fiction centered on the Black experience. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Lit Hub, Kweli Journal, Longform, and the Killens Review, amongst others. In addition to fiction, Kai has published poetry, personal essays, and peer-reviewed academic articles on topics related to Black girlhood and womanhood, the slave narrative genre, motherhood, and Black identity. A graduate of Western Michigan University’s PhD program, Kai now lives in the Bay Area where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Santa Clara University.

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