The Auburn Conference by Tom Piazza
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It is 1883, and America is at a crossroads. At a tiny college in Upstate New York, an idealistic young professor has \\nmanaged to convince Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, \\nConfederate memoirist Forrest Taylor, and romance novelist Lucy Comstock to participate in the first (and last) \\nAuburn Writers\\u2019 Conference for a public discussion about the future of America. By turns brilliantly comic and \\nstartlingly prescient, The Auburn Conference vibrates with questions as alive and urgent today as they were in \\n1883\\u2014the chronic American conundrums of race, class, and gender, and the fate of the democratic ideal.\\n\\nTom Piazza\\u2019s twelve books include the novels A Free State and City of Refuge, and the post-Katrina manifesto \\nWhy New Orleans Matters. He was a principal writer for the HBO series Treme, and a Grammy Award winner for \\nhis album notes to Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey. He lives in New Orleans.\\n\\n\\n
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