Join Powerhouse Arena to celebrate the book launch of Small Wonder, a murder mystery set on the streets and playgrounds of Park Slope. In addition to celebrating Eileen’s new book, Eileen Kelly, Clifford Thompson, and Jill Caryl Weiner will discuss some of their detours, curveballs, and reinventions as writers in NYC.
About the Book
Small Wonder is a murder mystery set in the preschools and the playgrounds of Park Slope. Karen Lee Boren, author of Secret Waltz says, “With delicious wit and a keen eye, Eileen Kelly’s Small Wonder transports the reader to some of the most dangerous places in our modern world – classrooms, playgrounds, and the shifting sands of reality and madness, certainty and suspicion. How do we know who to trust when we can’t trust our own perceptions?”
About the Author:
Eileen Kelly lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she writes development documents for criminal justice and mental health nonprofits and fiction for children and adults. Her stories have appeared in the Tupelo Quarterly and Wrongdoing Magazine. A very long time ago, she won the Hopwood Award in the Novel from the University of Michigan’s MFA program. Small Wonder is her first published novel.
About the Other Authors:
Clifford Thompson’s books include What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues (2019), which Time magazine called one of the “most anticipated” books of the season, and the graphic novel Big Man and the Little Men (2022), which he wrote and illustrated. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, Best American Essays, The Times Literary Supplement, Commonweal, and The Threepenny Review, among other places, and his essay “La Bohème” was selected for the 2024 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Thompson’s book Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in Essays will be published by the University of Georgia Press in the fall of 2025. A painter, he is a member of Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City. He was born and raised in Washington, DC and attended Oberlin College.
Jill Caryl Weiner has written about New York, parenting, sports and people for venues including The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Village Voice and Time Out New York Kids. She is the author of the award-winning family & baby memory journals When We Became Three: A Memory Book for the Modern Family (for a couple having their first baby) and When We Became Four: A Memory Book for the Whole Family (which welcomes a new baby while celebrating the Big Sib.) Carpool Goddess called Three “the most clever and creative memory book I’ve ever seen,” and Psychology Today’s Jean Kim, MD, said Four “is an invaluable way to both enrich and commemorate the family experience." Jill is writing her first novel.