The Ivy is delighted to present an evening with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore in celebration of her new memoir, TOUCHING THE ART! TOUCHING THE ART centers around Sycamore's relationship with her late grandmother, who lived and made art in Mount Washington from the 1960s until her death in 2010. We are pleased to highlight the hyper-local connection embedded in this celebration of the work of a widely-recognized, thoroughly beloved writer.

We're thrilled, too, that accomplished nonfiction writer and beloved Baltimore-based writer Jeannie Vanasco will join Mattilda in conversation. Please bundle up and join us on our patio for this meaningful conversation.

Please note that this event is outdoors - the patio is covered in case of rain, but we highly recommend bundling up on November days!

Click here to RSVP!

Click here to order TOUCHING THE ART!

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (mattildabernsteinsycamore.com) is the award-winning author of The Freezer Door, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, one of Oprah Magazine’s Best LGBTQ Books of 2020, and a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. She’s the author of three novels and three nonfiction titles, and the editor of six nonfiction anthologies, most recently Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis. Sycamore is the recipient of a Lambda Literary Award and an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book. Her new book, Touching the Art (out November 2023), is about her fraught relationship with her late grandmother, an abstract artist from Baltimore.

Jeannie Vanasco is the author of the memoirs Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl—which was named a New York Times Editors' Choice and a best book of 2019 by TIME, Esquire, Kirkus, among others—and The Glass Eye, which Poets & Writers called one of the five best literary nonfiction debuts of 2017. Her third book, A Silent Treatment, is forthcoming. Born and raised in Sandusky, Ohio, she lives in Baltimore and is an associate professor of English at Towson University.

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