Kambri Crews Book Reading & Signing

Author Kambri Crews Coming to Blue Rock Cafe

Comedic Storyteller to Perform, Sign Books & Answer Questions About Her Memoir

Hudson, OH — The Learned Owl is pleased to welcome Kambri Crews, author of Burn Down the Ground: A Memoir (Random House) on Sunday, April 1, at 3 p.m. Crews will be signing books provided by the Learned Owl, taking questions from the audience, and telling a story from her memoir. Her husband, comedian Christian Finnegan, will join her. Although the event is free, donations will be accepted and a portion of book sales will go to the Summit County Battered Women’s Shelter.

Burn Down the Ground is Crews’ powerful, affecting, and unflinching memoir about her unconventional childhood living with deaf parents in a tin shed in rural Texas (Crews is not deaf), and her attempts to reconcile that harrowing childhood to her present life—one in which her father is serving a twenty-year sentence in a maximum-security prison for attempted murder.

A long time Akron resident, Crews now runs her own PR and production company in New York City. A renowned storyteller and public speaker, she has performed in New York at The Moth’s Mainstage, The 92Y, UCB Theatre, and Gotham Comedy Club, and given speeches at SXSW (South by Southwest) and DeafHope, a nonprofit dedicated to ending domestic and sexual violence against deaf women and children.

Crews’s memoir has received praise from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, ELLE magazine, and Library Journal, whose review states, “While there’s plenty of memoir fodder in the hearing-child-of-two-deaf-parents subject, Crews’s story has heartbreaking depth and complexity. With insight into her father’s feelings about deafness, his über-Christian family’s response to his violence against the women in his life, and the culture of the deaf community, this is a rich read.”

SUN, APR 1 @ 3PM

Blue Rock Café

5827 Darrow Road

Hudson, OH

330.650.2222 | http://www.BlueRockCafe.com

FREE with donations and portion of sales going to Summit County Battered Women’s Shelter: http://www.scmcbws.org/

"Poignant and unsettling." —Kirkus Reviews

"A compelling testament to the strength of the human spirit.”—Booklist

"Crews' account (the title refers to lighting brush on fire to clear out snakes) is as well-paced and stirring as a novel. In her fluid narrative (she's also a storyteller on the side, a gig that helped her develop this book), Crews neither wallows in self-pity nor plays for cheap black-comedic yuks. Instead, this book stands out for what matters most: Crews' story, bluntly told." —Elle magazine

“Harrowing…A remarkable odyssey of scorched earth, collateral damage, and survival." —Publishers Weekly

For more information about Kambri Crews, visit www.kambricrews.com.

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