The Auburn Conference by Tom Piazza

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