Author and UH Creative Writing Program alumna Kristine S. Ervin will visit the Honors College on Monday, Nov. 18, from 1-2:30 p.m. in the Honors College Commons. She will read from her memoir Rabbit Heart, and participate in a Q&A with Honors College faculty member Robert Liddell. Refreshments will be served. This event is sponsored by The Honors College and the Medicine and Society minor.

"Melding true crime with memoir, Ervin reminds us of what happens when we conflate people with the transgressions committed against them — the collateral damage we inflict when we turn human beings into moral allegory . . . A powerful treatise on love and loss, on mothers and daughters, but it is also a warning to all of us who consume true crime." — The New York Times Book Review

RABBIT HEART BLURB/AUTHOR BIO
Kristine S. Ervin was eight years old when her mother, Kathy Sue Engle, was abducted from an Oklahoma mall parking lot and violently murdered in an oil field. First, there was grief. Then the desire to know: what happened to her, what she felt in her last terrible moments, and all she was before these acts of violence defined her life.

In her mother’s absence, Ervin tried to reconstruct a woman she can never fully grasp—from her own memory, from letters she uncovered, and the stories of other family members. As more information about her mother’s death came to light, Ervin’s drive to know her mother only intensified, winding its way into her own fraught adolescence. In the process of both, she reckons with contradictions of what a woman is allowed to be — a self beyond the roles of wife, mother, daughter, victim — what a “true” victim is supposed to look like, and, finally, how complicated and elusive justice can be.

Told fearlessly and poetically, Rabbit Heart weaves together themes of power, gender, and justice into a manifesto of grief and reclamation: our stories do not need to be simple to be true, and there is power in the telling.

Ervin grew up in a small suburb of Oklahoma City and now teaches creative writing at West Chester University, outside Philadelphia. She holds an master's in poetry from New York University and a doctorate in creative writing and literature, with a focus in nonfiction, from the University of Houston.