On Exhibit at Robeson Library: Toward Camden by Mercy Romero

In Toward Camden, Mercy Romero writes about the relationships that make and sustain the largely African American and Puerto Rican Cramer Hill neighborhood in New Jersey where she grew up. She walks the city and writes outdoors to think about the collapse and transformation of property. She revisits lost and empty houses—her family’s house, the Walt Whitman House, and the landscape of a vacant lot. Throughout, Romero engages with the aesthetics of fragment and ruin; her writing juts against idioms of redevelopment. She resists narratives of the city that are inextricable from crime and decline and witnesses everyday lives lived at the intersection of spatial and Puerto Rican diasporic memory. Toward Camden travels between what official reports say and what the city’s vacant lots withhold.

Romero, the Chancellor’s Distinguished Visiting Scholar, will be on campus in October for the following events:

• Wednesday, October 2, from 5 p.m. – 7 p.m.: Keynote Address and Workshop at the Digital Commons
• Sunday, October 6, from 5 p.m. – 7 p.m.: Book Club at the South ABC Conference Room, Campus Center
• Thursday, October 10, from 5 p.m. – 7 p.m.: “Picturing Community: Alonzo Adams and Mercy Romero,” at the Stedman Art Gallery
• Saturday, October 12, from 1 p.m. – 4 p.m.: “Writing about Home: Writers House Workshop” at the Rutgers-Camden Writers House

Visit each link for the event of interest for registration information.