**PLEASE NOTE THIS IS A VIRTUAL PROGRAM THAT WILL TAKE PLACE VIA ZOOM. Registrants will receive a link to access the Zoom Meeting via email.**  

Join author Kerri Arsenault for a presentation based on her new, critically-acclaimed book, Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains. 

About The Book: For over 100 years, the rural working class town of Mexico, Maine -- where the author grew up -- orbited around a paper mill that employed most townspeople, including three generations of Arsenault’s own family. Years after she moved away, Arsenault realized the price she paid for her seemingly secure childhood. The mill, while providing livelihoods for nearly everyone, also contributed to the destruction of the environment and the decline of the town’s economic, physical, and emotional health in a slow-moving catastrophe, earning the area the nickname “Cancer Valley.” Mill Town is a personal investigation, where Arsenault sifts through historical archives and scientific reports, talks to family and neighbors, and examines her own childhood to illuminate the rise and collapse of the working-class, the hazards of loving and leaving home, and the ambiguous nature of toxins and disease. Mill Town is a moral wake-up call that asks -- Whose lives are we willing to sacrifice for our own survival?

About The Author: Kerri Arsenault is the Book Review Editor at Orion magazine and Contributing Editor at Lithub. Arsenault received her MFA in Creative Writing from The New School and studied in Malmö University’s Communication for Development master’s programm. Her writing has appeared in Freeman’s, Lithub, Oprah.com, and The Minneapolis Star Tribune, among other publications. She lives in New England.

Register directly on Zoom HERE. Sponsored by the Friends of the Tewksbury Public Library. Presented in collaboration with libraries in North Reading and Wilmington.