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Riders on the Orphan Train: a multi-media program
w/ Alison Moore

Thursday, February 21
7 p.m.
$5 Suggested Donation

Alison Moore, former Assistant Professor of English/Creative Writing at the University of Arizona MFA Program will read excerpts from her 2012 novel, Riders on the Orphan Train. The event will feature the multi-media program that Moore tours nationally with as outreach for the National Orphan Train Complex Museum and Research Center. The program combines live music, video with historic photo montage and survivor interviews, and a dramatic reading from the new novel. Austin songwriter Phil Lancaster performs and sings original songs with Moore in the multi-media program.

Moore’s historical novel, Riders on the Orphan Train chronicles the lives of two children among approximately 250,000 young people “placed out” between 1854 and 1929; boarding trains in New York City and literally given away at rail stations across the country. A brief encounter aboard the same westbound train makes a lifelong impression on a pair of 11-year olds, Maud Farrell and Ezra Duval; and while theirs are different stories, the two share an enduring connection. Their lives unfold in a loose braid across Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona in the time before and during World War I and the decades that follow through the Great Depression. From the teeming streets of New York among a crush of immigrants;  through the winding down of the old West; the dustbowl; even an intimate brush with Coin Harvey and his ill-fated Monte Ne experiment, Riders on the Orphan Train is a story of the search for home, of dislocation, of loss and the rapidly-changing quality of American life. www.ridersontheorphantrain.org

Alison Moore is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the author of three previous books: The Middle of Elsewhere (Phoenix International, 2006), Synonym for Love (Penguin/Plume 1996), and Small Spaces between Emergencies (Mercury House, 1993), a National Library Association Notable Book. She has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction. She lives in Austin, TX. www.alisonmoorebooks.com