The Blue Hill Public Library and Blue Hill Books are cosponsoring an author event with author Alice Markham-Cantor in conversation with Ann Packer for her new book The Once and Future Witch Hunt on Tuesday August 27 at 7PM in the library's Howard Room. 

Past and present collide in this page-turner investigation into Salem’s irrepressible question: How could this have happened?

In 1692, Martha Allen Carrier was hanged in the Salem witch trials as the “Queen of Hell.” Three hundred years later, her nine-times-great-granddaughter, Alice Markham-Cantor, set out to discover why Martha had died. As she chased her ancestor through the archives, graveyards, and haunted places of New England, grappling with what we owe the past, Alice discovered a shocking truth: witch hunts didn’t end in Salem.

Extensively researched and told through alternating fiction and non-fiction chapters, The Once & Future Witch Hunt does not treat Salem as a cautionary tale. It treats Salem as an instruction manual–not on how to perform witch hunts, but how to stop them.

Alice Markham-Cantor is a writer and fact-checker from Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been published in New York Magazine, Scientific American, The Nation, and elsewhere. She serves on the working committee of the International Network Against Accusations of Witch Hunting and Associated Harms (TINAAWAHP), and spoke at the first and second Feminist Conferences on the Witch Hunts hosted by the Campaña por la Memoria de las Brujas in Spain. She is the writer and co-producer of A Witch Story, an award-winning documentary about Salem and her research. You can find her on Twitter @alicemdashc.

Ann Packer is the acclaimed author of two collections of short fiction, Swim Back to Me and Mendocino and Other Stories, and three bestselling novels, The Children’s Crusade, Songs Without Words, and The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, which received the Kate Chopin Literary Award, among many other prizes and honors. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and in the O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies, and her novels have been published around the world. Her next novel, Some Bright Nowhere, is forthcoming from Harper.

This event is free and open to all, and will be held in the library's Howard Room. For more information, please email Assistant Director Kayleigh Thomas at kayleigh.thomas[at]bhpl.net or call the library at 374-5515. Blue Hill Books will be onsite with copies of the book available for purchase.