China Martens: "The Avenue"

The Avenue is a novel about a single mother who works at an antique store – in 2004 before the stock market crash, when the antique stores had just started popping up everywhere in the increasingly white-on-white gentrified Hampden, Baltimore. It’s about wanting a better world and living in this one. It’s about a mango margarita and a record store guy. It’s about value, matter, and objects changing hands.

From groundbreaking zinester and essayist China Martens comes a raw, luminous debut novel that transforms the gritty everyday of working-class Baltimore into something transcendent. Following Mattie, a thirty-eight-year-old single mom navigating precarious employment, teenage chaos, and heartbreak on The Avenue, Martens crafts an unflinching portrait of survival that pulses with magic and beauty.

About the Author:

China Martens is a zinestress extraordinaire born in Baltimore. Her first book, The Future Generation: The Zine-Book for Subculture Parents, Kids, Friends & Others, is a compilation of 16 years of her first zine that was reissued in March 2017. She is also the co-editor of Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind: Concrete Ways To Support Families In Social Justice Movements & Communities and Revolutionary Mothering: Love On The Front Lines, an anthology which centers mothers of color and marginalized mothers voices, which Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker called “Juicy, gutsy, vulnerable, and brave.” The Avenue is her first novel.

About the Program:

• Doors will open to registered attendees at 1 pm.
• Books will be available for purchase before and after the event.
• Free street parking available along Falls Road and 37th Street. Bike parking available at the building.

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