Fleetwood launches book at Fitton
Hamilton, OH – The city shaped her. It stands to reason Hamilton native Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood would host a launch event for her memoir, Between the River and the Railroad Tracks, in her hometown.
The FREE community event is set for 7 p.m. Friday, November 20, at the Fitton Center for Creative Arts (101 S. Monument Avenue, Hamilton, Ohio 45011).
In partnership with book publisher Little Brown, the Lane Library, the Butler County Historical Society, Booker T. Washington Community Center and the Fitton Center, Samy Broyles moderates an author discussion with Fleetwood in the Fitton Family Theater. Nicole’s aunts – The Fleetwood Sisters – will perform several traditional a capella hymns before the discussion as part of the program.
Prior to the book event, guests may visit the Fitton Center’s first-floor Community Gallery for an exhibition of sculptures created from debris collected along the banks of the Little Miami River by Miami University Hamilton art students. The gallery-opening celebration runs from 5:30 to 7 p.m. (Fitton Center galleries are always free and open to the public.)
Fleetwood – a 1990 graduate of Hamilton High School – grew up about half a mile from the future site of the Fitton Center in the 2nd Ward neighborhood now known as Riverview. She went on to undergraduate studies at Miami University in Oxford and graduate school at Stanford University. She now serves as a New York University professor, is the acclaimed author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration and won a MacArthur Fellowship.
Between the River and the Railroad Tracks will be available at the event and Fleetwood will sign copies for guests after the discussion.
Little Brown called her memoir “meticulously crafted and unflinchingly vulnerable. Nicole R. Fleetwood’s multigenerational family portrait braids the intimate life of a neighborhood with the historic arc that shaped it to offer an untold story of the black Midwest.”
Publisher’s Weekly described it in a starred review as a “brilliant account of growing up in a majority-Black Ohio neighborhood in the 1970s. With cinematic scope, Fleetwood chronicles her and her family’s attempts to 'be birthed anew, to have vision enough' to escape the burdens of slavery and segregation in Hamilton, Ohio’s Second Ward. …(Fleetwood) trains her keen powers of observation on the ways her home has shaped her (in) a stirring self-portrait.”
Fleetwood is no stranger to the Fitton Center. In 2023 she co-curated the Home Free exhibition with Aimee Wissman and Kamisha Thomas of Ohio’s Returning Artist Guildi, presenting dramatic visual art by currently and formerly incarcerated artists from around the state.
Her Marking Time book became a traveling art exhibition as well, running to rave reviews at prestigious venues like New York’s MoMA PS1 and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati. With both, she hoped to shine a light on communities in crisis because of mass incarceration.
When discussing those previous projects, Fleetwood said Hamilton and the Second Ward helped get her ready for her career.
“The best part about growing up in Ohio, in Hamilton, was having a large, loving extended family and having lots of love and support from the black community in Hamilton,” she said. “I feel like I received a great education here. I’m a proud alum of Hamilton public schools and I got a full-ride scholarship to Miami University, graduated magna cum laude and went on to graduate school at Stanford. Hamilton prepared me for all of that.”
The Fitton Center for Creative Arts is located at 101 S. Monument Avenue on the Riverfront in downtown Hamilton, Ohio.
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