What if famous writers and activists from the 1800s met for a conference about the future of America? What would they say?

Join us at Auburn Public Theater for a meet and greet with the author, Tom Piazza, who answers these questions, and a staged reading of excerpts from his insightful book, "The Auburn Conference."

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It is 1883, and America is at a crossroads. At a tiny college in Upstate New York, an idealistic young professor has managed to convince Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Confederate memoirist Forrest Taylor, and romance novelist Lucy Comstock to participate in the first (and last) Auburn Writers’ Conference for a public discussion about the future of the nation. By turns brilliantly comic and startlingly prescient, The Auburn Conference vibrates with questions as alive and urgent today as they were in 1883—the chronic American conundrums of race, class, and gender, and the fate of the democratic ideal.