Saturday, September 9 at 1:30 pm
Gina Bright will discuss The Charon Club, a fictional chronicle of AIDS nurses’ memories and experiences, set in the midst of an emerging infectious disease in the eastern United States in 2021, which is based on her experiences working on an AIDS unit in New York City during the darkest years of the pandemic. It is the first AIDS novel solely devoted to the work of nurses.
Gina M. Bright’s short stories have appeared in Sundial Magazine, The Copperfield Review and Zoomorphic. She wrote a non-fiction book, Plague-Making and the AIDS Epidemic: A Story of Discrimination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), years after working on an AIDS unit in New York City. Gina has a doctorate in medieval English literature and enjoys her work as an oncology nurse in Norfolk, Va. and travelling with her husband, Mike, now that the world has opened back up again. The Charon Club is her first novel, but certainly not her last one.
The AIDS Quilt will be on display in June 2021 for the 40th anniversary of the first cases, but it will be its last appearance as ordered by the heavy hand of the President of the United States. Nine nurses who worked with AIDS patients during the early years of the pandemic travel to Washington, D.C. to see the Quilt.