Loyalty is so excited to welcome Martha Toll and Kiese Laymon for a virtual event celebrating Three Muses! This event will be held digitally via Crowdcast. Click here to register for the event with a donation of any amount of your choice. You can also order the book on our website to be automatically added to the event's registration list. Donations will go to the Catherine Coleman Fund at Jackson State University. There will also be an option to snag the book during the event.

“Martha Anne Toll's Three Muses is so surprisingly soulful. The surprise doesn't lie in the existence of textured prose that explores dance, music, love, and time in wholly different ways; it lies in how that textured prose actually creates a new time signature wholly dependent on practice and discipline. This is phenomenal writing. It just is.” - Kiese Makeba Laymon, bestselling author of Heavy, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and Long Division

Three Muses is a love story that enthralls: a tale of Holocaust survival venturing through memory, trauma, and identity, while raising the curtain on the unforgiving discipline of ballet. In post-WWII New York, John Curtin suffers lasting damage from having been forced to sing for the concentration camp kommandant who murdered his family. John trains to be a psychiatrist, struggling to wrest his life from his terror of music and his past. Katya Symanova climbs the arduous path to Prima Ballerina of the New York State Ballet, becoming enmeshed in an abusive relationship with her choreographer, who makes Katya a star but controls her life. When John receives a ticket to attend a ballet featuring Katya Symanova, a spell is cast. As John and Katya follow circuitous paths to one another, fear and promise rise in equal measure. Song, Discipline, and Memory weave their way through love and loss, heartbreak and triumph.

Martha Anne Toll’s reviews, essays, and short fiction regularly appear in NPR Books, The Washington Post, The Millions, and elsewhere. A passionate advocate for racial and social justice, Martha was the founding Executive Director of the Butler Family Fund. She lives with her husband, a climate activist, and their espresso machine just outside Washington, DC. They are the lucky parents of two daughters. Three Muses is Martha’s debut novel. Please visit her at www.marthannetoll.com and @marthaannetoll.

Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, Kiese Laymon is the Ottilie Schillig Professor in English and Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi and author of the novel Long Division, the memoir Heavy, and the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. He was recently named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow.

Please note Loyalty has a zero tolerance policy for harassment or intimidation of any kind during this virtual event.

Martha Toll and Kiese Laymon for THREE MUSES