Joe Mozingo

The Fiddler on Pantico Run (Free Press)

Award-winning Los Angeles Times reporter Joe Mozingo will discuss and sign his book The Fiddler on Pantico Run, about his search for the history behind his African last name. Mozingo discovers that he is decended from a Jamestown slave who sued for his freedom, married a white woman, became a tobacco farmer, and fathered one of the country's first mixed-race family lines.  It's a uniquely American story, revealing the unusual history of race in our country.

"Vividly fascinating … [Mozingo] unpacks our mixed-race colonial history and its heartbreaking consequences…. Mozingo’s most revelatory finding—the fundamental arbitrariness of racial designations—implicitly raises another question: What, if anything, does our genealogy really say about us?” —Elle Magazine Joe Mozingo is a projects reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He won a Robert F. Kennedy Award for his coverage of the earthquake in Haiti and helped lead a Miami Herald reporting team whose investigation into the crash of the space shuttle Columbia was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The Fiddler on Pantico Run was named a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, administered by Columbia University and Harvard Nieman Foundation.  He lives in Southern California with his wife and two children. THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS OCTOBER 15, 2012. Books from this event can be purchased here: http://tinyurl.com/b325kdt