Join us for an evening with writer and scholar Amy Bass as she talks about and reads from her book One Goal: A Coach, a Team, and the Game that Brought a Divided Town Together on Tuesday, April 9 from 7:00 – 8:00 pm, Woodbury Room at the Jones Library.  

When thousands of Somali refugees resettled in Lewiston, Maine, a struggling, overwhelmingly white town, longtime residents grew uneasy. Then the mayor wrote a letter asking Somalis to stop coming, which became a national story. While scandal threatened to subsume the town, its high school’s soccer coach integrated Somali kids onto his team, and their passion began to heal old wounds. Taking readers behind the tumult of this controversial team – and onto the pitch where the teammates vied to become state champions and achieved a vital sense of understanding – One Goal is a timely story about overcoming the prejudices that divide us.

Emmy award-winning writer Amy Bass, Ph.D., is Professor of Sport Studies and Chair of the Division of Social Science and Communication at Manhattanville College. As a writer and scholar, she engages audiences inside and outside of academia with a focus on sports, culture, and politics. Her first book, Not the Triumph, but the Struggle: the 1968 Olympic Games and the Making of the Black Athlete, is considered a standard-bearer for the study of sport from a cultural perspective. Her most recent work, One Goal: A Coach, a Team, and the Game That Brought a Divided Town Together, was named a best book of 2018 by the Boston Globe and Library Journal.  A native of the Berkshires, she resides in the New York metropolitan area with her husband, daughter, and a dog named Cuffy. Bass received a Ph.D. in History with distinction from Stony Brook University.

Bass will also be speaking at UMass on Monday, April 8 from 4:00 – 5:30 pm in 601 Herter Hall in a presentation entitled Listen to Athletes for a Change: Why Sports Matter.  Learn more at https://www.umass.edu/history/events/listen-athletes-change-why-sports-matter