First Novel Friday: Dominion, These Memories Do Not Belong to Us, and To the Moon and Back

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Friday, 6:00 pm EDT - 8:15 pm EDT September 5, 2025

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

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On the first Friday of the month, join us as we celebrate and launch a selection of the best debut novels published today. Be among the first to discover boundary-pushing and world-expanding work from exciting new voices in fiction.

Kick off the weekend with a happy hour at our cash bar for ticket holders in our Members Lounge starting at 6pm. Then, at 7pm, we’ll move to our auditorium for readings from the featured debut novelists, followed by a short moderated conversation. The party continues with book signings and signature cocktails to round out the night. Go home with something new—a book, a friend, a favorite Friday night tradition.

This month’s novels explore questions of belonging and examine the effects of systems of power, including families, corporations, governments, and the laws of nature. We are thrilled to welcome award-winning author Jacqueline Woodson (Brown Girl Dreaming, Red at the Bone) as the evening’s moderator. We hope you will support our featured debut novelists by purchasing their books at the event (purchase all three for 15% off). Space is limited, so reserve your spot today!

We offer two in-person ticket options: the $5 Community Ticket and the $15+ Supporter Ticket. Both provide the same access, but if you’re able, we kindly suggest registering for the Supporter Ticket to help sustain our programs for emerging writers.

September’s Featured Debuts:

Dominion by Addie E. Citchens
In Dominion, Addie E. Citchens tells the story of a powerful Black Southern family ruled by Reverend Sabre Winfrey, a man of faith, ambition, and control. His youngest son, Emmanuel—nicknamed Wonderboy—adored for his beauty and talent, faces a life-altering encounter that unsettles their carefully maintained world. Through the voices of the women around them, the novel explores how patriarchy thrives through silence, complicity, and fear—balancing moments of tenderness with the brutal weight of inherited power.

These Memories Do Not Belong to Us by Yiming Ma
In a future dominated by the Qin Empire, memories are no longer private. Through implanted Mindbanks, experiences can be bought, sold, and altered—fueling a society obsessed with living other people’s lives. When a young man inherits his late mother’s cache of forbidden memories, he uncovers a hidden history the regime wants to erase. Sweeping across time and place, These Memories Do Not Belong to Us is a bold exploration of control, resistance, and the fight to preserve truth.

To the Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage
After escaping an abusive home, Steph Harper is raised in Cherokee Nation, where she learns to survive by looking up—toward the moon, and a future far from Oklahoma. Determined to become the first Cherokee astronaut, she commits her life to the pursuit of flight. But ambition has its gravity. To the Moon and Back traces the unraveling and resilience of the women closest to her in a powerful story of belonging, sacrifice, and the search for space to exist.

In Conversation

Addie E. Citchens

Addie E. Citchens

Addie E. Citchens was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and lives in New Orleans. A graduate of Jackson State University, she studied in the Florida State University Creative Writing Program and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Oxford American’s “Best of the South,” Midnight & Indigo’s speculative fiction anthology, and other publications. Her blues history work features prominently in Mississippi Folklife, and she has been heard on The Mississippi Arts Hour on Mississippi Public Broadcasting. She was the inaugural recipient of the Farrar, Straus and Giroux Writer’s Fellowship, and her short story “That Girl” won the O. Henry Prize. Dominion is her first novel.

Photo Credit: Britt Smith
Yiming Ma

Yiming Ma

Born in Shanghai, Yiming Ma spent a decade in the tech and finance world across New York, Toronto, London and South Africa before writing the dystopian novel These Memories Do Not Belong to Us, set in a world where memories are bought and sold. He attended Stanford for his MBA, where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar, and also holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College, where he was named the Carol Houck Smith Scholar.

Photo Credit: Southspringbreeze
Eliana Ramage

Eliana Ramage

Eliana Ramage holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has received residencies and fellowships from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Lambda Literary, Tin House, and Vermont Studio Center. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation, she lives in Nashville with her family. To the Moon and Back is her first novel.

Photo Credit: Leah Margulies
Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson (New York State Author Laureate 2023-2025) is the recipient of a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and the 2018 Children’s Literature Legacy Award. She was the 2018–2019 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, and in 2015, she was named the Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. She received the 2014 National Book Award for her New York Times bestselling memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, which also received the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor, the NAACP Image Award and a Sibert Honor. She also wrote the adult books Red at the Bone, a New York Times bestseller, and Another Brooklyn, a 2016 National Book Award finalist. She is the author of dozens of award-winning books for young adults, middle graders and children; among her many accolades, she is a four-time Newbery Honor winner, a four-time National Book Award finalist, and a two-time Coretta Scott King Award winner. Her books include Remember Us, Before the Ever After, The World Belonged to Us, New York Times bestsellers The Day You Begin, The Year We Learned to Fly, and Harbor Me; The Other Side; Each Kindness; Caldecott Honor book Coming On Home Soon; Newbery Honor winners Feathers, Show Way, and After Tupac and D Foster; and Miracle’s Boys, which received the LA Times Book Prize and the Coretta Scott King Award. Jacqueline is also a recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement for her contributions to young adult literature and a two-time winner of the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award.

Photo Credit: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Featured Books

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Dominion

By Addie E. Citchens

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

PURCHASE

Reverend Sabre Winfrey, Jr., shepherd of the Seven Seals Missionary Baptist Church, believes in God, his own privilege, and enterprise. He owns the barbershop and the radio station, and generally keeps an iron hand on every aspect of society in Dominion, Mississippi. He and his wife, Priscilla, have five boys; the youngest, Emanuel, is called Wonderboy—no one sings prettier, runs as fast, or turns as many heads. But Wonderboy, his father, and all the structures in place that keep them on top are not as righteous as they seem to be. And when Wonderboy is caught off guard by an encounter with a stranger, he finds himself confronted by questions he’d never imagined. His response sends shock waves through the entire community.

Priscilla and Diamond, two women who love these men, bear witness to their charms and bear the brunt of their choices. Through their eyes and their stories, Dominion offers an intricate, intimate view of how secrets control us, how shame stifles us, how silence implicates us, and how even love plays a role in the everyday violence and casual sins of the powerful.

A brilliantly crafted Black Southern family drama told with the captivating force, humor, and tenderness carried in the hearts of these women, Addie E. Citchens’s Dominion wrestles with the many brutal, sinister ways in which we are shaped by fear and patriarchy, and studies how we might yet choose to break free.
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These Memories Do Not Belong to Us

By Yiming Ma

Published by HarperCollins

PURCHASE

When I was a boy, my mother used to tell me stories of a world before memories could be shared between strangers…

In a far-off future ruled by the Qin Empire, every citizen is fitted with a Mindbank, an intracranial device capable of recording and transmitting memories between minds. This technology gives birth to Memory Capitalism, where anyone with means can relive the life experiences of others. It also unleashes opportunities for manipulation: memories can be edited, marketed, and even corrupted for personal gain.

After the sudden passing of his mother, an unnamed narrator inherits a collection of banned memories from her Mindbank so dangerous that even possessing them places his freedom in jeopardy. Traversing genres, empires, and millennia, they are tales of sumo wrestlers and social activists and armless swimmers and watchmakers, struggling amid the backdrop of Qin’s ascent toward global dominance. Determined to release his mother’s memories to the world before they are destroyed forever, the narrator will risk everything—even if the cost is his own life.

Powerful and provocative, These Memories Do Not Belong to Us masterfully explores how governments and media manipulate history to control the collective imagination. It forces us to see beyond the sheen of convenient truths and to unearth real stories of sacrifice and love that refuse to be eradicated.

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To the Moon and Back

By Eliana Ramage

Published by Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster

PURCHASE

My mother took my sister and me, and she drove through the night to a place she felt a claim to, a place on earth she thought we might be safe. I stopped asking questions. I picked little glass pieces from my sister’s hair. I watched the moon.

Steph Harper is on the run. When she was five, her mother fled an abusive husband—with Steph and her younger sister in tow—to Cherokee Nation, where she hoped they might finally belong. In response, Steph sets her sights as far away from Oklahoma as she can get, vowing that she will let nothing get in the way of pursuing the rigorous physical and academic training she knows she will need to be accepted by NASA, and ultimately, to go to the moon.

Spanning three decades and several continents, To the Moon and Back encompasses Steph’s turbulent journey, along with the multifaceted and intertwined lives of the three women closest to her: her sister Kayla, an artist who goes on to become an Indigenous social media influencer, and whose determination to appear good takes her life to unexpected places; Steph’s college girlfriend Della Owens, who strives to reclaim her identity as an adult after being removed from her Cherokee family through a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act; and Hannah, Steph and Kayla’s mother, who has held up her family’s tribal history as a beacon of inspiration to her children, all the while keeping her own past a secret.

In Steph’s certainty that only her ambition can save her, she will stretch her bonds with each of these women to the point of breaking, at once betraying their love and generosity, and forcing them to reconsider their own deepest desires in her shadow. Told through an intricately woven tapestry of narrative, To the Moon and Back is an astounding and expansive novel of mothers and daughters, love and sacrifice, alienation and heartbreak, terror and wonder. At its core, it is the story of the extraordinary lengths to which one woman will go to find space for herself.