Mikita Brottman will join us to talk about her book, An Unexplained Death: The True Story of a Body at the Belvedere.  The book, shortlisted for the 2018 ACLS Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award for Non-Fiction, examines Rey Rivera’s purported suicidal jump from the roof of the Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore’s historic Mt. Vernon neighborhood. Certain details didn’t add up for Brottman, and she found herself researching the typical motives and mechanisms of suicide as well as the historic hotel’s abundant history of suicide.

Mikita Brottman is a writer, mostly of non-fiction, with an interest in reconsidering and interrogating  the true crime genre. In addition to An Unexplained Death, her other titles include Couple Found Slain (Henry Holt, 2021), The Maximum Security Book Club (Harper, 2016), and her upcoming Guilty Creatures (One Signal/Simon & Schuster, 2024).

She has been a lecturer or professor at universities in both her native England and the United States. Currently she teaches courses on Edgar Allan Poe, The Uncanny, animal studies and true crime in the Department of Humanistic Studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. She is also a certified psychoanalyst, and has worked in prisons and in forensic psychiatric facilities. Her articles and forensic case studies have appeared in The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, New Literary History, American Imago, and elsewhere. Currently, her academic research investigates the historical relationship between psychoanalysis and the occult.

• This FREE event will be presented in-person and virtually.
• To attend in person we strongly encourage you to register here.
• Free parking vouchers are available to program attendees who park at the Franklin Street Garage (15 W. Franklin Street) after 4pm.  Ask Pratt event staff for your parking voucher prior to or after the program.