Folio Presents – My Name Is Allen White: Sally J. McMillan in Conversation with Lynn Olson

Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum celebrates the release of Folio member and author Sally J. McMillan’s debut novel, My Name Is Allen White, available to purchase at the event. Sally will be in conversation with Folio member and award winning writer Lynn Olson.

Allen White was taught to be a believer. Instead, he became a nuclear physicist, astrophotographer, and musician.Raised in a faith community that discouraged questions, Allen’s inquiries took him places that his church and his father could not tolerate.

Narrated by Allen himself at age thirty-three, My Name Is Allen White unfolds across three pivotal discoveries, each one a wonder, each one a wound. The upheavals of mid-twentieth-century America provide an expansive backdrop to Allen’s personal challenges. But his great controversy unfolds in the narrow foreground of home.

Sally J. McMillan spent twenty-two years at the University of Tennessee, where she was a professor of communication, department head, associate dean, and vice provost. In retirement, she writes fiction, essays, poetry, and news articles at the intersection of communication, technology, and American life. Her writing is also informed by her earlier work as a high school teacher, book editor, nonprofit leader, journalist, technology-company executive, and higher-education consultant.

Lynn Olson worked in the K-12 program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation from 2008 to 2017, serving as a senior program officer, senior adviser to the director, and deputy director for knowledge management and strategic alliances. Prior to joining the foundation, Olson was an award-winning writer and editor for over two decades at the national newspaper Education Week, and earlier in her career she was a writer, editor, and policy analyst at the Children’s Defense Fund in Washington, D.C. She is a graduate of Yale University.

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