The Kerrytown BookFest is hosting Michigan Notable Book Award Winner Mary Ellen Geist as one of the featured author’s at the 7^th Annual BookFest. Geist will speak 3 P.M. Sunday, September 13 at the Ann Arbor Farmers Market. Geist’s book “Measure of the Heart” has received critical acclaim for its intense and warm look at a daughter who comes home to help her mother care for her father who has Alzheimer’s.

Geist was an international correspondent with CBS Radio who walked away from her job to come home to Michigan and help her mother care for her father. In her book, she tells the dramatic story of her father’s battle with Alzheimer’s and her ever-evolving relationship with him.

Of all the awards in her career, having “Measure” selected as a 2009 Michigan Notable Book may be the one she´s proudest of. “I don’t care about the decision I made about my career,” Geist said. “Other values took over. I had to come home.”

After spending the day caring for her father, Geist said she would wake at 3 a.m. and write for personal therapy with no idea that her writing would ever become a book. But after giving a presentation to a group in New York, a New York Times writer who was in the audience wrote a front page feature for Thanksgiving Day 2005 that propelled Geist into a new world. Geist said the response to that article was more than she had ever received in her professional career (during which she had covered Princess Diana and the O.J. Simpson trial).
“Agents started calling,” she said.

Since then, Geist has been on the other side of the microphone, giving interviews on major media outlets, including NBC’s “Today” show and NPR’s “Diane Rehm Show.” This past spring, a portion of her father’s story was included in the four-part HBO documentary “The Alzheimer’s Project.”
Geist believes her book helped open a new discussion. “There is often a sense of shame for the caregiver’s job,” she said. “When people would tell me I should get another job, I thought, ‘There is pride in this job.’”

The author considers her book to be a “gift from her father.” In addition to helping her tell a compelling story about one family’s relationship with Alzheimer’s, Geist said her father’s illness also spurred her to take up jazz singing again; she found that singing together (her father sang in an a capella group) reunited them.

Geist’s experience of taking the everyday and putting it to words may be, as Nancy Robertson, director of the Library of Michigan, said, the unifying feature of the Michigan Notable Books.  Visit Geist’s website by clicking here.