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After growing up a concert pianist in late Soviet Russia, River Adams (they/them) came to America as a Jewish refugee. They graduated from Rosemont College and Harvard Divinity School, then returned to Philadelphia to teach religious studies and work as a medical interpreter for Russian-speaking patients. Today, having earned an MFA from Emerson College, they live in Massachusetts. They are the author of many published short stories and essays and a biography of Leonard Swidler, There Must Be YOU (2014). The Light of Seven Days is their debut novel.
"""Adams' lyrical prose paints a lush, vivid, and imagistic portrait of the world through Dinah's eyes.... A quiet, artfully rendered story of the beauty and difficulty of coming-of-age between cultures, in the shadow of history."" -- Kirkus Reviews ""In River Adams' bracing and lyrical debut, The Light of Seven Days, a ballerina from the Soviet Union escapes to Philadelphia, a land of McDonalds and RiteAids, and the questions she finds: What is it like to flee from radical extremism? What does it mean to be white? To be American? To believe in God? could not be larger or more relevant. Adams' novel reminds us that the eyes of the immigrant and the artist alike can make the familiar seem strange and the strange familiar."" -- Kevin Birmingham, New York Times bestselling author of The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses ""In River Adams' lush, richly textured novel, we are taken so completely inside the Jewish Russian emigre experience, we forget the world we are sitting in. We breathe the close air of the ballet studio, taste the fresh black bread, and feel the terror of being 'other' in 1990s Leningrad. The journey from the Soviet Union to Philadelphia is exquisitely wrought and includes explorations of found family, the personal divine, and how to spend our short years on earth."" -- Jennifer Acker, author of The Limits of the World ""A bittersweet portrait of a young immigrant. River Adams offers an eye-opening account of the absurdities and private joys of late-twentieth-century Russia, as well as of class and race in America, in language that is frank, sensuous, and heartbreaking."" -- Michelle Syba, author of End Times"
