A Song for Olaf - Press Release
A Tender Story of Family & Love Against the Firestorm of the Early HIV- AIDS Pandemic
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Announcing the release on June 1, 2025 of A Song for Olaf: A Memoir of Sibling Love at the Dawn of the HIV-AIDS Pandemic, a heartfelt book that resonates deeply with our historic moment. In the aftershock of the arrival of Covid-19 and the mounting and retrograde societal backlash against the LGBTQ community, Jennifer Boulanger’s memoir arrives, recalling a tragic time in our collective American experience that bears a powerful message for the present.
A Song for Olaf is the story of the uncommonly close bond between a brother and sister, a bond which endured the turbulence of the 1960s, the emergence of the HIV-AIDS pandemic, and the illness and untimely death that tore an upstate New York family apart. The history of the times is deftly woven into the narrative, revealing the characters’ powerful experience within a culture of discrimination and societal negligence.
Jennifer Boulanger is a journalist, educator, activist, mother, and the sister of the eponymous Olaf. A former professor and community college dean, today she is a passionate advocate for the refugee community of Central New York. In A Song for Olaf, Boulanger has found her writerly voice and a voice for us all. In her taut and lyrical chapters, readers will fall in love with her raffish, adored, musically inclined, sophisticated, yet ever endearing older brother. Capturing the zeitgeist of that era, Boulanger transforms what might seem at first glance a small life of a smalltown boy into an operatic story of beauty and loss, with deep cultural significance.
A Song for Olaf is available from Saint Julian Press through Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, Better Books, and regional bookstores TBA. Please contact the author via Mnemosyne Books, mnemosynebks@yahoo.com, for review copies and information about booking author interviews, speaking engagements, and readings.
Mnemosyne Books is a new imprint of Saint Julian Press, Inc., which we established in 2025 to publish memoirs by exceptional writers. Elizabeth Cohn is the senior editor overseeing our publications. You may reach her at - mnemosynebks@yahoo.com.
Bookshop.org eBook
Bookshop.org Print Edition
—Ron Starbuck, Publisher
Saint Julian Press, Inc.
Houston, Texas