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About the Book:

On March 5, CBE Member Casey Schwartz is going deep with the phenomenal writer Stefan Merrill Block, author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, Homeschooled.

Stefan was nine when his mother pulled him from school, certain that his teachers were “stifling his creativity.” Hungry for more time with her boy who was growing up too quickly, she began to instruct Stefan in the family’s living room. Beyond his formal lessons in math, however, Stefan was largely left to his own devices and his mother’s increasingly erratic theories and whims, such as her project to recapture her twelve-year-old son’s early years by bleaching his hair and putting him on a crawling regimen.

Years before homeschooling would become a massive nationwide movement, at a time when it had just become legal in his home state of Texas, Stefan vanished into that largely unseen space. But when, after five years away from the outside world, Stefan reentered the public school system in Plano as a freshman, he was in for a jarring awakening.

At once a novelistic portrait of mother and son, and an illuminating window into an overlooked corner of the American education system, Homeschooled is a moving, funny, and ultimately inspiring story of a son’s battle for a life of his own choosing, and the wages of a mother’s insatiable love.


Author Bios:

Stefan Merrill Block grew up in Plano, Texas. He is the author of Homeschooled, a memoir, as well as three novels: The Story of Forgetting, The Storm at the Door, and Oliver Loving. Stefan’s fiction has been translated into ten languages, and his stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker Page-Turner, The Guardian, NPR’s Radiolab, GRANTA, and many other publications. He lives with his family in upstate New York, where he is a co-owner of Skate Time, a beloved local roller rink

Casey Schwartz is the author of two books, most recently Attention: A Love Story. She was a contributing writer at the Washington Post’s Book World; her writing also appears in the New York Times and other publications.

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Wed, March 11 2026 22 Adar 5786