Twenty-two years ago, while working in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., Jordan Patterson bought a handful of antique Bohemian chandelier crystals and began transforming them into jewelry. Those crystals inspired a children’s story about a Czech orphan who becomes a Bohemian princess. She never imagined that story would lead her to move to Prague to open an orphanage, where an unexpected meeting with a Czech prince opened the door to a hidden world of European royalty and aristocracy.

Back in America, she didn’t go looking for these stories—they seemed to find her everywhere she went. Patterson began meeting princes, princesses, counts, and baronesses whose families had been forever changed by war, Nazi occupation, and Communist rule before rebuilding their lives in the United States. Twenty-two years after buying those Bohemian crystals, she found herself in another Georgetown—Georgetown, Texas—where she discovered she had landed in the heart of Czech Texas. Those extraordinary encounters ultimately inspired her newly released children’s book, A True Bohemian Princess.

Blending memoir, history, and remarkable true stories, Patterson will trace the surprising journey from old-world Bohemia to Central Texas—from European families displaced by war and revolution to the Czech and Moravian immigrants who settled communities such as Taylor, Granger, and Corn Hill in the late nineteenth century. Along the way, she explores what survives when families leave one world behind and build another—and how Czech heritage continues to shape Central Texas generations later.

Joining Patterson for a special conversation will be Georgetown resident Lucy Oxberry, whose extraordinary family history bridges European nobility, diplomacy, art, and political exile. Oxberry came to the United States at age five after her family fled Communist Czechoslovakia when her father was blacklisted. Through her mother, she descends from Polish nobility. Her grandfather, renowned Czechoslovak diplomat Vladimír Radimský, served his country abroad, including as envoy to Sweden, while her great-uncle, Václav Radimský, became one of the most celebrated Czech Impressionist painters of his generation and lived and painted in France alongside the Impressionists.

Together, Patterson and Oxberry will bring this sweeping history down to the human scale—through stories of aristocracy and exile, immigration and reinvention, and the unexpected ways the old world of Bohemia still echoes in Georgetown and across Central Texas.