Wednesday, September 15, 7pm – Crime Fiction

Duane Swierczynski & Dennis Tafoya

Duane Swierczynski author of Expiration Date ($13.99 Minotaur Books) In this neighborhood, make a wrong turn… and you’re history.

Dennis Tafoya author of The Wolves of Fairmount Park ($25.99 Minotaur Books) The Wolves of Fairmount is Dennis Tafoya’s lyrical, intense, sometimes tragic and sometimes hopeful second novel.

Friday, September 10, 6pm – Science Fiction

Chandler Davis

author of It Walks in Beauty: Selected Prose of Chandler Davis

edited and with an introduction by Josh Lukin

Harvard awarded Chandler Davis a PhD in mathematics in 1950. Three years later, Davis was served with a subpoena as a result of his having paid for the printing of a pamphlet critical of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and his subsequent ordeal included the loss of his job at the University of Michigan and a six-month imprisonment in 1960 for contempt of Congress. Blacklisted from full-time academic jobs in the US, he ultimately found employment in 1962 at the University of Toronto, where he is now an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics. It Walks in Beauty collects several of his science fiction stories, which probe deeply into such social and political issues as nuclear escalation, gender roles, and eugenics, as well as a selection of his essays, originally published in venues ranging from The New York Review of Books to the Waging Peace Series of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. The volume also includes a lengthy interview of Davis by Lukin; a speech Davis made at the February 1995 meeting of AAAS; and three essays by Lukin, taking a long view of Davis’s work. In addition to his lifelong activism as a civil libertarian, Davis has been a director of Science for Peace and is a trustee of the Davis-Putter scholarship fund, founded by his father in 1961 to award grants to students working for peace and social justice. A poet and composer as well as a long-time co-editor of The Mathematical Intelligencer, Professor Davis combined his artistic and scientific interests in the anthology The Shape of Content: Creative Writing in Mathematics and Science (Chandler Davis, Marjorie Senechal, and Jan Zwicky, editors. Wellesley, MA: AK Peters, 2009).

Although Chandler Davis has published less than a score of science-fiction short stories, some of us have long treasured them as brilliant gems. Josh Lukin’s thoughtful collection of Davis’s fiction and nonfiction offers 21st-century readers a fine introduction to the work of this neglected and invaluable writer.
— H. Bruce Franklin, author of War Stars: The Superweapon in the American Imagination and Vietnam and Other American Fantasies

This is a wonderful and unusual selection of science fiction and political/psychological non-fiction, a collection of writing by Chandler Davis. Informed by his personal life, his unwavering political activism over the last half century, his professional life as a mathematician, Davis’ work provides invaluable insight and direction about what is to be done ¡V and always with wit, clarity, tolerance, and dissent. Whether writing imaginatively or factually, he shows how narcissism so destructively gets in the way of seeing others as real people and how it works against acknowledging what is unknown. Chandler Davis relates to past, present, and future times, always open to decipher the whole picture and to speak up.
— Judith Deutsch, President of Science for Peace

This is a terrific book. I can’t remember the last time I have seen fiction, especially science fiction, put so richly in context. It Walks in Beauty introduces us to a remarkable man, gives us insight into the American science fiction community of the 1940s and 50s, and reminds us how much damage the McCarthy era of red hunts did to ordinary human lives and to American civilization. Among the stories, I especially like “The Names of Yanils,” a thoughtful consideration of the relation of people to tradition, and “It Walks in Beauty,” an utterly creepy and true description of sex roles in 50s America. I remember those sex roles, just as I remember the red hunts.We have not recovered yet. Nor will we recover until the ideas and integrity of people like Chandler Davis are incorporated into our history and culture.
— Eleanor Arnason, author of Ring of Swords and A Woman of the Iron People

Wednesday July 28, 7pm – Author Event
Aaron Michael Morales author of Drowning Tucson (15.95 Coffee House Press)

“Morales wrestles with nothing less than the parameters  of the human soul.”  Luis Alberto Urrea

“You will not forget Drowning Tucson. The characters will haunt you, and even after you know the stories are getting to you, you won’t be able to stop reading this book.” Leslie Marmon Silko

“This novel will not make you feel good. It will make you want to avert your eyes in the same way Richard Wright made you want to avert your eyes in Native Son. I am in awe of the muscular writing here, writing that is brave, honest, precise, and disciplined. Drowning Tucson  took my breath away.” Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Set in Tucson’s toughest neighborhoods during the late 1980s, this explosive novel follows the disintegration of the Nuñez family and the people whose paths they cross. From young gang members to crooken cops, and from murderous vigilantes to prostitutes plying their trade along the “Miracle Mile,” each character’s destiny is linked by crushing poverty, the brutal codes of the street, and the harsh nature of the desert. In this place of both drought and flood, “civilization” is every bit as dangerous as its surroundings.

María Luisa Ortega Hernández author of Housed Under Glass: A Story of Desire, Repression, Loss, and Healing

Housed Under Glass is A Story of Desire, Repression, Loss, and Healing.  Like many other U.S. Latina writers, María Luisa Ortega Hernández confronts the dehumanizing expectations of her religious heritage, heavily imposed on women. Obedient to her Catholic teachings by repressing her female sexuality over what became a life sentence without parole, María Luisa’s inner turmoil culminated in an extreme case of female sexual disorder. Intimately aware that her healing process required the recovery of her faithfully neglected body, she started a barefoot pilgrimage within to give expression to her wounded being and her long-silenced yearnings. Her voice—poetic and bilingual—denounces the oppressive control of her young female body and finds healing in the claimed right to her own true self.  Housed Under Glass: A Story of Desire, Repression, Loss, and Healing. / Tras paredes de cristal: una historia de deseo, represión, pérdida y sanación.  Massachusetts: CBH Books, 2005.

Leticia Roa Nixon
on Mexican Immigrants living in South Philadelphia
Leticia Roa Nixon will read some of the stories she had collected about the lives of Mexican Immigrants living in South Philadelphia. Leticia is writing a book on this subject with a grant from the Leeway Foundation. She is a photographer who had an exhibit at The Lighthouse of images  of the Philadelphia Afro-Latino Community.

Saturday, August 14, 1pm – Author Event
E.N. JOY
author of She Who Finds a Husband ($14.95 Urban Christian)
and Been There Prayed That ($14.95 Urban Christian)

All About Joy
BLESSEDselling author, E. N. Joy, is the writer behind the five book series, “New Day Divas,” coined the “Soap Opera In Print.”  Formerly writing secular works under the names Joylynn M. Jossel and JOY, this award winning author has been sharing her literary expertise on conference panels in her home town of Columbus, Ohio as well as cities across the country.

After thirteen years of being a paralegal in the insurance industry, Joy finally divorced her career and married her mistress and her passion; writing.  In 2000, Joy formed her own publishing company, END OF THE RAINBOW projects, where she published her own works until landing a book deal with a major publisher.  Under End of the Rainbow, Joy has published New York Times and Essence Magazine Bestselling authors in the “Sinner Series,” in which the current releases are Even Sinners Have Souls (Book 1) and Even Sinners Have Souls TOO (Book 2).  In 2004, Joy branched off into the business of literary consulting in which she provides one-on-one consulting and literary services such as ghost writing, editing, professional  read-throughs, write behinds, etc…  Her clients consist of first time authors, Essence Magazine bestselling authors, New York Times bestselling authors, and entertainers.

Not forsaking her love of poetry in which she has published two works of poetry titled Please Tell Me If the Grass is Greener and World On My Shoulders, Joy plans to turn her focus back to poetry one day.  “But lately my spirit has been moving in another direction,” Joy says.  Needless to say, she will no longer be penning street lit (in which two of her titles, If I Ruled the World and Dollar Bill, made the Essence Magazine bestsellers list  (Dollar Bill was also translated to Japanese).  She will no longer be penning erotica or adult contemporary fiction either, in which one of her titles earned her the Borders bestselling African American romance award at the Romance  Writers of America National Conference.  Instead, under the name E.N. Joy, she will be penning adult Christian fiction, and under the name N. Joy she will be penning children’s and young adult titles.  Joy’s children’s story, The  Secret Olivia Told Me received the American Library Association Coretta  Scott King Honor.  Book club rights have also been purchased by Scholastic and the book is on tour at Scholastic Book Fairs in schools across the country.  Elementary and middle school children have fallen in love with reading and creative writing as a result of the readings and workshops Joy performs in schools across the country.

Currently, Joy is the executive editor for Urban Christian, in which the titles are distributed by Kensington Publishing Corporation out of New York.  When she’s not adding her two cents to other authors’ works, she’s diligently working on her own.  Joy’s latest project, the “New Day Divas” series, is taking the literary world by storm.  Book one of the series, She Who Finds A Husband and Book two, Been There Prayed That, are currently dominating book stores and libraries all over the country.  Joy is certain this project is the one that is going to afford her with the title of New York Times Bestselling Author.  Until then, she doesn’t mind the title of BLESSEDselling author.

You can visit JOY at www.joylynnjossel.com
And
www.enjoywrites.com

THURSDAY, MAY 20, 7pm – NON-FICTION
STEPHAN SALISBURY
author of Mohamed’s ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland ($26.95 Nation Books)

Mohamed Ghorab had no hint one late spring morning that when he dropped his daughter off at school, his life would change forever. Federal agents and police surrounded him in front of terrified parents, teachers and school children. They hustled him off to jail and eventually deported him. His wife was detained at the same time. Agents raided the obscure Philadelphia mosque where Ghorab was imam, ransacking its simple interior and his house next door.
This was a fearful time in the life of America following 9/11, as prize-winning reporter Stephan Salisbury well knew. But he did not anticipate the extremity of fear that emerged as he explored the aftermath of that virtually forgotten raid. Over time, the members of the mosque and the imam’s family opened up to him, giving Salisbury a unique opportunity to chronicle the demolition of lives and families, the spread of anti-immigrant hysteria and its manipulation by the government.
As he explored these events, Salisbury was constantly reminded of similar incidents in his own past—the paranoia and police activity that surrounded his political involvement in the 1960s and the surveillance and informing that dogged his father, Harrison Salisbury, a well-known New York Times reporter and editor, for half a century. Salisbury weaves these strands together into a personal portrait of an America fracturing under the intense pressure of the war on terror—the homeland in the time of Osama.

“Stephan Salisbury tells a dark and important story that has not been told before and that vividly conveys the texture of the lives of men and women caught up in a web of hostility and government interference.” Gay Talese

“Drawing on his own history as an antiwar dissident, Salisbury writes compassionately of the families destroyed and the lives ruined by government-orchestrated repression. This is a vital document for our times, lyrical to an extent unexpected in a political book, yet imbued with a fervor that at every turn is made just by dogged, scrupulous reporting.” Ken Kalfus, author of The Commissariat of Enlightenment

“Stephan Salisbury has written a deeply reported, thoughtful meditation on what happens when a society decides it needs to spy on its own. Salisbury’s immersive account of the real-life consequences that happen when an entire community is placed under suspicion makes it clear that covert government surveillance comes with costs that can’t be measured on any balance sheet. Everyone agrees that abuses of power are bad, but Salisbury pushes readers to ponder the consequences—for individuals and for our open, democratic society—that accompany even the legal variety of permanent surveillance.” Michael Schaffer, author of One Nation Under Dog

Stephan Salisbury is the senior cultural writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he has been a reporter for three decades. He has covered everything from the Pennsylvania prison system, unrest in Ireland and Eastern Europe and the coup in Turkey to the culture wars in the United States and the disruptions of American life in the wake of 9/11. He has received numerous awards and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize as part of an Enquirer team investigating local election fraud in 1995. He is married to the painter Jennifer Baker; they have a daughter and a son.

FRIDAY, MAY 7, 7pm – NON-FICTION
Art Sanctuary, The Brothers Network & Moonstone Arts Present
KEITH GILYARD
author John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism ($39.95 University of Georgia Press)

“John Oliver Killens is a genius of the South, and Keith Gilyard has honored this youngblood, civil rights and union activist, novelist, dramatist, and screenwriter in a superb biography. Gilyard’s engaging written voice draws us into a dramatic and important life, and his deep commitment to the highest standards of research inspires our trust and admiration. John Oliver Killens ably documents and brings to life the yearnings and accomplishments of a major figure in our national literature.” – Rudolph P. Byrd, Goodrich C. White Professor of American Studies, Emory University

John Oliver Killens’s politically charged novels And Then We Heard the Thunder and The Cotillion; or One Good Bull Is Half the Herd, were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His works of fiction and nonfiction, the most famous of which is his novel Youngblood, have been translated into more than a dozen languages. An influential novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and teacher, he was the founding chair of the Harlem Writers Guild and mentored a generation of black writers at Fisk, Howard, Columbia, and elsewhere. Killens is recognized as the spiritual father of the Black Arts Movement. In this first major biography of Killens, Keith Gilyard examines the life and career of the man who was perhaps the premier African American writer-activist from the 1950s to the 1980s. Gilyard extends his focus to the broad boundaries of Killens’s times and literary achievement—from the Old Left to the Black Arts Movement and beyond.

THURSDAY, APRIL 29, 7pm – AUTHOR SIGNING
VISIONS OF EXILE
LIGIA RAVÉ author of Hanah’s Paradise
MARK LYONS author of Espejos y Ventanas/ Mirrors and Windows: Oral Histories of Mexican Farmworkers and Their Families

Praise for Hannah’s Paradise

Like Scheherazade, the narrator of Ligia Ravé’s beautifully rendered novel, HANAH’S PARADISE, has to tell stories—in this case her family’s stories—in order to keep memory alive. Primarily, the memories are of suffering, displacement and loss. Only in Hanah’s Paradise, a magical, mystical place in northern Israel, where the history of this far-flung Jewish family is recorded in letters, recipes and songs, can happiness be found. However, this happiness, too, is only temporary—Jews are fated to wander the world, as the patriarch of the family comes to understand. A branch of flowering bamboo will be the sole reminder of their lost paradise. Told in wonderful, vibrant language, the tale of the Ravayah family has the magical, almost dreamlike quality of a García Márquez story, only this story has taken over a thousand years to tell and there is, as yet, no end to it.

Lily Tuck, author of The News from Paraguay, winner of the 2004 National Book Award

An epic of faith and family, Hanah’s Paradise spans one of the more eventful millennia of Jewish history. Ligia Ravé writes with passion, wisdom and a profound knowledge of the way the past tugs at the heartstrings of the present moment.

Ken Kalfus, author of three New York Times Notable Books of the Year

Imaginative and playful, HANAH’S PARADISE is Ligia Ravé’s heirloom garden, a paradise lost and rediscovered, lush with erotic poetry, tasty recipes and Jewish mysticism. Ravé takes the reader from Eden to eternity, provocatively proposing a scenario that transcends conflicts in the Middle East.

Arts Critic CARRIE RICKEY:

LIGIA RAVÉ, received a doctorate in art history from the Sorbonne, moved to the United States in 1982. An architect and a scholar, she has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at Tulane University, where for a decade she was the Henry Luce Professor of Architecture and Society.

Mark Lyons has published fiction in Whetstone (J. P. McGrath Memorial Award), Bucks County Writer, Sensations, the Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts, and Piker Press, and his work has been read in the Writing Aloud series at Philadelphia’s InterAct Theatre Company. He is a recipient of Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowships for 2003 and 2009 and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. The oral histories in ESPEJOS Y VENTANAS / MIRRORS AND WINDOWS grew out of Mark’s extensive work with Latino immigrants in Pennsylvania. It is a collection of rich and profoundly moving stories of the Mexican immigrant community of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, whose three generations have migrated north to work in the world’s largest mushroom industry. Published in both Spanish and English, these oral histories offer a rare window into the aspirations and fears of these immigrants and their children. They also provide personal testimonies of the general struggles of immigrant populations for social, political, and economic rights. Mark currently serves as co-director of the Open Borders Healing Stories Project, in which immigrants produce audio stories about their lives; these stories are webcast, played on radio, and published in Wild River Review.

THURSDAY, APRIL 15, 7pm – NON-FICTION
LISA TRACY
author of Objects of Our Affection: Uncovering My Family’s Past, One Chair, Pistol, and Pickle Fork at a Time ($25.00 Random House)

After their mother’s death, Lisa Tracy and her sister, Jeanne, are left to contend with several households’ worth of furniture and memorabilia, much of it accumulated during their family’s many decades of military service in far-flung outposts from the American frontier to the World War Two–era Pacific. In this engaging and deeply moving book, Tracy chronicles the wondrous interior life of those possessions and discovers that the roots of our passion for acquisition often lie not in shallow materialism but in our desire to possess the most treasured commodity of all: a connection to the past.
What starts as an exercise in information gathering designed to boost the estate’s resale value at auction evolves into a quest that takes Lisa Tracy from her New Jersey home to the Philippines and, ultimately, back to the town where she grew up. These travels open her eyes to a rich family history characterized by duty, hardship, honor, and devotion—qualities embodied in the very items she intends to sell. Here is an inventory unlike any other: silver gewgaws, dueling pistols that once belonged to Aaron Burr (no, not those pistols), a stately storage chest from Boxer Rebellion–era China, providentially recovered family documents, even a chair in which George Washington may or may not have sat—each piece cherished and passed down to Lisa’s generation as an emblem of who her forebears were, what they had done, and where they had been. Each is cataloged here with all the richness and intimacy that only a family member could bring to the endeavor.

“Even as we know we should be winnowing, we’re wallowing,” observes Lisa Tracy in one of her characteristically trenchant observations about America’s abiding obsession with “stuff.” A paean to the pack rat in us all, Objects of Our Affection offers an offbeat and intriguing mix of cultural anthropology, Antiques Roadshow Americana, and military history and lore, as well as a thoughtful meditation on the emotional resonance of objects—what they mean and the oh-so-fascinating stories they tell.