Thursday, July 21, 7pm – Non-Fiction

Andrew Laties author of Rebel Bookseller: Why Indie Bookstores Represent Everything You Want to Fight for from Free Speech to Buying Local to Building Communities ($16.95)

The revival of independent bookselling has already begun and is one of the amazing stories of our times. Bookseller Andy Laties wrote the first edition of Rebel Bookseller six years ago, hoping it would spark a movement.  The revival of independent bookselling has already begun and is one of the amazing stories of our times. Bookseller Andy Laties wrote the first edition of Rebel Bookseller six years ago, hoping it would spark a movement. Now, with this second edition, Laties’s book can be a rallying cry for everyone who wants to better understand how the rise of the big bookstore chains led irrevocably to their decline, and how even in the face of electronic readers from three of America’s largest and most successful companies—Apple, Amazon, and Google—the movement to support locally owned independent stores, especially bookstores, is on the rise. From the mid-1980s to the present, Andy Laties has been an independent bookseller, starting out in Chicago, teaching along the way at the American Booksellers Association, and finally running the bookshop at the Eric Carle Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts. His innovations were adapted by Barnes & Noble, Zany Brainy, and scores of independent stores. In Rebel Bookseller, Laties tells how he got started, how he kept going, and why he believes independent bookselling has a great future. He alternates his narrative with short anecdotes, interludes between the chapters that give his credo as a bookseller. Along the way, he explains the growth of the chains, and throws in a treasure trove of tips for anyone who is considering opening up a bookstore. Rebel Bookseller is a must read for those in the book biz, a testament to the ingeniousness of one man man’s story of making a life out of his passionate commitment to books and bookselling.

Wednesday, July 27, 7pm – Fiction

The Black Women’s Arts Festival Presents

Kola Boof author of THE SEXY PART OF THE BIBLE ($15.95 Akashic)

“Boof spins surrealism, sci-fi, racial politics, feminism, religious debate, postcolonial theory, and more into a thought-provoking, suspenseful novel that manages to keep intriguing characters afloat in a roiling sea of crazy rhetoric.” –Publishers Weekly

“Kola Boof is a natural storyteller who turns cliches on their heads. There may be a surprise lurking at the end of any sentence and the prose and the story of The Sexy Part of the Bible rush by with the urgency, anger, and irony of a writer with important things to say.” –Mark Kurlansky, best-selling author of Salt: A World History

“If disagreement, even outrage, is the price of enlightenment on sensitive matters like race, then reading Kola Boof’s book The Sexy Part of the Bible is essential therapy for understanding our society and its likely fate.” –Derrick Bell, author of Faces at the Bottom of the Well

Set in modern West Africa, Europe, and the U.S., and featuring the kind of heroine readers rarely get to encounter in popular culture–beautiful charcoal-skinned Eternity, a spirited and diabolical young African hellcat whose life is stigmatized by a heart-stopping secret–The Sexy Part of the Bible is an erotically astute novel filled with mystery and adventure. Enveloped in the arms of a domineering Fela Kuti-type rap star and revolutionary named Sea Horse Twee, Eternity finds herself miraculously surviving several African rebellions–and in the interim, she powerfully unmasks the science of cloning, which becomes a powerful metaphor in the story. Written with the lush musicality of North African classics, The Sexy Part of the Bible is guaranteed to stay on your mind long after you’ve put it down.

Kola Boof is the author of several novels and poetry collections, including Flesh and the Devil and Nile River Woman. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s and the story collection Politically Inspired. Her autobiography, Diary of a Lost Girl, was published in 2006. She has been interviewed by MSNBC, FOX News, and CNN; and has been featured in TV Guide, Time, etc  the New York Post, and the New York Times. She lives in Southern California.

Thursday, July 14, 7pm – Fiction

Phong Nguyen author of Memory Sickness and Other Stories (Elixir Press)

The son of a Vietnamese-American immigrant scholar and a daughter of the revolution, Phong Nguyen grew up outside of Princeton, New Jersey, where he was a confirmed member of the infamously under-achieving generation X. After attending college for a year, he dropped out to live on the beach and work at a series of crappy jobs. In a used bookstore in New Haven, he discovered Marcel Proust’s THE REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST, and did not put it down for nearly a year. After finishing the book, Nguyen committed his life to writing, and proceeded to complete a Master’s degree at Emerson College, where he studied with Dewitt Henry, and a PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he studied with George Makana Clark.

Phong Nguyen is now an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Central Missouri, where he teaches fiction-writing and edits the literary journal PLEIADES. Before editing for PLEIADES, he was chief editor of CREAM CITY REVIEW, and before that, an editorial assistant at THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

His own stories have appeared in AGNI, BOULEVARD, IOWA REVIEW, KENYON REVIEW, MASSACHUSETTS REVIEW, NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, FLORIDA REVIEW, MISSISSIPPI REVIEW, MERIDIAN, NEW OHIO REVIEW, TEXAS REVIEW, PHOEBE, CHATTAHOOCHEE REVIEW, SOUTHERN INDIANA REVIEW, and dozens of other literary journals.  His stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010.

His first collection of stories, MEMORY SICKNESS AND OTHER STORIES, won the Elixir Press Fiction Award for 2010, and was published in June 1st of 2011. Don Lee, editor of PLOUGHSHARES and author of YELLOW, has called MEMORY SICKNESS “a superb debut” full of stories that “pulse with poetry, power, and grit,” adding, “This is a truly memorable collection.” William Giraldi, editor of AGNI, and author of BUSY MONSTERS, said, “Phong Nguyen has crafted stories with zero at the bone, stories of how the child is father of the man, of what we do to one another in this world, and what we do to ourselves. … This book will scar you.” And Benjamin Percy, author of THE WILDING, called these “gritty, moving stories.”

Wednesday, July 13, 7pm

Dwayne Booth a.k.a. Mr. Fish author of Go Fish: How to Win contempt and Influence People – Political Cartoons and Essays by Mr. Fish ($18.95 Akashic Books)

“Nobody does what Mr. Fish does, and even if they did, they wouldn’t do it as well as Mr. Fish does. Go Fish is that rarest of creatures; an essential collection of political cartoons.” –David Rees, author of Get Your War On

“Mr. Fish is one of the few brilliant souls who describes and illustrates the earth’s insanity and all of the hypocrisy and still somehow doesn’t detract from my need to masturbate constantly.”–Richard Lewis, Comedian/Actor

“Behold the cartoons in Go Fish: there is no more savage yet brilliant wit than that possessed by Mr. Fish, who will never compromise on his deep artistic insight or the outrageous honesty of his social commentary. In a sellout culture he is that rare witness for unfettered truth.” –Robert Sheer, author of The Great American Stickup

“Mr. Fish’s penis obsession has evolved into unique visual metaphorical truths that probe the very core of politics, culture, religion–pick a target, any target–yes, he has indeed learned to think outside the cocks.” –Paul Krassner, author of Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counter-culture

This debut volume of political cartoons from the revered Mr. Fish spans politics, popular culture, the economic crisis, the Obama presidency, and much more, where nobody–right, left, nor middle–is safe from his razor-edged satire. The volume also includes original essays from Mr. Fish.

Mr. Fish has been a freelance writer and cartoonist for eighteen years, publishing under both his real name (Dwayne Booth) and the penname of Mr. Fish with many of the nation’s most reputable and prestigious magazines, journals, and newspapers. In addition to his weekly cartoon for Harper’s and daily contributions to Truthdig, he has also contributed to the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, the LA Weekly, the Atlantic, the Huffington Post, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, the Advocate, Z Magazine, the Utne Reader, Slate.com, MSNBC.com, and others. He has also worked for National Public Radio. In May 2008 he was presented with a first place award by the Los Angeles Press Club for editorial cartooning. In May 2010 he was awarded the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Award for Editorial Cartooning from the Society of Professional Journalists. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and twin daughters.

Saturday, June 25, 1pm – Non-Fiction

James R. Boyd author of Follow the Trend: the Story of a Life and
Observations from Living It

James R. Boyd was born soon after the country began its descent into the
Great Depression. His life was hugely impacted both by the state of affairs
in the country as a whole and by the political and social issues inherent in
growing up in the south at that time. His childhood was spent in a small
town in what he describes as a large, close-knit family. After his father
died suddenly at the age of forty-nine, he knew he was simply going to have to carve a future out of the moral support of a loving family and his own wish to succeed. After completing high school and a year of college, Mr. Boyd joined the Air Force just as he was about to be drafted by the Army. When he turned down an offer to train as a pilot, he was trained as a medic and led an interesting and helpful life while serving in Japan. Following military service, Mr. Boyd completed college with a Bachelor of Science degree in economics from Florida A & M University, and later attained a Master of Education degree in Urban Education from Antioch University. He taught general science and mathematics in Philadelphia. In addition to his regular classroom responsibilities, for five years he held various administrative positions including Coordinator, Assistant Director, and Director of Leadership Training for the City of Philadelphia. He coordinated an exchange program with a private school in the city. For ten years, he was director of an alternative school whose target population was students with behavioral issues.

Mr. Boyd co-authored with his wife: Help Me Decide: Learning to Make Good Choices. This book is currently being used around the country and
internationally to help teach students how to examine and manage their own behavior.

Wednesday, June 22, 7pm – Non-Fiction

Bill E. Beckwith, Ph.D.,
Author of Managing Your Memory: Practical Solutions for Forgetting

Do you spend too much time looking for your glasses? Do names escape you? Do you worry about your future? Dr. Bill E. Beckwith will give you the facts on what you can do to protect yourself. He will provide you with immediately effective, easy-to-use, and practical techniques to monitor and improve your memory.

Wednesday, June 22, 7pm – Non-Fiction

Bill E Beckwith, PH.D. Author of Managing Your Memory: Practical Solutions for Forgetting

Do you spend too much time looking for your glasses?  Do names escape you?  Do you worry about your future?  Dr. Bill E. Beckwith will give you the facts on what you can do to protect yourself.  He will provide you with immediately effective, easy to use, and practical techniques to monitor and improve your memory.  Dr. Beckwith is a Clinical Psychologist and nationally known speaker on Aging, Memory, and Alzheimer’s disease.  He is the author of “Managing Your Memory: Practical Solutions for Forgetting”, columnist in the Naples Dailey News, and co-founder with his wife Pamela of The Life and Memory Center and has an office in Naples, FL.  He has completed over 3,000 memory evaluations, published more than 70 articles and co-edited three books as well as winning several teaching awards during his 30 years as a clinician and researcher in the area of memory and its disorders.

Tuesday, June 14, 7pm – Poetry & Prose

Phillip Sterling author of In Which Brief Stories Are Told
($18.95 Wayne State University Press)

In Which Brief Stories Are Told presents a collage of moments in the lives of average people—car salesmen and motel maids, mothers and fathers, neighbors and professional colleagues—with small-town northern Michigan as a backdrop. Author Phillip Sterling invites readers to share his characters’ small tragedies and victories in fifteen deceptively simple, intimate stories. While varied in length from short glimpses to longer narratives, each of the stories is defined by a unique perspective, as characters present their version of a story—sometimes other peoples’ stories—clouded by the same emotion, judgment, and passing of time that inhabit all of our memories. The stories in this collection contain laments and mysteries: a car salesman implicates himself in a crime that he is not sure ever took place, a third-shift convenience store clerk accepts her unfortunate disfigurement, dinner parties generate jealousy and resignation among their participants, a sister’s disappearance creates a long-standing familial black hole, a sailboat comes to symbolize the longing of an elderly couple, and a daughter finds answers in her father’s speechlessness. In what is often unspoken or unacknowledged, Sterling’s narrators draw readers into complicity. Readers will identify with these characters, who weigh the what-ifs and could-haves at length, often for longer than it takes to recount the actual events of their stories, revealing the telltale signs of our own heartache, guilt, or feelings of forgiveness in the process.

Sterling’s realistic and intriguing stories offer haunting glimpses of characters and situations that are original but familiar. Phillip Sterling is the author of In Which Brief Stories Are Told and four collections of poetry: Abeyance, Quatrains, Significant Others and Mutual Shores. He is the editor of Imported Breads: Literature of Cultural Exchange and founding coordinator of the Literature In Person (LIP) Reading Series at Ferris State University, where he has taught for many years.

Wednesday, May 25, 7pm – Non-Fiction

Lily Yeh author of Awakening Creativity: Dandelion School Blossoms ($34.95 New Village Press)

Once described as the “Mother Theresa of community arts,” Lily Yeh is a Philadelphia-based visual artist by way of China and Taiwan. She has won numerous awards, including an Arts and Healing Network Award as well as a Founder’s Award from the Fleisher Organization. She has completed residencies and given keynote speeches at universities throughout the United States. Lily emigrated to the United States in the early 1960s to attend the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate school of Fine Arts. A successful painter and professor at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, Lily traveled to Beijing in 1989 to show her work at the Central Institute of Fine Art. There, she witnessed the tragic events of Tiananmen Square. Over the 1980s, Lily gradually realized that being an artist “is not just about making art . . . It is about delivering the vision one is given . . . and about doing the right thing without sparing oneself.” She founded The Village of Arts and Humanities in Philadelphia and continues pursuing her vision through her new organization, Barefoot Artists, which teaches residents and artists how to replicate the Village model in devastated communities around the world. Lily is most noted for transforming an urban neighborhood in North Philadelphia into an inner-city work of art. Once an empty lot, Yeh worked with the community to create an interactive park space filled with gardens and mosaics. Lily’s vision has rippled out far beyond North Philadelphia’s borders. She inspires and collaborates with prison inmates to create beauty and art, and does the same with thousands of adults and children who live in some of the world’s most broken communities. She has collaborated with residents of the Korogocho slum near Nairobi to enliven a barren churchyard with colorful murals and sculptures and traveled to Ghana, Ecuador, The Ivory Coast and the Republic of Georgia to work on similar projects. Her most recent endeavor is the Rwanda Healing Project, in which she worked with hundreds of children and families to transform their bleak village into a place of beauty and joy.

“Lily Yeh is a global angel who not only believes in the power of people engaged, but inspires and ignites them through her own creative fire. Lily Yeh changed my life completely and if you read this book, your life as you know it will begin to change, as well, through the vibrancy of art in action called love.”
—Terry Tempest Williams, author, Finding Beauty in a Broken World

“An inspiration for anyone who cares about kids, beauty and reinventing education to ignite greater joy, expression and leadership. At once visionary and eminently useful and practical, Lily Yeh celebrates the profound capacity of art to seed and support human transformation.” – —Matthew Fox, PhD, author, Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet and The A.W.E. Project: Reinventing Education, Reinventing the Human.

“A story about the beauty we each possess, the potential for rebirth at any time in life, and the power of an engaged, inspired community. This book shows the artist’s hand, eye, and mind at work, and its greatest reward is revealing the artist’s heart for us all to consider.”  —Glenn Holsten, filmmaker and director of An Angel in the Village, a documentary about Lily Yeh’s work in North Philadelphia

“Lily Yeh is a passionate dedicated artist-alchemist who not only awakens creativity and beauty in broken places of the world she cultivates the human spirit to heal, transform, and blossom like the mosaic tree of life she helps communities create.” —Elizabeth Murray, artist, garden designer, author, Cultivating Sacred Space: Gardening for the Soul and Monet’s Passion

“This beautiful book shines a light on the hard work of making magic in the modern world. As with all of Lily’s adventures, her work in China is a powerful testament to enormous power of the creative spirit.”
—William Cleveland, author, Art and Upheaval: Artists on the World’s Frontlines, Art in Other Places and Between Grace and Fear

“Awakening Creativity should be read by every educator, artist, activist, architect and parent, as it will change the way we understand education, parenting, healing and social change.” —Nina Simons, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Bioneers

“Lily’s book unveils, in practical and loving detail, the carefully conceived methodology of a master artist and community builder that can be replicated in schools and communities anywhere.” —Judy Wicks, Founder, White Dog Cafe, Philadelphia, and Co-founder, Business Alliance for Local Living Economies

“Ms. Lily Yeh has an extraordinary ability to combine the best elements of the left and right brain in countless projects of international acclaim. We can use her book as/ testament and a road map to a far better world.” —Bill Strickland, MacArthur Fellow and CEO, Manchester/Bidwell

“This book offers a powerful illustration of the catalytic role that art can play in our lives and how when people—of all ages—are challenged to create together, real transformation occurs.” —Jane Golden, Director, City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program

Wednesday, May 11, 7pm – New Age

Barbara Brodsky author of Cosmic Healing: A Spiritual Journey with Aaron and John of God ($18.95 North Atlantic Books)

Though studies have shown that nearly one in two Americans live with some kind of chronic condition, the American Journal of Psychiatry reports that people who make faith a significant part of their lives have a lower risk of depression and better manage their medical issues than those who do not. In her moving new book, Cosmic Healing, nationally recognized dharma teacher Barbara Brodsky shares her remarkable experience of overcoming the limitations of deafness and partial blindness with the aid of Aaron, a channeled spirit, and the healer John of God. With the onset of sudden profound deafness at the age of 29, Barbara Brodsky set out on a path to understand the nature of illness and healing, examining the interrelationship of mind and body and our capacity to transcend limitation. A longtime Buddhist practitioner who began meditation in the ’60s, Brodsky discovered an entirely new path on her healing journey when her channeling of the discarnate spirit Aaron began in 1989. A being of great love, compassion, wisdom, and gentle humor, Aaron came to Brodsky to not only reveal a path to self-healing, but to encourage her to help others do the same. Since then, Brodsky has shared the wisdom of Aaron with over 10,000 workshop participants worldwide in her over 20 years of teaching, touching the lives of  people from all walks of life. More than just a personal narrative, Cosmic Healing shares hope and real answers to questions like “How do we heal?” and “Why do some people heal while others do not?” through a combination of Buddhist teachings, channeled material from Aaron, and the author’s account of her experience with the world-renowned healer, John of God. While Cosmic Healing is channeled in part and has deep roots in traditional dharma, it is at heart a universal story of human growth and discovery. Old beliefs limit us every day. But, as Brodsky has discovered and teaches, we can learn to recognize such limiting beliefs, transcend them, and live a deeper truth. Barbara Brodsky is the founder and guiding teacher of Deep Spring Center for Meditation and Spiritual Inquiry, http://deepspring.org/ an interfaith center. She is also the channel for the spirit Aaron, since 1989. A guest on two episodes of NPR’s This American Life, she also appeared in the internationally acclaimed documentary One: The Movie (2005). Her writing has been included in the anthologies Being Bodies: Buddhist Women on the Paradox of Embodiment and Buddhist Acts of Compassion, and in numerous magazines and journals. Brodsky lives in Ann Arbor, MI