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Literary Birthday Celebration: Paul Laurence Dunbar

Poets Holly Bass and Al Young celebrate the birthday of American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar by reading selections from his work and discussing his influence on their own writing.

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Franklin Foer (author of World Without Mind) at the FYE® Conference 2018
Franklin Foer, author of WORLD WITHOUT MIND: THE EXISTENTIAL THREAT OF BIG TECH (Penguin Books), speaks about his book at the First-Year Experience® (FYE) Conference in San Antonio, TX.
Sarah Schulman | After Delores
Writers convene to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Sarah Schulman’s cult classic novel “After Delores.”

Panelists, from left to right: Davey Davis, Kay Gabriel, Tina Horn, Sarah Schulman

Sarah Schulman's acclaimed 1988 novel is a noirish tale about a no-nonsense coffee-shop waitress in New York who is nursing a broken heart after her girlfriend Delores leaves her; her attempts to find love again are funny, sexy, and ultimately even violent. “After Delores” is a fast-paced, electrifying chronicle of the Lower East Side's lesbian subculture in the 1980s.

Davey Davis writes about culture, sexuality, technology, and genderqueer embodiment. Their first novel, “the earthquake room,” was released by TigerBee Press in late 2017. You can find them on Twitter at @k8bushofficial.

Kay Gabriel is the author of “Elegy Department Spring” (BOAAT Press, 2017), the finalist for the 2016 BOAAT chapbook prize selected by Richard Siken. She's one-fifth of Negative Press, a gay Marxist poetry collective, and an editor for Vetch. Find her provocations on Twitter @unit01barbie.

Tina Horn is a non-fiction NSFW writer, audio producer, queer punk, and true karaoke believer. She produces and hosts the kinky slut podcast “Why Are People Into That?!,” and is the author of two nonfiction books, “Love Not Given Lightly,” and “Sexting.” She is a Lambda Literary Fellow and the winner of two Feminist Porn Awards. TinaHorn.net / @TinaHornsAss

Sarah Schulman is the author of 19 books, most recently THE COSMOPOLITANS (chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the best American novels of 2016), CONFLICT IS NOT ABUSE (winner of The 2017 Publishing Triangle Nonfiction Prize) and MAGGIE TERRY, a novel of murder and discovery which will be published in September 2018. A playwright, screenwriter, and AIDS historian, Sarah is currently collaborating with the great Marianne Faithfull on a stage play, "The Snow Queen" featuring 24 of Marianne's songs from her long career.
Lesley Nneka Arimah interview at AWP 2018
Lesley Nneka Arimah is joining us to talk about her book, What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky: Stories. Lesley was selected as a National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 honoree last year.

FROM THE PUBLISHER:

In “Who Will Greet You at Home,” a National Magazine Award finalist for The New Yorker, A woman desperate for a child weaves one out of hair, with unsettling results. In “Wild,” a disastrous night out shifts a teenager and her Nigerian cousin onto uneasy common ground. In "The Future Looks Good," three generations of women are haunted by the ghosts of war, while in "Light," a father struggles to protect and empower the daughter he loves. And in the title story, in a world ravaged by flood and riven by class, experts have discovered how to "fix the equation of a person" - with rippling, unforeseen repercussions.

Evocative, playful, subversive, and incredibly human, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky heralds the arrival of a prodigious talent with a remarkable career ahead of her.
Mike Epps | Unsuccessful Thug
Comedian/actor Mike Epps gets semi-serious in this wide-ranging fan Q&A on his career in Hollywood, his advice to up-and-coming comics, and why Richard Pryor wasn’t too impressed with his backyard. His new memoir is “Unsuccessful Thug: One Comedian’s Journey from Naptown to Tinseltown.”

Michael Elliot Epps is a stand-up comedian, actor, film producer, writer, and rapper. He is best known for playing Day-Day Jones in “Next Friday” and its sequel, “Friday After Next,” and also appearing in “The Hangover” as "Black Doug". He was the voice of Boog in “Open Season 2.” As of 2010, Epps was the executive producer on a documentary about the life story of a former member of Tupac Shakur's Outlawz, “Napoleon: Life of an Outlaw.” He is also known for playing Lloyd Jefferson "L.J." Wade in “Resident Evil: Apocalypse” and “Resident Evil: Extinction.”
Dydine Umunyana: "Embracing Survival" | Talks at Google
Embracing Survival, a memoir by Dydine Umunyana, tells the story of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide against Tutsis at the hands of Hutu perpetrators through the eyes of the four-year-old-child that she was when the horror occurred. Separated from her family, she barely survived the conflict. While the physical killing eventually stopped, the mental and emotional torture continued, affecting her, her family, friends, and community until acceptance paved a way forward.

Now 27 years old and living in the United States, she writes that she has "learned that we cannot do for others what we cannot do for ourselves. By nourishing the light within ourselves, we find strength we never knew was there...one's own life experiences are not meant to be kept, but to be shared and learned from."
Shelfie with Sarah Winman
Every single person who has reviewed Sarah Winman's Costa Book Award-nominated novel, Tin Man, on our website has given it five stars. As you let that sink in, enjoy her recent visit to Waterstones Tottenham Court Road where she picked out five books that helped shape her as a writer.
William T. Vollmann | Carbon Ideologies
National Book Award winner William T. Vollmann introduces “Carbon Ideologies,” his new two-volume exploration of the causes and consequences global warming.

Over the years William T. Vollmann has earned critical acclaim by tackling some of the largest and thorniest issues of our times, including poverty, violence, and American imperialism. In “Carbon Ideologies,” Vollmann turns to one of the greatest crises we have ever faced: global warming.

“No Immediate Danger,” volume one of the series, examines the technological and cultural forces that created climate change—manufacturing, agriculture, fossil fuel extraction and the global demand for electric power—leading to a detailed case study of the brutal 2011 tsunami and nuclear reactor meltdowns in Fukushima, Japan. For seven years, at great personal risk, Vollmann traveled to the no-go zones and ghost towns of Fukushima to interview tsunami victims, nuclear evacuees, anti-nuclear organizers and pro-nuclear utility workers. With his signature wit and meticulous, wide-ranging research, “No Immediate Danger” builds a powerful picture of one of the greatest environmental disasters in recent history.

Volume two, “No Good Alternative,” coming in June 2018, focuses on human experiences related to coal mining and natural gas production.
Malcolm Gladwell Explains Where His Ideas Come From | The New Yorker
David Remnick speaks with Malcolm Gladwell about how he arrived at his particular approach to storytelling.
Brit Bennett interview at AWP 2018
Brit Bennett on The Mothers

Rich Fahle talks with Brit Bennett about her debut novel, The Mothers at the 2018 AWP Conference & Book Fair.

FROM THE PUBLISHER:

Set within a contemporary black community in Southern California, Brit Bennett's mesmerizing first novel is an emotionally perceptive story about community, love, and ambition. It begins with a secret.

"All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we'd taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season."

It is the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken, seventeen-year-old beauty. Mourning her own mother's recent suicide, she takes up with the local pastor's son. Luke Sheppard is twenty-one, a former football star whose injury has reduced him to waiting tables at a diner. They are young; it's not serious. But the pregnancy that results from this teen romance—and the subsequent cover-up—will have an impact that goes far beyond their youth. As Nadia hides her secret from everyone, including Aubrey, her God-fearing best friend, the years move quickly. Soon, Nadia, Luke, and Aubrey are full-fledged adults and still living in debt to the choices they made that one seaside summer, caught in a love triangle they must carefully maneuver, and dogged by the constant, nagging question: What if they had chosen differently? The possibilities of the road not taken are a relentless haunt.

In entrancing, lyrical prose, The Mothers asks whether a "what if" can be more powerful than an experience itself. If, as time passes, we must always live in servitude to the decisions of our younger selves, to the communities that have parented us, and to the decisions we make that shape our lives forever.
Cecile Richards introduces Make Trouble
Women's rights advocate and president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Cecile Richards, joins us for a discussion of her new book, Make Trouble.

Richards has been an activist since 7th grade, when she was taken to the principal's office for wearing an armband in protest of the Vietnam War. She had an extraordinary childhood in ultra-conservative Texas, where her civil rights attorney father and activist-turned-Texas governor mother taught their kids to be troublemakers. Now, after years of advocacy, resistance, and progressive leadership, she shares her story for the first time—from the joy and heartbreak of activism to the challenges of raising kids, having a life, and making change, all at the same time.
Francisco Cantú (author of The Line Becomes a River) at the FYE® Conference 2018
Francisco Cantú, author of THE LINE BECOMES A RIVER: DISPATCHES FROM THE BORDER (Riverhead Books), speaks about his book at the First-Year Experience® (FYE) Conference in San Antonio, TX.
Alexander Chee interview at AWP 2018
Alexander Chee is with us at AWP 2018 talking about his newest book, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays. Mr. Chee has won numerous awards and fellowships, is an Associate Professor at Dartmouth College as well as being a contributing editor at The New Republic, an editor at large at The Virginia Quarterly Review and a critic at large at The Los Angeles Times.

FROM THE PUBLISHER:

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is the author’s manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nation’s history, including his father’s death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, the jobs that supported his writing—Tarot-reading, bookselling, cater-waiting for William F. Buckley—the writing of his first novel, Edinburgh, and the election of Donald Trump.
Ada Limon interview at AWP 2018
We welcome Ada Limón to the set, author of Bright Dead Things: Poems. Limón was a finalist for the National Book Award, The National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award. Limon’s next book, The Carrying: Poems is due to be released this summer.

FROM THE PUBLISHER:

From National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Ada Limon comes The Carrying—her most powerful collection yet.

Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility—"What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?"—and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: "Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal." And still Limon shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives. "Fine then, / I'll take it," she writes. "I'll take it all."

In Bright Dead Things, Limon showed us a heart "giant with power, heavy with blood"—"the huge beating genius machine / that thinks, no, it knows, / it's going to come in first." In her follow-up collection, that heart is on full display—even as The Carrying continues further and deeper into the bloodstream, following the hard-won truth of what it means to live in an imperfect world.
Meredith Goldstein & Wesley Morris | Can't Help Myself
Meredith discusses her new memoir with New York Times Journalist Wesley Morris.

Meredith Goldstein, the mastermind behind the Boston Globe advice column Love Letters, is coming to the Strand for the release of her new memoir! In Can't Help Myself, Goldstein takes readers through the origins of the column, its wild online-to-print success, and reveals what was happening in her own life as Love Letters grew. Despite her calm and collected attitude in writing, Goldstein doesn’t have it all figured out for herself. She has her own questions about aging parents, office break-ups, dating-in-your-thirties, feminism, porn habits, and Tinder. In Can't Help Myself, we watch as Love Letters becomes Goldstein’s anchor, helping her through painful breakups and a family cancer diagnosis, just as she anchors her readers through their own setbacks and tragedies. With humor (the ex she calls “Draco Malfoy,” the millennial pals she calls “The Rachels”) and the collective empathy of a dedicated online community, Can't Help Myself is an extraordinary and touching portrait of a single woman navigating the difficulties of life and love for both herself and thousands of others.
Ishion Hutchinson interview at AWP 2018
We’re sitting down with Ishion Hutchinson, author of House of Lords and Commons: Poems. Hutchinson won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry in 2016 for House of Lords and Commons.

FROM THE PUBLISHER:

In House of Lords and Commons, the revelatory and vital new collection of poems from the winner of the 2013 Whiting Writers’ Award in poetry, Ishion Hutchinson returns to the difficult beauty of the Jamaican landscape with remarkable lyric precision. Here, the poet holds his world in full focus but at an astonishing angle: from the violence of the seventeenth-century English Civil War as refracted through a mythic sea wanderer, right down to the dark interior of love.

These poems arrange the contemporary continuum of home and abroad into a wonderment of cracked narrative sequences and tumultuous personae. With ears tuned to the vernacular, the collection vividly binds us to what is terrifying about happiness, loss, and the lure of the sea. House of Lords and Commons testifies to the particular courage it takes to wade unsettled, uncertain, and unfettered in the wake of our shared human experience.

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Literary Birthday Celebration: Paul Laurence Dunbar

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