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Clemantine Wamariya discusses her new memoir and how it's affected her life, her work, and the writing she creates.
About THE GIRL WHO SMILED BEADS
Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbors began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were thunder. In 1994, she and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, fled the Rwandan massacre and spent the next six years migrating through seven African countries, searching for safety—perpetually hungry, imprisoned and abused, enduring and escaping refugee camps, finding unexpected kindness, witnessing inhuman cruelty. They did not know whether their parents were dead or alive.
When Clemantine was twelve, she and her sister were granted refugee status in the United States; there, in Chicago, their lives diverged. Though their bond remained unbreakable, Claire, who had for so long protected and provided for Clemantine, was a single mother struggling to make ends meet, while Clemantine was taken in by a family who raised her as their own. She seemed to live the American dream: attending private school, taking up cheerleading, and, ultimately, graduating from Yale. Yet the years of being treated as less than human, of going hungry and seeing death, could not be erased. She felt at the same time six years old and one hundred years old.
In The Girl Who Smiled Beads, Clemantine provokes us to look beyond the label of “victim” and recognize the power of the imagination to transcend even the most profound injuries and aftershocks. Devastating yet beautiful, and bracingly original, it is a powerful testament to her commitment to constructing a life on her own terms. 
Contributors discuss “Things We Haven’t Said,” a powerful new anthology of writing by survivors of sexual violence.
Edited by YA writer and librarian Erin Moulton, “Things We Haven’t Said” collects poems, essays, letters, vignettes and interviews written written by a diverse group of adults who survived sexual violence as children and adolescents.
Erin E. Moulton is the author of FLUTTER, TRACING STARS, CHASING THE MILKY WAY, and KEEPERS OF THE LABYRINTH. Her books have been selected and nominated for national and state award lists, such as the Amelia Bloomer list, the Kentucky Bluegrass Master List and the Isinglass Teen Read Award List. She also works as teen librarian at the Derry Public Library where she maintains a collection of awesome YA books and leads teen programming.
Barbara McLean hid the injuries from a childhood sexual assault for many years and, as an adult, became involved in an abusive relationship. Eventually, Barbara enrolled in a master's program to study social policy with the desire to change how sexual assault survivors perceive themselves. Today, she works for a Violence Intervention and Treatment Program in Brooklyn, NY, and she volunteers on a sexual assault hotline as well as in a local emergency room.
G. Donald Cribbs has written and published poetry and short stories since high school. He is also a drug and alcohol counselor at the Discovery House in Harrisburg, PA, and holds a master's degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling (MA). He and his wife and four boys reside in central Pennsylvania where the author is hard at work on his next book, the sequel to his debut novel, THE PACKING HOUSE.
Maya Demri started her artistic life at age 4 when she found the magic of ballet and the freedom in painting. Over the years she studied visual arts, dance, acting and singing professionally. In college she discovered her soul's talent of writing and became an author as well. She believes that arts can truly heal and awaken humanity's consciousness.
Jane Cochrane is a poet and a journalist. Originally from North Carolina, she recently graduated from college in Los Angeles with a degree in creative writing. She now lives in New York City. 
Robin Coste Lewis discusses Voyage of the Sable Venus, and Evie Shockley discusses semiautomatic at the 2018 L.A. Times Festival of Music.
FROM THE PUBLISHER (Voyage of the Sable Venus):
Robin Coste Lewis's electrifying collection is a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems meditating on the roles that desire and race play in the construction of the self. In the center of the collection is the title poem, "Voyage of the Sable Venus," an amazing narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present—titles that feature or in some way comment on the black female figure in Western art.
Bracketed by Lewis's own autobiographical poems, Voyage is a tender and shocking meditation on the fragmentary mysteries of stereotype, juxtaposing our names for things with what we actually see and know. A new understanding of biography and the self, this collection questions just where, historically, do ideas about the black female figure truly begin—five hundred years ago, five thousand, or even longer? And what role did art play in this ancient, often heinous story?
Here we meet a poet who adores her culture and the beauty to be found within it. Yet she is also a cultural critic alert to the nuances of race and desire—how they define us all, including her own sometimes painful history. Lewis's book is a thrilling aesthetic anthem to the complexity of race—a full embrace of its pleasure and horror, in equal parts.
FROM THE PUBLISHER (semiautomatic):
Art can't shield our bodies or stabilize the earth's climate, but Evie Shockley's semiautomatic insists that it can feed the spirit and reawaken the imagination. The volume responds primarily to the twenty-first century's inescapable evidence of the terms of black life—not so much new as newly visible. The poems trace a whole web of connections between the kinds of violence that affect people across the racial, ethnic, gender, class, sexual, national, and linguistic boundaries that do and do not divide us. How do we protect our humanity, our ability to feel deeply and think freely, in the face of a seemingly endless onslaught of physical, social, and environmental abuses? Where do we find language to describe, process, and check the attacks and injuries we see and suffer? What actions can break us out of the soul-numbing cycle of emotions, moving through outrage, mourning, and despair, again and again? In poems that span fragment to narrative and quiz to constraint, from procedure to prose and sequence to song, semiautomatic culls past and present for guides to a hoped-for future. 
Michelle Dean discusses Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion with co-host Jeffrey Brown at the 2018 L.A. Times Festival of Books.
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
The ten brilliant women who are the focus of Sharp came from different backgrounds and had vastly divergent political and artistic opinions. But they all made a significant contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of America and ultimately changed the course of the twentieth century, in spite of the men who often undervalued or dismissed their work.
These ten women—Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolm—are united by what Dean calls “sharpness,” the ability to cut to the quick with precision of thought and wit. Sharp is a vibrant depiction of the intellectual beau monde of twentieth-century New York, where gossip-filled parties at night gave out to literary slugging-matches in the pages of the Partisan Review or the New York Review of Books. It is also a passionate portrayal of how these women asserted themselves through their writing in a climate where women were treated with extreme condescension by the male-dominated cultural establishment.
Mixing biography, literary criticism, and cultural history, Sharpis a celebration of this group of extraordinary women, an engaging introduction to their works, and a testament to how anyone who feels powerless can claim the mantle of writer, and, perhaps, change the world. 
Alexander Chee | How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
“How to Write an Autobiographical Novel” explores Alexander Chee’s life as a man, a writer, and an activist. Collectively, the essays form Chee’s manifesto on how we form our identities in the creative world, mixing life, literature, and politics to reveal how the lessons he learned from reading and writing have shaped who he is. In these essays he morphs from a student to a teacher, reader to writer, and considers his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean-American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He recalls formative experiences of his life and the country’s history, including his father’s death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, writing his first novel, and the election of Donald Trump.
Alexander Chee is the author of the national best-seller “The Queen of the Night.”
Joseph Osmundson is a scientist and writer with bylines at the Village Voice, Los Angeles Review of Books, author of “Capsid: A Love Song” and “INSIDE/OUT,” and cohost of the Food 4 Thot podcast. Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refuge Lives at the 2018 L.A. Times Festival of Books.
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
In January 2017, Donald Trump signed an executive order stopping entry to the United States from seven predominantly Muslim countries and dramatically cutting the number of refugees allowed to resettle in the United States each year. The American people spoke up, with protests, marches, donations, and lawsuits that quickly overturned the order. But the refugee caps remained.
In The Displaced, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, himself a refugee, brings together a host of prominent refugee writers to explore and illuminate the refugee experience. Featuring original essays by a collection of writers from around the world, The Displaced is an indictment of closing our doors, and a powerful look at what it means to be forced to leave home and find a place of refuge. 
Questlove (Ahmir Thompson) discusses is latest book, "Creative Quest".
About Questlove:
Drummer, DJ, producer, culinary entrepreneur, New York Times best-selling author, and bandleader of The Roots - Questlove, is the unmistakable heartbeat of Philadelphia’s most influential hip-hop group. He is the Musical Director for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, where his beloved Roots crew serves as house band. Beyond that, this 4-time GRAMMY Award winning musician's indisputable reputation has landed him musical directing positions with everyone from D'Angelo to Eminem to Jay-Z. Questlove has also released two books including the New York Times bestseller Mo’ Meta Blues and Soul Train: The Music, Dance and Style of a Generation. One of his latest endeavors includes scoring Chris Rock’s film, Top Five, and also working as the music supervisor. He also recently produced the Original Broadway Cast Recording of Hamilton, alongside Alex Lacamoire, Bill Sherman, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Tarik "Black Thought" Trotter. He will also serve as the Executive Music Producer and Composer on the A&E Mini Series “Roots.”
