The calendar shows events we are part of and events we are sponsoring. Do you have an event we should know about? Send us a message.
For our October 15th Book Club we will be reading The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang.
To register, click here to email Anne Melia, JEDI book club organizer.
To register, click here to email Anne Melia, JEDI book club organizer.
About the Author:
From esmewang.com: “I’m a fiction/nonfiction writer and the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Collected Schizophrenias, as well as The Border of Paradise. I’m a 2010 MFA graduate from the University of Michigan, and was called one of the 21 “Best of Young American Novelists” in 2017 by Granta in their once-in-a-decade list. Awards include the 2018 Whiting Award, the 2016 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, the Northern California Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, Hopwood Award for Novel-in-Progress, and a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation; I have also been awarded residencies at places such as Yaddo, MacDowell, Camargo, and Hedgebrook.”
For our November 19th Book Club we will be reading Dear America, Notes of an Undocumented Citizen by Jose Antonio Vargas
To register, click here to email Anne Melia, JEDI book club organizer.
“This is not a book about the politics of immigration. This book––at its core––is not about immigration at all. This book is about homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but in the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like myself find ourselves in. This book is about lying and being forced to lie to get by; about passing as an American and as a contributing citizen; about families, keeping them together, and having to make new ones when you can’t. This book is about constantly hiding from the government and, in the process, hiding from ourselves. This book is about what it means to not have a home.
After 25 years of living illegally in a country that does not consider me one of its own, this book is the closest thing I have to freedom.”
—Jose Antonio Vargas, from Dear America
To register, click here to email Anne Melia, JEDI book club organizer.
For our December 17th Book Club we will be reading Thin Places by Kerri ni Dochartaigh. I (Anne) read this book earlier this year. As a person who has not read very extensively about the conflict in Northern Ireland, I found myself profoundly affected by Kerri’s book. I’ve definitely become a fan of her writing.
To register, click here to email Anne Melia, JEDI book club organizer.
A breathtaking mix of memoir, nature writing and social history: this is Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s story of a wild Ireland, an invisible border, an old conflict and the healing power of the natural world
Kerri ní Dochartaigh was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, at the very height of the Troubles. She was brought up on a grey and impoverished council estate on the wrong side of town. But for her family, and many others, there was no right side. One parent was Catholic, the other was Protestant. In the space of one year they were forced out of two homes and when she was eleven a homemade petrol bomb was thrown through her bedroom window. Terror was in the very fabric of the city, and for families like Kerri’s, the ones who fell between the cracks of identity, it seemed there was no escape.
In Thin Places, a mixture of memoir, history and nature writing, Kerri explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal, how violence and poverty are never more than a stone’s throw from beauty and hope, and how we are, once again, allowing our borders to become hard, and terror to creep back in. Kerri asks us to reclaim our landscape through language and study, and remember that the land we fight over is much more than lines on a map, more than housing estates and parliament buildings – it will always be ours but, at the same time, it never really was.
To register, click here to email Anne Melia, JEDI book club organizer.
For our January 21st book club, we will be reading Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh.
To register, click here to email Anne Melia, JEDI book club organizer.
“During Sarah Smarsh’s turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the forces of cyclical poverty and the country’s changing economic policies solidified her family’s place among the working poor.
By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country and examine the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less.
Her personal history affirms the corrosive impact intergenerational poverty can have on individuals, families, and communities, and she explores this idea as lived experience, metaphor, and level of consciousness.
Smarsh was born a fifth generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side. Through her experiences growing up as the daughter of a dissatisfied young mother and raised predominantly by her grandmother on a farm thirty miles west of Wichita, we are given a unique and essential look into the lives of poor and working class Americans living in the heartland. Combining memoir with powerful analysis and cultural commentary, Heartland is an uncompromising look at class, identity, and the particular perils of having less in a country known for its excess.”
To register, click here to email Anne Melia, JEDI book club organizer.