City of Springfield
Massachusetts Book Awards March Author Series |
 |
CELEBRATED AUTHORS TO VISIT SPRINGFIELD CITY LIBRARY
Poet Martín Espada kicks off series of Massachusetts Book Award winners, finalists
A world of books, poetry, and acclaimed authors awaits you at the Springfield City Library, and that is especially true this March when readers are invited to meet four diverse authors whose books have been named either Massachusetts Book Award winners or honor books. Following each author's presentation, copies of the books will be available for purchase and autographing. The events are free and open to the public.
Poet Martín Espada
Central Library Rotunda
Saturday, March 8, 2 pm
Following the 1 p.m. Open Mic poetry program on Saturday, March 8, join us at 2 p.m. to hear from two-time Massachusetts Book Award Poetry Honor Book recipient Martín Espada at the Central Library, located at 220 State Street, Springfield. Called "the Latino poet of his generation” and “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors," Martín Espada has published sixteen books as a poet, editor and translator. His eighth book of poems, The Republic of Poetry, received the Massachusetts Book Award 2007 Honor Book award, the 2007 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Harper's and The Nation. He has also published a collection of essays, Zapata's Disciple (South End, 1998) and edited two anthologies, Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press (Curbstone, 1994) and El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry (University of Massachusetts, 1997). A former tenant lawyer, Espada is now a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches creative writing and the work of Pablo Neruda.
For more information, visit Mr Espada's website at www.martinespada.net
This program is supported by a grant from the Springfield Cultural Council, a local agency supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Kim McLarin
Pine Point Branch Library
Thursday, March 13, 6:30 pm
Meet author Kim McLarin on Thursday, March 13 at 6:30 p.m. at the Pine Point Branch Library, 204 Boston Road. Her book, Jump at the Sun, the Massachusetts Book Award's Fiction Honor Book for 2007, addresses contemporary issues of race, love, gender, class, and motherhood. In the book, African-American Grace Jefferson seems to have it all - a doctorate in sociology, a loving scientist husband, and two cute young daughters. However, she feels unsuited to her new role of suburban stay-at-home mom. Caught between the only two models of mothering she has ever known - a sharecropping grandmother who abandoned her children to save herself and a mother who sacrificed all to save her kids - Grace longs to embrace her new role, hoping to find a middle ground. But as the days pass and the pressures mount, Grace struggles not to damage her children with her own fears and complications, while her thoughts stray far from the greeting-card picture often expected of mothers in society today.
Kim McLarin is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels Taming it Down, Meeting of the Waters and Jump at the Sun. McLarin is also co-author of the memoir Growing Up X with Ilyasah Shabazz. In addition to being named a Massachusetts Book Award Fiction Honor Book, Jump at the Sun was also nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and was chosen by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association as a 2007 Fiction Honor Book. McLarin is a former staff writer for The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Greensboro News & Record and the Associated Press. She has taught at Northeastern University and been a writer-in-residence at Emerson College in Boston. She is currently on leave from Emerson writing a book about Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia. She is the new host of Basic Black, Boston's longest-running weekly television program devoted exclusively to African-American themes, shown on WGBH.
For more information, visit Ms McLarin's website at: www.kimmclarin.com
Mameve Medwed
East Forest Park Branch Library
Tuesday, March 18, 7 pm
Our next author is Mameve Medwed, who will speak on Tuesday, March 18 at 7:00 p.m. at the East Forest Park Branch Library, 122 Island Pond Road. Her novel, How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life, Fiction Honor Book for 2007, follows the fortunes of antiques dealer Abby Randolph - divorced, mourning the death of her mother, and suffering a crisis of confidence. Then the Antiques Roadshow comes to Boston, and Abby, carting an old chamber pot that she inherited from her mother, surprisingly gets star treatment. When it's announced on national television that the pot once belonged to 19th century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning and is worth tens of thousands of dollars, everything changes - friendships, her career, love affairs, even the way she views herself and others - as life comes rushing back at her full force. Kirkus Reviews calls the book "a sitcom with heart, and a whole lot of fun."
Mameve Medwed is the author of five novels: Mail, Host Family, The End of an Error, How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life, and the forthcoming Of Men and Their Mothers. Her short stories, essays and book reviews have appeared in many publications, including Yankee, Redbook, Missouri Review, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and Newsday. Her first novel, Mail, has been optioned for motion picture development by Anand Tucker (Shopgirl, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Hilary and Jackie) and will be directed by Sharon Maguire (Bridget Jones's Diary) with a screenplay by Wendy Wasserstein. Born in Bangor, Maine, she and her husband have two grown sons and have lived in Cambridge for thirty years in an 1860 red Victorian house on a hill.
Click here for more about the author.
Dawn Clifton Tripp
Sixteen Acres Branch Library
Saturday, March 29, 1 pm
This exciting author series is rounded out by a visit from Dawn Clifton Tripp on Saturday, March 29 at 1:00 p.m. at the Sixteen Acres Branch Library, 1187 Parker Street. The Season of Open Water, which won the Massachusetts Book Award Fiction Award for 2006, explores the lives of three generations in a New England seacoast town in the late 1920s. Noel Dowd, once a whaler, now builds boats, while his widowed daughter Cora takes in laundry to make ends meet. Noel has a special fondness for his boyish and willful granddaughter Bridge, who helps him repair boats. Bridge's close and complicated relationship with her brother Luce is tested by both her passion for World War I veteran Henry, a former doctor shattered by the horrors of war, and Luce's growing involvement in the dangerous business of rum-running. Perfectly capturing its time and place, The Season of Open Water explores the often inescapable connections between desire and violence.
Dawn Clifton Tripp, who holds a B.A. in literature from Harvard University, is the author of two novels, Moon Tide and The Season of Open Water, and is currently finishing her third. She lives with her husband and two small children on the top floor of what used to be a lobster company in Westport, a small town on the Massachusetts coast. She has strong ties to Springfield, since her mother was born and raised here, and her father was formerly headmaster of The MacDuffie School.
Click here for a conversation with Dawn Clifton Tripp.
Kim McLarin, Mameve Medwed, and Dawn Clifton Tripp's programs are generously supported by the Friends of the Springfield Library, Inc.
For more information, call the Library, 263-6828, ext. 294. The Massachusetts Book Awards are presented by the Massachusetts Center for the Book; visit www.massbook.org to learn more.
Home | Catalog | Databases | Branches | Kids | Teens | Calendar | Site Index