I hope you tuned in this week when
President Barack Obama joined us for a conversation with filmmaker Ava DuVernay about his bestselling memoir “A Promised Land.” But if you weren’t able to attend the streaming event Wednesday, never fear: Watch this special book club event here.
Obama talked about leadership, failure, activism and police reform, which he says begins with reimagining the role of law enforcement.
“What does it mean for a community to be safe?” Obama asked during the book club conversation. “For most of our history, policing in the African American community has meant just keeping a lid on things and keeping control and maintaining barriers and boundaries, rather than actually serving those communities.”
WHEN: April 17-23
HOW: Register in advance for events and receive a reminder email with a link.
DETAILS: Events are free to view except those featuring Don Lemon, Richard Thompson and Brandi Carlile, which cost $5. Books available through partner booksellers. Questions can be submitted on registration. See Festival FAQ for more.
April 17
Festival of Books kickoff, presented with USC
Join us for the kickoff of the 26th annual Festival of Books featuring Dr. Carol L. Folt, USC president, along with surprise appearances by L.A. Times writers and a performance by the USC Trojan Marching Band. Please join in this prelude to the weeklong virtual celebration of books with conversations, panels, children’s and poetry readings and more! Times columnist Patt Morrison will host the event.
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A critic wrote of “A Beautiful Crime”: “Bollen writes expansive, psychologically probing novels in the manner of Updike, Eugenides, and Franzen, but he’s an avowed disciple of Agatha Christie.” How does that statement and the assumptions it makes about literature versus crime fiction resonate for you?
Bollen: (Laughing) I discovered Agatha Christie in the fourth grade, and became obsessed with reading her novels, so mysteries were my gateway drug into reading and loving literature.
Author Jennifer Hillier of “Little Secrets”
(Darren Blohowiak)
Hillier: I read a lot of “Sweet Valley High” as a kid, then jumped directly to Stephen King, which were books my mother had lying around the house. King rocked my world, but his books weren’t always digestible; I think I was 11 when I read “Pet Sematary.” I know a lot of writers from my generation who were influenced by King.
Clackamas Community College to host free creative writing event April 08 2021
Calling all writers and lovers of the written word.
Explore the practices and professions of creative writing and publishing at Clackamas Community College s annual Compose Creative Writing Conference on Saturday, May 15.
This year s event will once again be virtual and free to the public.
Join poet and essayist Wendy Willis as she delivers the keynote address. Her book of essays, These Are Strange Times, My Dear, was published in 2019. Her second book of poems, A Long Late Pledge, won the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize and was released in 2017.
Her first book of poems, Blood Sisters of the Republic, was published in 2012. Her last two books were finalists for the Oregon Book Award. Willis is a faculty member in poetry and creative nonfiction at the Attic Institute in Portland, and she is also the executive director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium and the founder and dire
Counterpoint: 304 pages, $26
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For a crime writer, a sense of place means as much as clean prose and a morally tormented hero. So a lot of what makes Tod Goldberg’s lively, often entertainingly snarky story collection “The Low Desert” so cohesive is its preferred destination for murder and despair: West Coast exurbia.
“The Royal Californian” takes place in a stretch of Indio that “could have been Carson City or Bakersfield or Van Nuys or anywhere else where someone had the wise idea to plant a palm tree and then surround it with cement.” The penultimate story, “Ragtown,” concludes in a “rut of desert” outside Las Vegas. A handful of stories are set by the Salton Sea, a shriveling resort area ravaged by military tests, climate change and corporate exploitation. “The middle of someone else’s mistakes,” as one character puts it.