This interview features award-winning author and university professor Valerie Miner. A longtime visitor and now resident of Mendocino County, Valerie will be reading from and discussing her fifteenth book, Bread and Salt: Stories.
Valerie Miner is the award-winning author of fifteen books. Bread and Salt is her fourth collection of stories. Her latest novel is Traveling with Spirits. Other novels include After Eden, Range of Light, A Walking Fire, Winter’s Edge, Blood Sisters, All Good Women, Movement: A Novel in Stories, and Murder in the English Department. Her short fiction books include Abundant Light, The Night Singers and Trespassing. Her collection of essays is Rumors from the Cauldron: Selected Essays, Reviews and Reportage. In 2002, The Low Road: A Scottish Family Memoir was a Finalist for the PEN USA Creative Non-Fiction Award. Her short fiction collections, Trespassing and Abundant Light were each Finalists for the Lambda Literary Awards
After a career spanning more than 40 years at UC Berkeley, Randy Katz will be stepping down as vice chancellor for research effective June 30.
Katz was appointed to the role of vice chancellor Jan. 1, 2018, according to Berkeley Research’s website. Prior to being vice chancellor, Katz was a computer science professor in the EECS department and served as chair of both the department and the computer science division.
After teaching nearly 20,000 students as a campus professor, training and graduating 52 doctoral students, bringing the internet to the White House and creating technological breakthroughs such as multiprocessor architecture, Katz said in an email that it was time to retire.
Daudi Abe
Daudi Abe is a Seattle-based professor, writer, and historian who has taught and written about culture, race, gender, education, communication, hip-hop, and sports for over 20 years. He is the author of the book
6 ‘N the Morning: West Coast Hip-Hop Music 1987-1992 & the Transformation of Mainstream Culture and
From Memphis and Mogadishu: The History of African Americans in Martin Luther King County,
Washington, 1858-2014 at www.BlackPast.org. His work has appeared in
The Stranger and
The Seattle Times, and he has appeared on national media such as MSNBC and
The Tavis Smiley Show. Abe holds an MA in human development and a PhD in education from the University of Washington. His forthcoming book is
Milton Hildebrand
Milton Hildebrand died on Nov. 28. He was 102 years old.
Milton and his three siblings grew up in Berkeley in a family that provided varied outdoor activities and exposed them to science. (Their father was an eminent chemist on the UC Berkeley faculty.)
Starting at age 8, Milton participated in many Sierra pack trips with family and friends. The children all became proficient at camping and packing burros and mules. When he was 11, Milton and his brothers attended a boy’s boarding school in Switzerland for six months, learning skiing, German, and how to be pals with international classmates.
As an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley, Milton majored in zoology. He skied in the winters (he was captain of the university ski team, and, on skis, made winter ascents of several peaks, including Mount Shasta), and spent most of his summers in the Sierra. He was the manager, and nine times leader, of the burro-trip outings of the Sierra Club (20 people and 12 burros f