Raoul Peck will be at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on Wednesday, June 19 and at the  IFC Film Center on Thursday, June 20 to present the U.S. premiere of his new documentary Fatal Assistance.

Peck is an award-winning Haitian-born filmmaker, and in Fatal Assistance he leads us through the two-year process of colossal rebuilding efforts in post-earthquake Haiti. The film dives headfirst into the complexity of the reconstruction process and the impact of global humanitarian aid, revealing the disturbing extent to which these aid efforts were a failure. Through this film the viewer learns that a large portion of the money pledged to Haiti was never actually received, and the grand plans for  reconstruction largely failed to materialize. Fatal Assistance leads its viewers to one definitive conclusion: current aid policies in Haiti need to be changed.

To learn more about the event, visit the Film Festival’s event page.

Locked-out musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra

By Sam Pizzigati
Too Much – A commentary on excess and inequality
June 9, 2013

Posted on Portside.

Richard Davis chairs the negotiating committee at the nonprofit responsible for the Minnesota Orchestra. Last October 1, Davis and his fellow corporate managers who run the nonprofit “locked out” the orchestra’s musicians after they refused to accept a contract offer that would have cut musician pay by up to 50 percent and jumped annual health care premiums by up to $8,000. These musicians are not striking. Quite the contrary.

For the grasping managers of Corporate America – and the institutions their wealth dominates – no workers deserve dignity, not even the most amazingly accomplished.

What do bank executives who make $19 million a year do in their spare time? They do the same thing they do in the hours they spend in their executive suites. They squeeze America’s middle class.

That’s not, of course, what the flacks at U.S. Bancorp, the nation’s fifth-largest bank, will tell you. They’ll inform you that the CEO of their Minneapolis-based banking giant, Richard Davis, graciously gives of his spare time to serve on the board of the nationally renowned Minnesota Orchestra.

True enough. But CEO Davis brings to that board much more than a fondness for fugues. He brings the same corporate executive arrogance that has shoved labor’s share of the nation’s economic output down to modern-day record lows.

This redistribution - from worker to boss – has been rushing ahead now for over three decades. Since 1980, as analyst David Cay Johnston noted last week, “corporate pre-tax profits have grown at almost twice the rate of pre-tax wages.”

Behind this massive redistribution: a relentless corporate offensive to minimize labor bargaining power by any means necessary. Including “lockouts.”

Richard Davis chairs the negotiating committee at the nonprofit responsible for the Minnesota Orchestra. Last October 1, Davis and his fellow corporate managers who run the nonprofit “locked out” the orchestra’s musicians after they refused to accept a contract offer that would have cut musician pay by up to 50 percent and jumped annual health care premiums by up to $8,000.

Ever since then, the Minnesota Orchestra’s near 100 symphony musicians have gone without salary, health insurance, and pension contributions, the basic building blocks of middle class security.

These musicians are not striking. Quite the contrary. They offered to keep working while bargaining negotiations continued. They also offered to submit “to impartial, final and binding arbitration under the guidance of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.”

U.S. Bancorp CEO Davis and friends rejected these offers. They chose instead to keep the musicians from working – and wait for them to cave.

Back in America’s middle class golden age, in the middle of the 20th century, such management behavior would have been unthinkable.

Back then, any corporate chiefs who locked out their employees in the middle of a labor dispute risked becoming pariahs in their communities, the sort of shady operators who would never be invited to sit on the board of a prestigious nonprofit like the Minnesota Orchestral Association.

But elite attitudes toward lockouts started changing in 1975 when an ostensibly liberal pillar of the business community, Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, replaced striking workers with “replacement workers” and lived to tell the tale. Six years later, a newly elected conservative President, Ronald Reagan, fired and replaced striking air traffic controllers.

A new anything-goes corporate management approach to labor relations soon took hold. Lockouts, in this atmosphere, would become simply another option in the modern American management toolkit – and the federal regulator created to safeguard the right to good-faith collective bargaining, the National Labor Relations Board, would prove too feeble to offer up much resistance.

U.S. Bancorp CEO Davis has had an up-close chance to see how effective a management tool lockouts could be. Nearly two years ago, another major enterprise in Minnesota, American Crystal Sugar, locked out 1,300 workers.

The unionized workers at Crystal, the nation’s largest beet sugar producer, had solid middle-class jobs that averaged $40,000 a year, plus overtime. But in 2011 contract negotiations Crystal management demanded huge health care cuts and work rule changes that would undercut the job security of long-term workers.

The workers voted not to accept the offer Crystal labeled “final.”In August 2011, Crystal then locked them out.

The workers never struck. Crystal replaced them anyway. Last month, the worn-out workers, their unemployment benefits exhausted, voted to accept the same management attack on their middle-class contract they had rejected four times earlier. Crystal management had won a total victory.

U.S. Bancorp’s Davis expected total victory when his lockout began, too. But the musicians have hung tough, buoyed by widespread community support. Still, the hostile environment management has created has taken a toll. About a quarter of the orchestra’s 98 musicians have taken jobs elsewhere or retired.

“This lockout is destroying the Minnesota Orchestra, musician by musician by musician,” viola player Sam Bergman told the audience at one benefit concert late in April.

Richard Davis personally took home $18.8 million in 2010 for his U.S. Bancorp labors, several million dollars more than the annual wage and benefit cost of the entire Minnesota Orchestra. Since becoming Bancorp CEO over six years ago, Davis has averaged about $10 million annually.

Imperial CEOs like Richard Davis owe their grand fortunes, in large part, to the grand squeeze American workers have suffered over the last generation. These execs have been squeezing so long they simply cannot operate any other way.

Even music, turns out, cannot soothe the savage beast.

Aficionados of fine music – and advocates for a more equal America – can now support the musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra online.

[Labor journalist Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, writes widely about inequality. His latest book, The Rich Don't Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970, has just been published.]

Told you so.

Some might deem it celebratory to utter this phrase, as if one is boasting about their own clever foresight. But when it comes to serious matters — matters that affect millions of people, their jobs, their health, and their livelihoods, there is no satisfaction in being right about predicting bad conditions. It’s much better to predict good news. But as it now stands in our country, many problems that emerged years ago have developed into sheer catastrophes, despite the many warnings of forward-thinking experts, scholars and observers.

Disturbingly, those of us who saw the warning signs and called attention to the storm clouds on the horizon are routinely ignored or even chastised, while the blatant war mongers, the misleaders, the defrauders and the corporate apologists are given ample TV/radio time and space on op-ed pages to promote their wrongheaded views. What kind of nation prosecutes whistleblowers for telling the truth, while the perpetrators of blatant, criminal actions by governments and corporations continue to walk free and enjoy the fruits of their shameful actions?

My latest book, Told You So: The Big Book of Weekly Columns is a collection of ten years of weekly writings on a large range of issues. Many of the problems discussed in the book are ones that long have plagued our nation and have been routinely ignored or overlooked.

Here are four “Told You So’s” noted in the book.

1.) Many are shocked by the recent reports of the National Security Agency (NSA) secretly collecting records of millions of phone calls, emails, internet searches, and more, all without any clear oversight and accountability. Many mainstream media outlets are now questioning the scope of this monumental level of government snooping. But while this news of Big Brother-esque overreach might be surprising to some, consider those of us who predicted it back when the Patriot Act was signed into law in the post-9/11 fervor. Benjamin Franklin once wrote: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

On January 9, 2009, I wrote then President-Elect Obama and asked him to: “[M]ake a clean break from the Bush regime’s law of rule to our declared commitment to the rule of law…This can be significantly accomplished by executive orders, agency or departmental directives, whistleblower protections, enforcement actions and explicit legislative proposals.”

Instead of heeding this advice, President Obama has continued — and even expanded — the worst practices of the Bush Administration. Drone strikes have routinely terrorized people in foreign lands and created new enemies to the United States, and countless billions of dollars have been spent on new ways to snoop on ordinary Americans private lives by tracking their phone calls and emails. In 2008, I wrote: “Barack Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. Let’s have it operate out of the Obama White House!”

The same advice applies today.

2.) The actions of Wall Street brought us the financial collapse, the global recession, and the emergence of “Too Big to Fail” and “Too Big to Jail.” Much of this is due to the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. Repealing Glass-Steagall freed Wall Street from its regulatory restraints. Breaking down the wall between investment banks and commercial banking placed our country on the path to unfettered casino capitalism, gambling away other peoples’ money such as pension plans and mutual funds. Soon after the repeal of Glass-Steagall, I approached then-Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers during a chance encounter on a flight to Boston. “Do you think the big banks have too much power?” I asked him.

“Not yet,” was his reply.

3.) Last week, Southern California Edison announced that it will be permanently shutting down its long troubled San Onofre nuclear plant. Back in 1982, I wrote to demand the closure of this facility.

San Onofre is one of several U.S. plants, such as Indian Point in New York and Diablo Canyon in California, that rest near an earthquake fault — just like the infamous Fukushima plant in Japan.

Over 40 years ago, the Atomic Energy Commission estimated that a full nuclear meltdown could contaminate an area “the size of Pennsylvania” and cause massive casualties. Despite this enormous risk, the nuclear industry has claimed a return to nuclear power will be beneficial to the economy and the environment. What of the radioactive waste? What of the enormous security risks? Allowing such reactors to continue to exist is jeopardizing public health and safety.

It is time to eliminate the threats of these catastrophic accidents waiting to happen.

4. The Iraq War was an invasion driven by falsehoods from a criminal presidency violating our Constitution, federal statutes, and international treaties. None of the perpetrators of that invasion have been punished for the wanton death and destruction they caused. The war took the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and injured and sickened many more. The Congressional Budget Office now estimates that the Iraq War cost the U.S. taxpayers approximately $1.9 trillion dollars.

In February 2003, after opposing the pending illegal invasion of Iraq, I wrote: “the Bush Administration has been less than forthcoming in providing the public estimates of the actual costs of a war, both in terms of troops and money. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences estimates that over 10 years, war and the reconstruction of Iraq could cost as much as $2 trillion — almost the equivalent of the entire annual federal budget.”

Two trillion dollars later and many Americans would be hard pressed to say what was truly accomplished in that conflict other than the continuing sociocide of Iraq and its people.

There is no glory in “Told You So’s.” But it is time to stop celebrating the criminally negligent, the suppressors of truth and the profit-driven wrongdoers. Let us turn to those who have proven themselves as early warners, and as such, cease traveling down the road to decay and decline. Look to prophetic people such as Jim Hightower, Bill Moyers, William Greider, Barbara Ehrenreich, Ramsey Clark, James Hansen, Lois Gibbs, Bob Monks, Adolph Reed, Nomi Prins and many others.

Ralph Nader

For more information, see told-you-so.com

Autographed copies of Told You So: The Big Book of Weekly Columns are available from Politics and Prose, an independent book store in Washington D.C.

“The Tale of An Phuc House is a powerful glimpse into the everyday lives of twenty disabled children – third generation victims of the Agent Orange warfare that occurred during the Vietnam War (1963-1973). An inspirational video tale about pride, dignity and love;  a story of a man who dedicates his life to the well-being of his adopted family;  a story of twenty exceptional young adults, whose disabilities brought them together under one roof; a story about ordinary people living  extraordinary lives despite their unfortunate physical conditions.”–thetaleofanphuchouse.com

The documentary will be screened at the Producer’s Club Theater at 6 p.m. on Monday, June 17. Produced by Canada’s Babel Entertainment in association with Vietnam’s Crea-TV, and directed by Ivan Tankushev, it competes with four other documentaries for the coveted title.

For tickets to the screening: http://producersclubjune17.eventbrite.com/

For more information about the disastrous effects of Agent Orange to the Vietnamese and Vietnam War veterans, check out Fred Wilcox’s acclaimed books: Waiting for an Army to Die and Scorched Earth.

Stephanie McMillan will be at the College Street People’s Arts Collective on Tuesday, June 11 to present an easy-to-understand introduction to capitalism in the United States and the dangers of the system.

Stephanie McMillan, the cartoonist behind “Minimum Security” and “Code Green,” presents a basic introduction to what capitalism is, how it works, and why it’s a flawed system that isn’t working. This talk will be accompanied by cartoons and illustrations. Stephanie McMillan is also an organizer with the anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist group One Struggle.

Stephanie McMillan, a long-time activist, cartoonist, and the organizer behind the anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist group One Struggle, has waited decades for the American people to rise up. Inspired by uprisings across the globe, a new movement bursts onto the national scene against a capitalist system that denies people decent lives and puts the planet in jeopardy. McMillan’s book The Beginning of the American Fall documents the first few months of the precarious and contradictory movement with drawings, interviews, dialogue, description, and insightful reflections. It situates detailed personal experiences and representative narratives within the broad context of a truly unique and historical global conjuncture. This book will stand as a record of the emerging movement in accessible comic form. Her other cartoons include “Code Green” and “Minimum Security”, which will be published in its entirety this September.

Stephanie McMillan will be available for question and answer as well as book signings. To learn more about the event, visit the People’s Art Collective event page.

The Graphic Canon Volume 3: World literature through art and comics

Join Graphic Canon Volume Three contributors Benjamin Birdie, Shawn Cheng, Seymour Chwast, Chandra Free, Sandy Jimenez, Peter Kuper, Ellen Lidner, Rebecca Migdal, Robert Sikoryak, Bishakh Som & Lauren Weinstein in an exhibit curated by and featuring Andrea Arroyo. Meet the artists at a book launch reception Monday, June 10th, 6-8 PM.

The exhibit features works from in The Graphic Canon Volume 3, including visual interpretations of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, “How Six Made Good in the World” from the Grimms Brothers, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, T.S. Elliot’s “The Waste Land”, Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge”, Kafka’s “The Top” and “Give It Up!”, Plath’s The Bell Jar, Gabriela Mistral’s “The Dancer”, and more. Meet the artists, view the exhibit, and celebrate the launch of The Graphic Canon Volume 3.

The exhibit will be on view June 10-July 17, 2013 at The Grady Alexis Gallery- El Taller Latino Americano.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with City Council Melissa Mark-Viverito’s office

What Makes a Baby Toronto Book Launch

Join author Cory Silverberg and illustrator Fiona Smyth on Sunday, June 9th at the Academy of the Impossible for the Toronto book launch of their new picture book What Makes a Baby.

Geared to readers from pre-school to 8 years old, it teaches curious kids about conception, gestation, and birth in a way that works regardless of whether or not the kid in question was adopted, conceived using reproductive technologies, at home or in a clinic, through surrogacy, or the old fashioned way, and regardless of how many people were involved, their orientation, gender and other identity, or family composition. Just as important, the story doesn’t gender people or body parts, so most parents and families will find that it leaves room for them to educate their child without having to erase their own experience.

Join Cory and Fiona for a kid-friendly afternoon filled with reading, coloring (pulled straight from the pages of What Makes a Baby), food, drink, and discussions about where babies—all babies—come from.

Stephanie McMillan will be at the Allen Street Bluestockings Bookstore on Saturday, June 8th to present a basic, easy-to-understand introduction to Capitalism and its pitfalls.

Stephanie McMillan, the cartoonist behind “Minimum Security” and “Code Green,” presents a basic, easy-to-understand introduction to what capitalism is, how it works, and why it’s evil. This talk is accompanied by cartoons and illustrations. Stephanie McMillan is an organizer with the anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist group One Struggle.

Stephanie McMillan, a long-time activist, cartoonist, and the organizer behind the anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist group One Struggle, has waited her entire life for the American people to rise up. Sparked by uprisings around the world, a new movement bursts onto the national scene against a system that denies the people a decent life and puts the planet at risk. Her book The Beginning of the American Fall chronicles the first several months of the fragile and contradictory movement with delightful drawings, interviews, dialogue, description, and insightful reflections. It situates detailed personal experiences and representative narratives within the broad context of a truly unique and historical global conjuncture. This book will stand as a record of the emerging movement in accessible comics form. Her other cartoons include “Code Green” and “Minimum Security”, which will be published in its entirety this September.

Stephanie McMillan will be available for question and answer as well as book signings. To learn more about the event, visit the Bluestockings Bookstore event page. The even has a $5 suggested donation at the door.

Ralph Nader with Amy Goodman

Ralph Nader will be at 92nd Street Y on Thursday, June 6th to read and discuss the columns from his new book Told You So.

Ralph Nader is one of America’s most controversial—and uncompromising—public figures. He is a man on a mission who believes that taking on the powers that be involves more than just talking about it—it also means taking action. This collection of columns spanning not only time but topic brings to the forefront issues facing out society— from war, corporate power, commercialism, workers’ rights, and more.

Ralph Nader will be available for question and answer and well as book signings. To learn more about the event, visit the 92nd St Y event page.

Ralph Nader Book Tour

Join Ralph Nader at the Barnes & Noble Union Square Store as he reads and discusses his new book of columns, Told You So. 

For the past forty-five years Ralph Nader has challenged corporations, government agencies, and institutions to be more accountable to the public. In 1965, Unsafe at Any Speed changed the face of the automobile industry and made Ralph Nader a household name. As a result of his efforts, cars have more safety features. His lobbying and writing on the food industry insured that the food we buy is required to pass strict guidelines before reaching the consumer. His new collection Told You So covers topics from big corporations, environmental pollution, commercialism, civil rights, and more.

To learn more about the event, visit the Barnes & Noble event page.

Double Fist: A Reading with Chavisa Woods & Jeanne Thornton

Chavisa Woods, author of Albino Album, will be joined by Jeanne Thornton, author of The Dream of Doctor Bantam, on Wednesday, June 5th at Bluestockings for a night of readings and conversation.

In The Dream of Doctor Bantam, Jeanne Thornton tells an unlikely love story of  rough, chain-smoking Texan Julie Thatch and her lover, Patrice. When Julie’s hero and sister dieds after being hit by a car, she finds her self gravitating to Patrice- someone strangely similar to her sister, and someone who is also a member of the Scientology-esque Institute of Temporal Illusion.

The Albino Album is a novel as songs that tells the epic story of a girl who rides the line between abandon and lunacy on a speeding albino horse. A lead character with an un-pronounceable name, our fiery, unhinged, growling, big-hearted country girl in a dirty black tutu and combat boots leaves ashen valentines in her wake along this unique exploration of the bizarre yet familiar aspects of human desire.

Join these two amazing writers as they read and discuss their debut novels at Bluestockings. To find out more about the event, visit the Bluestockings event page.

Adapting the Novel: the Graphic Canon 

Join Graphic Canon contributor Robert Berry at the exhibition Ulysses Seen: An International Bloomsday at the Irish Arts Center Wednesday, June 4th to celebrate the launch of The Graphic Canon Volume 3 with fellow contributors Annie Mok, Lauren Weinstein, Peter Kuper, and Brendan Leach.

Karen Green, curator of the Columbia University Library collection of graphic novels, will be moderation a discussion about adapting literature into a visual form. The Graphic Canon Volume 3 is a nonstop barrage of comics, full-page illustrations, photography, and cutting-edge design bringing to life the literature of the twentieth century. You never know what you’ll find: a Sherlock Holmes mystery, an H. G. Wells story, an illustrated guide to the Beat writers, a one-act play from Zora Neale Hurston (drawn by Milton Knight), a disturbing meditation on Naked Lunch, Rilke’s soul-stirring Letters to a Young Poet, a WWI soldier’s suppressed poem of war’s savagery, Anaïs Nin’s diaries, the visions of Black Elk, the heroin classic The Man With the Golden Arm (published four years before William Burroughs’s Junky ), and the postmodernism of Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Kathy Acker, Raymond Carver, and Donald Barthelme.

Join Robert Berry, Annie Mok, Laren Weinstein, Peter Kuper, and Brendan Leach for the launch of this visually stunning collection. The panel discussion begins at 7:30, and will be followed by a wine and cheese reception at 8:30. This event is free of charge, but you can reserve a space in advance. To learn more about the event, go to the Irish Arts Center event page.

The anticipation is building for the June 25th release of Volume 3 of The Graphic Canon, the massive collection of classic and modern world literature adapted by artists and illustrators.

Want an inside look at how these brilliant artists adapted our most beloved modern classics?

Join us tomorrow, June 4th at 7:30pm at the Irish Arts Center for a panel discussion and reception to celebrate the soon-to-be-released Graphic Canon Vol 3.
June 4th, 7:30pm
Irish Arts Center
553 W 51st St  New York, NY 10019

Seven Stories publisher Dan Simon and editor Veronica Liu will introduce the event and thank editor Russ Kick (unfortunately not present) for his vision.

Karen Green, graphic novel librarian at Columbia University and walking encyclopedia of  graphic novels, will be moderating a panel discussion with the incredible artists Peter Kuper (adapted Franz Kafka’s ”The Top” and “Give It Up!”), Robert Berry (adapted Ulysses by James Joyce), Annie Mok (adapted ”Araby” from Dubliners by James Joyce), Lauren Weinstein (adapted ”The Dreaming of the Bones” by W.B. Yeats), and Brendan Leach (adapted ”The Voice of the Hamster” by Thomas Pynchon).

A selection of Robert Berry’s drawings from Ulysses, part of the Bloomsday celebration sponsored by Irish Arts Center, will be on display in the gallery, where the reception will take place following the panel discussion.

I hope you will join us for wine, cheese and great conversation with some of the charming and talented artists who have made The Graphic Canon such a one-of-kind project.

Sponsored by the Irish Arts Center and Seven Stories Press.

What Makes a Baby New York Book Launch

On Saturday, June 1st, Cory Silverberg will be at Bank Street Books to celebrate the launch of his new book, What Makes a Baby.

Most books about where babies come from leave many of us out. They tell a nice story (mommy + daddy + intercourse = you!) but the truth is that more and more of us are acknowledging the help we get to bring children into our lives. That help might be a doctor, fertility clinic, adoption or foster agency; it might be a turkey baster and a friend; it might be a sperm donor or a surrogate. What Makes a Baby helps parents tell children a story about where they came from that isn’t just true for them, but true for everyone.

Join Cory for a kid-friendly afternoon filled with reading, coloring (pulled straight from the pages of What Makes a Baby), food, drink, and discussions about where babies—all babies—come from. To learn more about this event, visit the Bank Street Books event page.

Book Discussion with Sam Pizzigati

Polls now show that two-thirds of Americans believe that the nation’s enormous wealth ought to be “distributed more evenly.” But almost as many Americans—well over half—feel that protests against inequality will ultimately have “little impact.” The rich, millions of us believe, always get their way. But, as Pizzigati shows in the popular history of 1900-1970, the plutocracy can win.Sam Pizzigati, author of The Rich Don’t Always Win, will be at AFL-CIO on Friday, May 31st to discuss and sign his book. Beverages will be provided, but bring your lunch and learn about the forgotten triumph of the American middle class.

More timely than ever with the looming fiscal cliff, Pizzigati explains that there was once a time that the little guys won- and created the American middle class. In his recent LA Times article “The fiscal cliff… of 1932”, Pizzigati says “Is history simply repeating? If so, bring that repeat on, with the same final result. That 1932 fiscal crisis produced an unexpected, and stunning, watershed in U.S. history, the moment when America’s rich and powerful began to lose their lock-grip on the nation’s political pulse.”

This event is part of the AFL-CIO Book Club, and you can RSVP here.

Ralph Nader Book Tour

Ralph Nader will be launching his new book of columns, Told You So, at Politics & Prose Bookstore on Thursday, May 30th.

The column is the most natural literary form for a citizen’s advocate, and Ralph Nader may be its most robust and forceful practitioner. Told You So: The Big Book of Weekly Columns presents a panoramic portrait of the problems confronting our society and provides examples of the many actions an organized citizenry could and should take to create a more just and environmentally sustainable world. Drawing on decades of experience, Nader’s columns document the consequences of concentrated corporate power; threats to our food, water and air; the corrosive effect of commercialism on our children; the dismantling of worker rights; and the attacks on our civil rights and civil liberties. Nader also offers concrete suggestions to spark citizen action and achieve social change.

Ralph Nader will be available for question and answer as well as book signings. To find out more about the event, visit the Politics & Prose event website.

Wise words from Seven Stories publisher Dan Simon:

The most important person I know is Ralph Nader because he always makes a lot of sense. Ralph is one of the very few living Americans who has saved countless lives, done so again and again. Seatbelts. The whole idea of consumer protection. Ralph reminds us that we can make real change, and shows us how. Today we release his new book, Told You So: The Big Book of Weekly Columns. In the tradition of I.F. Stone, Ralph Nader has taken up and transformed what used to be called the newspaper column (but today since most newspaper columns aren’t read in newspapers we had to drop the n-word) into a weekly literary and political call to action. The book is big and bold, full of great ideas and, like its author, funny, honest, and brash all at once.

You can see Ralph at the Union Square Barnes & Noble on Wednesday, June 5, and at the 92nd Street Y with Amy Goodman on Thursday, June 6.

The segment calls Gaskin “the unlikely leader of the midwife movement,” and said that she “created change from the woods of Tennessee” and “impacted women globally.”

Midwifery is a centuries-old practice of guiding a woman though pregnancy, labor, birth, and the post-partum period. Thought midwifery doesn’t necessarily mean birth without medication or hospitals, Gaskin cites the problems with hospital births as “too many drugs, too many c-sections, too many inductions.” Humans have the capacity for natural birth the same as any other mammal.

“Don’t criticize nature,” she says in the segment, “stand in awe of it.”

In addition to her work as a midwife, Gaskin is also a the author of several books including Birth Matters: A Midwife’s Manifesta (Seven Stories Press, 2011). 

Luis Negrón Book Tour

Puerto Rican author Luis Negrón will be speaking about his debut collection of short stories, Mundo Cruel, already a sensation in Latin America and available in English for the first time, at Elliott Bay Book Company on Thursday, May 28th.

Mundo Cruel, Luis Negrón’s debut book, elegantly presents to its readers a world both tragic and outrageous. Masterfully satirical with a discrete solemnity at its core, Mundo Cruel‘s most remarkable element is its language. Several of its stories feature unnamed protagonists brought to life by their speech—colloquial, self-incriminating, and idiosyncratic—revealing Negrón’s mesmerizing talent for conjuring the spoken word in all its subtlety.

Luis will be available for question and answer, as well as book signings. To find out more about the event, visit the Elliott Bay event page.

Luis Negrón Book Tour

Join Puerto Rican author Luis Negrón at City Lights Bookstore on Wednesday, May 22nd as he reads and discusses his debut collection Mundo Cruel.

In the collection that Publisher’s Weekly calls “Slender but never slight, and often extremely funny,” Negrón offers insight to gay life in the intimate world of a small community in Puerto Rico. Rich with humor, satire, and expert story-telling, this collection is expertly translated by the award-winning Suzanne Jill Levine.

Luis Negrón will be available for question and answer as well as book signings. To find out more about the event, visit the City Lights Bookstore event page.

The classic canon of Western civilization meets the artists and illustrators who have remade reading in the last years of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century in Russ Kick’s magisterial, three-volume, full-color Graphic Canon. In the first anthology of its kind in comics history, Russ Kick presents some of the artists and illustrators, both known and unknown, who have begun to redefine literature for a new century. Among these artists are Zak Smith (Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon), Sharon Rudahl (Three Tang poems: Wang Han, Cui Hu, and Li Bai), Milton Knight (“Poker!” by Zora Neale Hurston), and Frank M. Hansen (”If-” by Rudyard Kipling).

Join these amazing artists alongside Russ Kick in a panel discussion and presentation about art, literature, and what happened when these two worlds collide. To find out about the event, visit the event page.

This event is an ALOUD event. Help support this valuable program and purchase your copies of The Graphic Canon at the Library Store.

Luis Negrón Book Tour

Author Luis Negrón will be at Book Soup in LA on Monday, May 20th to read from his debut collection Mundo Cruel.

In the collection Lambda Literary Magazine calls “a study in verve, sass, and voice, peppered with a dash of spirituality,” Negrón’s stories capture a picture of life a small community in Puerto Rico. He examines not only gay life, but the human condition across all boards. Smart, funny, and heart-wrenching, these nine stories reveal a mastery of language that leaves you wanting more.

Luis Negrón will be available for question and answer, as well as book signings. To find out more information about the event, visit the Book Soup event page.

Fighting hunger means more than donating cans to a food drive, says Joel Berg, an expert on hunger and food security, and the head of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. Hunger is a larger societal problem, and people need to change the way they think about it before they can begin to fight it.

Berg, the author of All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America? (Seven Stories Press, 2008), writes in an article in the New York Nonprofit Press that volunteering once a year on the holidays is not enough to fight hunger either. With hopes of connecting people with ways they can fight food insecurity, Berg and NYCCAH have launched the Ending Hunger Through Citizen Service initiative. People interested in the new program can go to HungerVolunteer.org, where they will find downloadable toolkits for service work, as well as ways to match their own skills, interests, resources, and time availability. For example, Berg writes that it can make a greater difference for a graphic designer to help a soup kitchen design a new logo than for the person with those skills to volunteer to wash pots.

Berg writes that it is a fact that there is enough food in America for everyone. He highlights the extreme concentration of wealth in the city–there are 53 billionaires in New York City with a collective worth of $231.5 billion, a number four times the entire budget of the city of New York–and calls it “outrageous” that, considering this wealth, anyone in New York City goes hungry.

Lots of water and a healthy amount of probiotics are two tips offered by Julie Gabriel in a recent article entitled “5 Ways to Detox Your Face.”

Holistic nutritionist Julie Gabriel is the author of Holistic Beauty from the Inside Out: Your Complete Guide to Natural Health, Nutrition, and Skincare, a wonderful guide to taking care of your body that brings all four corners of the natural beauty paradigm together: natural skincare, holistic nutrition, stress-relief, and healthy lifestyle.  

Gabriel states that the skin can be helped along in the detox process by fiber intake such as eating oatmeal or muesli for breakfast, or switching to whole meal bread. Some of Gabriel’s suggestions, like a weekly home spa ritual including a facial steam infused with lavender, nettle, chamomile, and rosemary, are nourishing for the soul as well as the skin. Others, like replacing your chemically based, paraben-containing, expensive cosmetic products with organic essential oils, should also be healthy for your wallet.

For more healthy beauty tips from Julie Gabriel as well as natural skincare recipes, be sure to check out Holistic Beauty from the Inside Out.  

In a recent review by Noah Berlatsky in The Atlantic, Silverberg is praised for “includ[ing] all children, regardless of whether they have a mommy and daddy who had sex, or adopted them, or whether they have two mommies, or two daddies, or (as Silverberg mentioned in the guide) a trans daddy who gave birth to them, or any of a myriad of other possibilities. The book, then, tries not to impose one truth, but rather to open up possibilities and conversations.”

To read the full review, go to The Atlantic online. This truly inclusive explanation of the birds and the bees is available in stores in two weeks!

Parecomic: Michael Albert and the Story of Participatory Economics is on sale today!

Sean Michael Wilson and Carl Thompson, the creative team behind the progressive comic strip “Green Benches,” have united once more to bring us Parecomic—the story of political and economic revolutionary Michael Albert and his ideas for an alternative to capitalism.

Joel Magnuson Book Tour

Joel Magnuson will be at Annie Bloom’s Books to read and discuss his new book, The Approaching Great Transformation: Toward a Livable Post Carbon Economy, on Monday, May 6th.

The oncoming decline of the Oil Age, the facts are hard: global oil deposits will soon reach their peak, a violent race to get whats left has begun, and our culture of consumption is heedlessly dependent on oil and other fossil fuels. The consequences will not just be longer lines and higher prices at the gas pump, but as Magnuson explains the very nature of life as we know it hangs in the balance with the onsite of this inevitable change which stands to become a needless catastrophe.

Magnuson’s visionary insights do not only highlight the negative compounding factors of dwindling resources, global warming, increasing debt, and ill-prepared government. He also argues that mindful and concentrated action of individuals and communities around the world can reshape our future into a world shifted away from a consumer culture. By emphasizing projects such as B-Corporations and LETS projects, Magnuson shows us that the great transformation is already underway.

Joel will be available for question and answer, as well as book signings. To learn more about the event, go to the Annie Bloom’s Books event page.

“The Approaching Great Transformation is a breath of fresh air in a world of hackneyed nonsolutions to our social and economic problems. Professor Magnuson pulls no punches regarding the coming collapse of the corporate-commercial-consumer society, or the inability of technological fixes and ‘green capitalism’ to bail us out of the historical crunch that is virtually upon us. Rather, as we start to run out of energy (read: oil) and are forced to abandon obsolete notions of ‘growth’ and ‘progress’, we shall have to confront the question we have collectively been avoiding for roughly 500 years: If money is not the purpose of life, what is? Whether the alternative models discussed in this book prove to be viable or not, the author makes it clear that what we are living with now is no choice at all. His message is simple: change or die.”
—Morris Berman, author of Why America Failed

On May 04, 2013, about 45 South Floridians rallied at Walmart Super Center in Davie to express solidarity with workers in Bangladesh. The death toll of the Rana Plaza building collapse in Savar, Bangladesh currently stands at 547.

The protesters chanted, “Walmart profits come in coffins!” “When human rights are under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back!” and “Hey Walmart, what do you say, how many workers have you killed today?”

Walmart makes $15.4 billion annual profit by maintaining exploitative and dangerous working conditions around the globe. In the last 6 months, at least 659 Bangladeshi workers have been killed making clothing for them and other retail brands. In the U.S., Walmart store employees and
warehouse workers suffer low wages, long hours, no benefits, and no union organization.

We must stand together to demand a living wage, safe working conditions, and the right to organize for all workers, around the globe. No more profits off the backs and blood of workers!

The Rapid Response Network is a project of One Struggle (onestruggle.net). To be on the RRN mailing list, contact onestruggle.southflorida@gmail.com

Join Graphic Canon contributor Robert Berry at the opening reception of Ulysses “seen”, a web-based comic adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, created in collaboration with Josh Levitas and Mike Barsanti, and featured in Graphic Canon Volume 3 out this June.

Robert Berry will be giving an artists talk at 6:30, followed by a reception where guests can view his artwork on display through June 30th. To find out more about the event, visit the Irish Art Center webpage. Admission to this event is free.

This poignant book with its exotic illustrations can be used across several educational landscapes. It might do well as supplemental or advanced independent reading, or it might even be used to open dialogue in social studies, citizenship, human rights, or ethics classes.

The entire review can be found on The New York Journal of Books website. 

Seven Stories author Lee Stringer described a life of poverty in America in an article for Alternet’s Hard Times, USA series. The article, entitled “How Being Poor in America Shaped Every Part of My Life and Forced Me to Live on the Streets,” details his childhood, his parents struggles to make ends meet, and the circumstances  that led Stringer to live on the streets of New York City for a dozen years.

Stringer tells of living in a rooming house with his mother and brother; of his mother having to rely on public assistance; and of how he, deemed economically and culturally disadvantaged by his school, was “summarily consigned to the slow classes and systematically steered towards developing [him]self into a capable factory worker.”

Through his experiences with poverty, Stringer notes a series of ironies–how pride, which he was taught in church was a sin, was actually a virtue for the poor; how charity, which he was taught was a virtue, was tinged with shame for the recipient; how when a poor person self-advocates, they are a beggar, but when they are advocated for, the person who does so is lauded for their humanity; and, ultimately, how only when he was no longer poor did people begin to care what he had to say about being poor.

Stringer’s books Grand Central Winter and Sleepaway School are available through Seven Stories Press.

Sam Pizzigati Book Talk

Sam Pizzzigati will be at the First Church of Jamaica Plain in Boston on Thursday, April 15th to discuss how a century ago, just like today, the wealthy dominated the country’s politics and economy, and how over the course of 50 years, the middle class won. Sponsored by Jamaica Plain Forum, Dollars & Sense, United for a Fair Economy, and Class Action, Sam will be discussing his bookhttp://catalog.sevenstories.com/products/rich-dont-always-win, followed by Q&A and a book signing. 

hosted a super-rich even more domineering than ours today. Yet fifty years later, that super-rich had almost entirely disappeared. Their majestic mansions and estates had become museums and college campuses, and America had become a vibrant, mass middle class nation, the first and finest the world had ever seen.

Americans today ought to be taking no small inspiration from this stunning change. After all, if our forbears successfully beat back grand fortune, why can’t we? But this transformation is inspiring virtually no one. Why? Because the story behind it has remained almost totally unknown, until now.

Join Sam Pizzigati as he talks about this forgotten piece of history and reveals the courage and hope that the middle class had then, and can reclaim now. For more information about the event, go to the Jamaica Plain Forum event page.

The Themes that Bind Us: Workshop & Book Signing with Sabrina Chap

Sabrina Chap will be at the Foundation for Sex Positive Culture Main Space on Tuesday, April 23rd for a reading, multimedia presentation, and book signing for Live Through This: On Creativity and Self-Destruction.

After a short reading of Live Through This, Sabrina will put on a multi-media presentation that serves as an introduction to the book and the artist contributors. In the presentation, Sabrina touches upon the themes she noticed most while editing Live Through This: shame, political consciousness, isolation, and power versus control. These reflections offer an honest and hopeful journey through a woman’s silent rage, through the ways struggles with destruction can be empowering, and the ensuing possibilities for transforming that burning force into external release as art.

Sabrina will be available for question and answer, as well as book signings. To learn more about the event, visit the event page.

We’re celebrating Earth Day with two recently released books which advocate for the preservation of the environment: the children’s book The Story of the Blue Planet by Icelandic author Andri Snaer Magnason and a collection of essays about the dangers facing the people, the animals, and the land of the Arctic, Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point, edited by photographer, writer and activist Subhankar Banerjee. 

The children’s book The Story of the Blue Planet (November 27, 2012 with the paperback coming out November 26, 2013) by Andri Snaer Magnason, has just won a Green Earth Book Award honorable mention during the Salisbury University Read Green Literature Festival on April 5, 2013. The literature award, sponsored by the environmental nonprofit The Nature Generation, is given to authors and illustrators whose books best inspire young readers to appreciate and care for the environment. 

Says Magnason about the inspiration behind the story, “Mythology and fairy tales were written before we knew we were living on a planet. I wanted to make a modern tale, modern mythology, about living on a planet—the wisdom, the choices—because things that happen on one side of the planet affect the other side as well.”

With the decision in February that Royal Dutch Shell will not drill for oil in Alaska’s Arctic seas this year, environmentalists breathed a sigh of relief—for now that is. Indian-born environmental activist Subhankar Banerjee was an outspoken critic of Shell’s plans to drill in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas last summer, citing the dangers to the native wildlife and the disruption to indigenous life and culture in the area.

Subhankar Banerjee brings together first-person narratives from more than thirty prominent activists, writers, and researchers who address issues of climate change, resource war, and human rights with stunning urgency and groundbreaking research. Arctic Voices (June 19th, 2012, updated paperback edition coming in August, 2013) includes 32 pages of color photographs of this breathtaking region and an introductory essay by Banjerjee.

From Gwich’in activist Sarah James’s impassioned appeal, “We Are the Ones Who Have Everything to Lose,” during the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen in 2009 to an original piece by acclaimed historian Dan O’Neill about his recent trips to the Yukon River fish camps to an essay by Pamela Miller, the Arctic Program Director of the Northern Alaska Environmental Center, about the harmful effects of past drilling in Alaska’s North Slope, Arctic Voices is a window into a remarkable region.

“In this impassioned book, Banerjee shows a situation so serious that it has created a movement, where ‘voices of resistance are gathering, are getting louder and louder.’ May his heartfelt efforts magnify them. The climate changes that are coming have hit soon and hard in the Arctic, and their consequences may be starkest there.”—Ian Frazier, The New York Review of Books

Join acclaimed South African poet Antjie Krog and guest poets to celebrate the publication of Antjie’s first collection of poetry published in North America, Skinned.

Thursday, April 18th at 6:30pm
Seven Stories Press
140 Watts Street (between Greenwich and Washington St)
New York, NY 10013
A, C, E, 1 to Canal Street

Antjie Krog has long been considered one of the most important poetic voices of contemporary South Africa. Her language beautifully evokes the passion, pride, anger, and confusion felt for her homeland and its complex history. Skinned, which gathers poems from ten of Krog’s published collections over a span of thirty years, is a one-of-a-kind collection representing her entire career as a poet. It is Krog’s first volume to be published in North America and features poems newly translated into English and unpublished until now.

As Antjie Krog says in her introduction,
“Three themes have fingerprinted my work for four decades: politics and the land, family and love, and the being-ness of the poet. This volume attempts to present a kaleidoscope of how these themes changed and developed in the course of ten volumes against the background of profound political and social changes within South Africa.”

Antjie Krog has published twelve volumes of Afrikaans poetry and she has won virtually all the literary prizes available in Afrikaans, including the esteemed Hertzog prize, the Dutch/ Flemish prize Reina Prinsen Geerligs, and the Eugene Marais prize for the best young poet. Her poetry has been translated into Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Turkish and Arabic, but not until now has it been published in America.

The struggle against inequality continues as Tax Day highlighted just how little the wealthiest Americans pay in taxes. Sam Pizzigati, author of the recently released, The Rich Don’t Always Win, talked with Laura Flanders about the battle against plutocracy that everyday Americans waged in the first half of the 20th century, when the upper class ruled and inequality was at its peak. Pizzigati compares 2007, the year before the financial meltdown, when the richest 400 people were taxed just 16.6% of their total income (which averaged $345 million), to 1955 when the richest 400 paid 51.2% of their total income (after exploiting all the loopholes).

It’s almost laugh-out-loud ridiculous to think that in the 1950s the top tax bracket was 91% on those making over 200,000 a year. But the 1950s were times of great prosperity, and it was because of the little guys fighting for economic equality, over many decades, that progressive taxes were implemented.

“Why should our tax dollars be subsidizing economic inequality?” asks Pizzigati. “We shouldn’t be giving any federal contracts to companies that pay their top executives over 25 or 50 times what they pay their lowest paid workers. We can redistribute through the tax system.”

Pizzigati’s advice? “Be as bold as our predecessors were.”

Check out Pizzigati’s conversation with Laura Flanders on GritTV and pick up a copy of The Rich Don’t Always Win for more background on this historical struggle.

Among Nader’s criticisms are that Obama, in 2008, promised a minimum wage increase to $9.50 by 2011, fell silent on the topic after winning the election, and has recently amended the proposal to an increase to $9 by 2015–a far cry from his original plans. Nader also writes that Obama and the Democrats focus more on raising funds and not alienating business interests than opposing a Republican Party and its “votes to protect massive tax breaks for the wealthiest, end the universal Medicare guarantee, jeopardize Social Security, oppose measures that would protect seniors from abusive financial practices, attack women’s health and safety, weaken consumer protections, undermine the Pell Grant program for low-income students, favor corporations shipping jobs overseas at the expense of American workers, slash the food stamp program, weaken protections to ensure that every voter’s vote counts, and allow big oil companies and speculators to drive up gas prices along with a raft of brazen anti-environmental bills that would have despoiled our air, water and soil.” Nader believes that the Democratic Party lacks self-analysis, and, instead of talking vaguely about the middle class, needs to focus more on the needs of the poorer classes that are its “natural constituency.”

Many more of Ralph Nader’s opinions can be found in the forthcoming Told You So: The Big Book of Weekly Columns, which will be available from Seven Stories in May.

“When I put Cory Silverberg’s What Makes a Baby on my university course reading list, I did not know how students would respond. On the first day of class, some were skeptical. Others wondered why I required them to read a children’s book. But in the end, it worked—brilliantly. Contrasted with stereotypical stories of conception that are commonplace in our culture, What Makes a Baby gives learners a delightfully diverse, child appropriate (and adult appreciated), and inclusive vision of family and sex education.”

Dr. Carla Rice, Canada Research Chair in Care, Gender and Relationships, University of Guelph

 

Luis Negrón and Suzanne Jill Levine Book Event

Author Luis Negrón and translator Suzanne Jill Levine will  be at the Strange Loop Gallery on Thursday, April 11th to read from Mundo Cruel, Negrón’s debut collection of short stories.

Nine short stories, expertly translated, open a door into working class Santurce, Puerto Rico, where shoddy medical offices, Catholic churches, Mormon temples, and Santeria storefronts line the sunbaked streets. Here, a bumbling prostitute-turned-fugitive bewilderingly avoids capture. Back-biting mothers hand down judgment on their neighbors and the world at large from their front lawns. A desperate dog-owner will do anything to have his precious animal sent to a taxidermist. A young Chosen One with a curious gift helps his fellow parishioners find God.

Both author and translator will be available for question and answer, as well as book signings. This event is sponsored by the Bureau of General Services: Queer Division.

Wars, a recession, and the dissatisfaction with government are signs that those entrusted to run government are out of touch with those who elected them to run it, and brings to mind the old adage “power corrupts…” I also remember a most quotable line from a favorite movie I first saw as a teenager–Star Wars. Princess Leia, when she was captured, had stared defiantly at her subduers, and, unflinching, proclaimed, “The more you tighten your grip, the more [systems] just slip through your fingers.” I believe this quite apropos in the case of the UN vote on 29 November, 2012, recognizing Palestine as a state. The world (or “systems”) spoke out against US support of Israeli aggression and terrorism against the Palestinian people specifically, and US interventionism generally.

Seven Stories finds that there are fewer and fewer people in the world who can dedicate themselves to such extensive reading as the incarcerated often want to undertake, and value them as some of our most important readers.

Luis Negron & Suzanne Jill Levine Book Event

Luis Negrón will be at the Upper West Side Barnes & Noble on Wednesday, April 10th, alongside translator Suzanne Jill Levine, to read from his debut collection of short stories Mundo Cruel.

In the collection that Publisher’s Weekly calls “Slender but never slight, and often extremely funny,” Negrón offers insight to gay life in the intimate world of a small community in Puerto Rico. Rich with humor, satire, and expert story-telling, this collection is expertly translated by the award-winning Suzanne Jill Levine.

Both author and translator will be available for question and answer, as well as book signings. To find out more, visit the Barnes & Noble event page.

Levine’s acclaimed translations, which include works by Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Three Trapped Tigers) and Manuel Puig (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth), have helped introduce the world to some of the icons of contemporary Latin American literature.

Every year since 1976, Project Censored, our nation’s oldest news-monitoring group—founded at Sonoma State University by Carl Jensen, directed for many years by Peter Phillips, and now under the leadership of Mickey Huff—has produced a Top-25 list of underreported news stories and a book, Censored, dedicated to the stories that ought to be top features on the nightly news, but that are missing because of corporate media bias and self-censorship.

Join Mickey Huff in this important discussion of the news stories you should have heard, but didn’t. For more information, visit the Tattered Cover website.

Mundo Cruel Book Launch with Luis Negrón

Puerto Rican author Luis Negrón will be speaking about his debut collection of short stories, Mundo Cruel,  with Alan West-Durán, Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program at Northeastern University, at La Galeria at the Villa Victoria Center for the Arts on Thursday, April 4th at 7pm.

“Hilarious and heart-wrenching, provocative and pitch-perfect, each story is a tiny, transgressive explosion. I feel inadequate to the task of expressing just how wonderful this book is…read it slowly, and listen close; here is a master storyteller at his finest.”—Justin Torres, author of We The Animals

Puerto Rican author Luis Negrón brings his impeccable ear for dialog to English readers with his debut collection of short stories, Mundo Cruel, capturing the rhythms of daily life in a community in Puerto Rico as well as the longing, abuse, and isolation faced by the marginalized gay subculture.

Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine, two-time winner of the PEN Center USA Translation Award, these stories crackle with language that brings all the hilarity, desperation and joy of each character boldly into focus. Negrón’s unique voice has been receiving praise throughout Latin America and the book, already a sensation in Spanish, is now available in English for the first time. 

The event was held at Dixon Place and hosted a mix of LGBTQ spoken word poets and authors. Following the reading, there was a pagan ritual to bless the book and Chavisa with good fortune and prosperity. The ceremony included members of the audience donning animal masks, the lighting of candles, and the invoking of gods to bless Chavisa and her book.

Following are photos and video by Art Kaye:

LoveStar was originally published in Iceland, and was named “Novel of the Year” by Icelandic booksellers and received the DV Literary Award and a nomination for the Icelandic Literary Prize. 

“Lovestar is a dystopia for the information age. But unlike most dystopias, the LoveStar world is also shocking in its beauty.”—Ploughshares Literary Magazine

“Orwell, Vonnegut, and Douglas Adams are felt on every page, though Magnason is never derivative. His satire and insightful social commentary sweeten the pot and the sheer wackiness of Magnason’s oversized imagination is invigorating.”—Publishers Weekly

“Strange and refreshing—a lushly imagined future that reminded me of Vonnegut and Brautigan.”—Ed Park, author of Personal Days

LoveStar, the enigmatic and obsessively driven founder of the LoveStar corporation, has unlocked the key to transmitting data via birdwaves, thus freeing mankind from wires and devices, and allowing consumerism, technology, and science to run rampant over all aspects of daily life. Cordless modern men and women are paid to howl advertisements at unsuspecting passers-by, REGRET machines eliminate doubt over roads not taken, soul mates are identified and brought together (while existing, unscientifically validated relationships are driven remorselessly asunder), and rocketing the dead into the sky becomes both a status symbol and a beautiful, cathartic show for those left behind.

Join Andri as he reads from his Philip K. Dick Award nominated novel, the night before the award announcement! To learn more about the event, visit the Elliott Bay event page.

Born Nelson Algren Abraham in Detroit, Algren wrote his first story, “So Help Me,” in 1933, and won his first award–an O. Henry prize for his short story “The Brother’s House”–two years later, in 1935. The same year, he also published his first book, Somebody in Boots, which he later disowned, saying that it was politically naive. Algren is certainly best known for The Man With the Golden Arm, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1950 and was adapted into a film starring Frank Sinatra in 1955 (which Algren abhorred).

Throughout his career, Algren remained fixated on stories of the downtrodden members of society and those pushed to its fringes; his work is densely populated with failures, has-beens, and outcasts. The Man With the Golden Arm‘s protagonist, Freddie Machine, is a prime example, having been worn down by the slow march of time into a morphine addict trapped in a marriage of false obligation. His powerful, raw writing earned him the respect of his contemporaries: Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemingway, and others.

Algren’s influence continues to be felt in American literature today, whether through the writing of his friend Terry Southern, the Chicago Tribune‘s Nelson Algren Award, or the many writers like Peter Plate whose sensibilities have been deeply informed by this master of fiction. Seven Stories Press proudly continues to publish Algren’s works, keeping in print a classic voice that should never go unheard.

To browse Seven Stories’ complete Nelson Algren collection, click here.

Check out an portrait of Nelson Algren on The Believer by Colin Asher here.

The abortion debate remains one of the biggest cultural issues in America today. In her new book, Sarah Erdreich shows that there may be more common ground than most people see. Connected to issues of autonomy, privacy, and sexuality, Erdreich exposes the legislative battles being waged against abortion rights across the states. She also tells the stories of those who risk their lives for careers in the abortion field, from doctors to counselors.

Sarah is a women’s health advocate and has been identified as a leading pro-choice activist by Newsweek, and her incisive writings on abortion rights have been noted by Jezebel, Feministing, and the National Partnership for Women and Families. She has worked for several prominent pro-choice organizations, and has been published in On The Issues, Lilith, Feminists For Choice, and RH Reality Check.

To learn more about this event, visit the library event homepage. This event is free of charge, and is presented in partnership with Planned Parenthood of Maryland.

The Torturer in the Mirror

The Torturer in the Mirror shows us how when one of us tortures, we are all implicated in the crime. In three uncompromising essays, Iraqi dissident Haifa Zangana, former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, and professor of sociology Thomas Ehrlich Reifer teach us how physically and psychologically insidious torture is, how deep a mark it leaves on both its victims and its practitioners, and how necessary it is for us as a society to hold torturers accountable.

Join Dr. Thomas Reifer in discussion of methods of modern warfare, especially torture and the lasting effects.

Hecker and Oscar have made it their goal, alongside the media watchdog group started by Carl Jensen at Sonoma State University, to return journalism to be used ethically as a means of educating the voting public with honest, need-to-know stories. With their film, they hope to ignite a grassroots effort to take back control of the media and make sure those stories that are under-reported, ignored by the media, or covered up all together are heard by the public.

In the article “Digging for the truth” on Petaluma360, Sehldon Bermont lays out the films main points:

• Abandon complacency concerning potential threats to our ability to be informed citizens; turn off corporate media, referred to by Hecker and Oscar as “Junk Food News”

• Research and experience alternate media. Hecker and Oscar listed their recommended top five in this category as KPFA Radio, Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman, the BBC, Russian Televisoin (RTN) and Al Jazeera.

To learn more about the film premier, or the festival being held April 10-April 14, go to the festival website.

“Do You Dream in Color? reveals Rubin’s strong personality, an honesty that is refreshing and beautiful and her adamant refusal to slip into the shadows and be ignored.”

Click here to read the entire review.

School Library Journal

Those who enjoyed Adam Gidwitz’s A Tale Dark and Grimm (Dutton, 2010) may find Magnason’s cautionary ecological tale a perfect compliment. Like Gidwitz, Magnason does not shy away from graphic descriptions of danger and death. That being said, as in all good fables, he begins with once upon a time and readers learn of an innocuous-looking blue planet floating in space. It is inhabited solely by children, who live an idyllic, although somewhat savage life (they hunt for food, even clubbing seals). They are happy and this is most fully realized once a year when the butterflies of the Blue Mountains follow the sun across the sky, a beautiful and breathtaking sight. But as in all good tales and life itself, things are never static. Enter the villain, Mr. Goodday, who lands on the planet and is discovered by the protagonists, Brimir and Hulda. Mr. Goodday, over the course of a very short time, corrupts the children by giving them the power to fly and by introducing them to, among other things, the concept of sefishness. In the process the planet is corrupted as well, affecting the entire ecosystem. After a number of harrowing events, Mr. Goodday is outsmarted by Hulda, who offers to fulfill his greatest wish in return for restoring the children and planet to their former states. Well-paced, with some wonderful, story-enhancing color illustrations. –Mary Beth Rassulo, Ridgefield Library, CT

Sarah Erdreich will be in L.A. at Book Soup Thursday, March 21 at 7:00pm to discuss her new book, Generation Roe.

It is about time, forty years after Roe v. Wade, to finally demystify abortion. One-third of all American women will have an abortion by the time they are 45, and most of those women are already mothers. Yet, the topic remains taboo. Even amidst MTV’s 16 & Pregnant, depictions of or even discussion about abortion remains almost nonexistent. In Generation Roe, Sarah Erdreich gives us a new way of thinking about abortion–one based in the reality of women’s lives.

Erdreich has been identified as a leading pro-choice activist by Newsweek, and her incisive writings on abortion rights have been noted by Jezebel, Feministing,  and the National Partnership for Women and Families. Now, in Generation Roe, Erdreich tells the true stories of those whose lives are most changed by this issue, and outlines the outrageous legal battlegrounds that have popped up across the country, all with frankness and candor. Gloria Steinem says Erdreich “replaces lies with honesty and myth with reality” in this, her first book.

Click here to watch Sarah Erdreich on Book TV!

Don’t miss her charming performance at the Free Library of Philadelphia, where she delighted crowds singing with her partner, Jenny Taira accompanying her on piano, and read an excerpt from her memoir.

For more, listen to Laurie’s interview on Radio Times and download the mp3 of her Philadelphia performance.

With vision and deliberate action communities around the world can break out of habitual ways of producing and consuming things and move optimistically toward something better. The Approaching Great Transformation: Toward a Liveable Post Carbon Economy, Magnuson’s follow-up to Mindful Economics, discusses this idea and many other timely issues of economy, energy, and consumption. in time, these institutional developments will lead to the positive evolution of economic systems and human culture. This book documents examples and stories of this work that is already being done.

Joel Magnuson is an internationally recognized economist specializing in non-orthodox approaches to political economy. He is currently a professor of economics in Portland, Oregon; a visiting fellow at the Ashcroft International Business School at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, England; and is an international advisor to the editorial board of Anglia’s journal Interconnections.

The Approaching Great Transformation will be out in April 2013.

Click here to listen to the full program on Blog Talk Radio!

And it never would have happened without Andrew Laties’ Rebel Bookseller, the book which inspired Ackland to pursue his lifelong dream.

Rebel Bookseller: Why Indie Businesses Represent Everything You Want to Fight for, from Free Speech to Buying Local to Building Communities is the culmination of Laties’ extensive thirty-year experience in bookselling and a powerful testament to the power of independent businesses to grow and transform, along with the communities of which they are inextricably a part. Rebel Bookseller is the story of Laties’ success in his own words, complete with personal anecdotes about “making it” and advice for those who wish to try their own hand at the competitive book business.

“Bookstores are personal, quirky assemblages of the rich artifacts called books. Bookstores inspire the creation of analogous, personal libraries for individuals to use to enrich their lives and relationships and futures.”

–Andrew Laties, Rebel Bookseller

“A bookstore is a cultural anchor,” says Ackland. Though Amazing Books will only operate in one location (as opposed to Awesome’s three former branches), its bold new owner is undeterred. In his introduction to Rebel Bookseller, Laties writes that “a life in indie store ownership is worth striving for.” In Ackland’s case, the striving is finally over. Now, the real work can begin.

Read the full story on the Pittsburgh City Paper Blogh and check out Rebel Bookseller in the Seven Stories Press catalog now!

Rubin describes her past as a “journey towards identity,” one she hopes will resonate with young people struggling with two fundamental questions: “Who am I?” and “Where do I fit in?” Although most of us aren’t blind, Rubin believes that many of us have traits that make us something other than “normal.” These differences, like blindness, may seem like barriers but for the strong and the persistent, dreams can overcome barriers, no matter how large they may seem. This is what makes her story so unique yet universal and so important for young readers.

To learn more about the event, go to the Philadelphia Library events page. This event is in partnership with the National Museum of American Jewish History, and is free of charge.

Queer in America brings together some of the best voices in writing, including Laurie Rubin (Do You Dream in Color?, Seven Stories Press), Amy Bloom (Come to Me, HarperCollins), Michael Cunningham (The Hours, Picador), Paul Rudnick (I Hate Hamlet), and Brian Selznick (The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Scholastic Press), to discuss how they are working towards a better and more accepting place for LGBT youth. After a screening of Lecesne’s award-winning documentary Trevor, the authors will be reading their own letters from The Letter Q: Queer Writers’ Notes to Their Young Selves. 

Join James Lecesne and all of the outstanding and award-winning authors for this one of a kind event. To find out more information about the event, visit the 92nd Street Y event page.

An epic story of a big-hearted country girl with a dirty black tutu, combat boots, and an unpronounceable name, The Albino Album is a novel as a song about a girl riding the line between lunacy and abandon on a speeding albino horse. In the tradition of the southern gothic novel, Woods presents a new land of contemporary misfits including fire dancers, pseudo-Nazis who breed albino animals, circus performers, catholic workers, horse thieves, and the archangel Gabrielle.

Come hear Chavisa Woods talk about her original and breathtaking novel at Left Bank Books! To learn more about the event, visit the event page.

TONIGHT at the 92nd St. Y James Lecesne, author of Trevor: A Novella for young adults and co-founder of the Trevor Project, hosts an evening on how writers are working to make it better for LGBT youth. He is joined by writers Amy Bloom, Michael Cunningham, Paul Rudnick, Brian Selznick, Doug Wright and Laurie Rubin, who will read their own letters from The Letter Q: Queer Writers’ Notes to Their Younger Selves.

Watch live online tonight at 8:15pm!

In recent years, transgender rights have been becoming more and more a part of public consciousness. From laws disallowing discrimination in matters of housing and employment to growing rights around public accommodation such as being able to use bathrooms of one’s chosen gender, the needs of people who fall outside the gender binary are being acknowledged.

Many transgender people become aware of their status at a very early age. Some children identify as the opposite gender than the one they were assigned at birth almost as soon as they begin to talk. For these children who know deeply who they are, the difficult part is often making those around them aware of their identity and needs. Some school districts have taken steps in the right direction, letting transgender children use their chosen name and gender on  forms and in classrooms, use the bathroom of their choosing, and not letting anyone know about the child’s assigned gender unless the child chooses to disclose it themselves. Recently, a transgender third-grader in New Hampshire won the right to be treated as a girl at school. “Score one for tolerance, and the increasing strides grown-ups are making in understanding that gender isn’t always definitively settled the moment a baby is born,” says a recent Salon.com article about the girl.  Transgender children, once labeled as “mentally ill” now have options such as hormones, surgery, and full social transition–all of which were chosen by sixteen-year-old Skylar, the topic of a recent New Yorker article on trans kids. Many tra

nsgendered children chose not to fully transition, but stay within the realm of gender ambiguity or genderqueerness.

10,000 Dresses by Marcus Ewert, illustrated by Rex Ray (Seven Stories, 2008) is the story of a young girl assigned male at birth who dreams of dresses and tries to share her enthusiasm with family members who all tell her to start acting like a boy. Eventually, she finds a friend who accepts her as the beautiful, creative girl she knows she is inside, and together they make dresses like the ones she dreams about. A 2008 finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards, a 2009 Rainbow Book List book, and a honor book in the 2010

Stonewall Children’s and Young Adult Literature Award,  the book treats the topic of transgendered children honestly and sensitively and is a must-have for any parent that wants to open their child’s eyes to a world beyond the gender binary.

On Tuesday, March 12th former gang member and drug addict Bob Powers, acclaimed photographer Bruce Davidson, and author Emily Davidson, gathered at Barnes & Noble on the Upper East Side of New York to discuss Bob’s incredible story of survival and recovery, all detailed in Bobby’s Book.

Growing up park side—on the west side of Prospect Park—in the 1950s and 60s, Bob barely had a chance. His family wasn’t dysfunctional, the whole neighborhood was. Alcoholism was as common as tattoos and territorial fights at the 9^th Street neighborhood line. The nuns at school were cruel and Bobby didn’t learn to read or write—not until he set out to master these basics in his 40s. Instead he honed his reputation for being tough, wrangled with the police, and got into drugs.

When he first tried heroin in his early twenties, he never imagined that it would lead to a black hole where for twenty years he would run million dollar drugs deals and then squander the money, cycle in and out of prison and through homelessness, and father three children who witnessed it all. It was a period of such desperation and loneliness that he was certain he would not make it out alive.

It wasn’t until he turned forty that Bobby realized no one could pull him out of this life but himself. And then he set out to help others like him, becoming a nationally respected drug counselor. With the delicate hand of Emily Davidson and photos by Bruce Davidson of Bob as a teenager in 1959, Bob’s story is told in his gritty voice, full of suffering and honesty, free of judgment but not free of remorse. 

James Lecesne, founder of The Trevor Project and author of Trevor: A Novella, will be hosting Queer in America at 92nd Street Y, a night dedicated to how writers are trying to make a better life for LGBT youth. The event happens tonight at 8.15 pm.

Queer in America brings together some of the best voices in writing, including Laurie Rubin (Do You Dream in Color?, Seven Stories Press), Amy Bloom (Come to Me, HarperCollins), Michael Cunningham (The Hours, Picador),Paul Rudnick (I Hate Hamlet), and Brian Selznick (The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Scholastic Press), to discuss how they are working towards a better and more accepting place for LGBT youth. After a screening of Lecesne’s award-winning documentary Trevor, the authors will be reading their own letters from The Letter Q: Queer Writers’ Notes to Their Young Selves. 

Watch it live online at the 92nd Street Y’s blog.

After a sit-in in her office and heated negotiations, the school President, Mary Jane Saunders, agreed to meet with students. Though Saunders scheduled the open meeting for the first day of spring break, over 250 people attended. The final outcome of the talks was that the school intended to keep the money and name the stadium after the donor, despite the students’ concerns.

The first football game at the new stadium is scheduled for April 20th, but the students’ fight continues. The struggle was a topic on the Colbert Report, and The Nation declared Stop OwlCatraz one of the top ten most important student mobilizations in the current period.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! In between the parade and a cold glass of Guinness, if you’d like to explore Irish culture on a deeper level, check out Martha Long’s memoir on growing up in the slums of Dublin in 1950s, MA, HE SOLD ME FOR A FEW CIGARETTES.

As Alice Walker says about the book, 
“Reading this startling testament to one child’s valiant attempts to live until the age of sixteen is a worthy reminder that we can do better as adults if we turn to embrace the children who are suffering, anywhere on earth…”

And Counterpunch says, 
“This is a searing account of childhood survival. No more haunting memoir has been published this year.”

Check out an interview with Martha on WORT-FM.

Join Laurie Rubin (Do You Dream in Color?, Seven Stories Press), Amy Bloom (Come to Me, HarperCollins), Michael Cunningham (The Hours, Picador), Paul Rudnick (I Hate Hamlet), and Brian Selznick (The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Scholastic Press), to discuss how they are working towards a better and more accepting place for LGBT youth. Moderated by James Lecesne and featuring a screening of his award-winning documentary Trevor, this event is $29 at the 92nd St Y. For more information, go to the event page.

“In the tradition of Roald Dahl and Maurice Sendak, Magnason’s story celebrates the ferity and fearlessness of childhood as an idealized state. . . . a Suessian mix of wonder, wit, and gravitas.” 

Click here to read the entire review.

The Albino Album is a novel as songs that tells the epic story of a girl who rides the line between abandon and lunacy on a speeding albino horse. A lead character with an un-pronounceable name, our fiery, unhinged, growling, big-hearted country girl in a dirty black tutu and combat boots leaves ashen valentines in her wake along this unique exploration of the bizarre yet familiar aspects of human desire.

Chavisa Woods is a Brooklyn-based writer and artist, and recipient of the 2009 Jerome Foundation Award for emerging writers. Her debut collection of short stories, Love Does Not Make Me Gentle or Kind, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Debut Fiction. Woods has read or performed at The Whitney Museum, Penn State, the New York Vision Festival, the NYC HOWL festival, and the New York Hot Festival.

The Albino Album will be out February 2013.

Economist and author of  The Approaching Great Transformation: Toward a Livable Post Carbon Economy spoke at at Powell’s Books in Portland to a full house yesterday. We are standing on the brink of a momentous time in history, when the natural resources that the global economy has relied upon for the past century are drying up. There is a necessity for change, but what will that change look like and will it come soon enough? Economist Joel Magnuson explains that the choices we make today as we adapt to mounting scarcity may be the most important historical events of the 21st century.

As Magnuson makes clear, an economy so deeply reliant on fast-disappearing resources has no future. Economists have been cautioning us for decades that the approaching decline in oil will seriously impair food production, along with almost every other major industry.

Magnuson takes an uplifting approach of looking beyond corporate globalization to alternative systems such as localization. As Helena Norberg-Hodge says in the foreword, “Building a sustainable, just future requires re-imagining our social and economic structures. Magnuson shows us how practical, realistic shifts in those structures can bring about a whole range of short- and long-term benefits.”

Join Bruce Davidson, Emily Davidson, and Bob Powers discussing Bobby’s Book
Tuesday, March 12th, 7pm
Barnes and Noble, Upper East Side
150 E 86th St  New York, NY 10028

Bob Powers has led a shocking and remarkable life, a childhood of violence and poverty followed by stints as a drug dealer and a heroin addict, before turning his life around and becoming a nationally respected drug counselor.

Growing up in the rough neighborhood of South Park Slope in Brooklyn in the 50s and 60s, Bob joined a street gang called The Jokers, and became one the subjects of the critically acclaimed photographer Bruce Davidson. Bruce’s beautiful black and white photos of Bob and The Jokers, taken in 1959, were published in Esquire and then in a book called Brooklyn Gang in 1998.

Bruce’s wife, Emily Davidson, began a long friendship with Bob and has now recorded his story in his own voice that offers a shocking glimpse into a world of the past, of rough and tumble Brooklyn streets, of the horrible price of addiction and the difficult journey of recovery. Included in the book are some of Bruce’s 1959 photos of Bob, patrolling the streets of Brooklyn with his gang of tough-looking kids.

The Approaching Great Transformation: Toward a Liveable Post Carbon Economy is Magnuson’s follow up to his previous book, Mindful Economics. In his second book, Magnuson extends his ideas and focuses on he coming shift in how we act and think in the world economically as the era of cheap oil comes to an end. The purpose of this book is to provide inspiration for those seeking the ongoing global effort to move away from our dependency on fossil fuels and ceaseless growth, and towards a more sustainable, stable, and just system.

“The Approaching Great Transformation is a breath of fresh air in a world of hackneyed nonsolutions to our social and economic problems. Professor Magnuson pulls no punches regarding the coming collapse of the corporate-commercial-consumer society, or the inability of technological fixes and ‘green capitalism’ to bail us out of the historical crunch that is virtually upon us.” -Morris Berman, author of Why America Failed

The Approaching Great Transformation will be out in April 2013.

Inextricably connected to issues of autonomy, privacy, and sexuality, the abortion debate remains home base for the culture wars in America. Yet, there is more common ground than meets the eye in favor of choice. Generation Roe delves into phenomena such as “abortion-recovery counseling,” “crisis pregnancy centers,” and the infamous anti-choice “black children are an endangered species” billboards. It tells the stories of those who risk their lives to pursue careers in this stigmatized field. And it outlines the outrageous legislative battles that are being waged against abortion rights all over the country. With an inspiring spirit and a forward-looking approach, Erdreich holds abortion up, unabashedly, as a moral and fundamental human right.

Join Sarah Erdreich, women’s health advocate and writer, to discuss her new book. Admission is free! To learn more about the event, go to the event page.

The Albino Album. 

Emerging author Chavisa Woods, noted for capturing a “strange, troubling vision of domestic life in the rural U.S.” (Go Magazine), here presents a technicolored vision of rural adolescence. The novel, told as songs, follows a lead character with an unpronounceable name who rides the line between abandon and lunacy on a speeding albino horse. The Albino Album breaks into a whirlwind tour of the underbelly of America spanning countryside to cityscape, from the cornfields of Luisiana, to the big brass sound of Mardi Gras, and the heights of the Empire State Building.

The Albino Album will be out February 2013.

There are a lot of books out there that explain the facts of life. Why did you want to write one?

Partly because I disagree with the facts as they are usually presented! The“facts of life”usually mean the facts of only some people’s lives, and really they end up meaning the facts of some idealized life that no one actually lives. So I wanted to write a book for kids about where they came from that would more closely represent the actual story. I’d like to think this is the book Mrs. G would write.

What Makes a Baby is surprisingly funny in parts (I hadn’t ever thought of the uterus as funny before your book). Was it important to you to make the book humorous?

I wanted to write a book that both adults and kids would actually want to read. So much sex education is well meaning but has a feel of required reading to it. Parents often approach this topic with anxiety and I wanted to give them something that would make them laugh and hopefully relax a bit, since young children don’t have anxiety about this topic at all. They learn it from us!

You’ve described the book as a social justice approach to sex education. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Well a social justice frame is about, among other things, not centering one experience because it’s the most common, or easiest to explain, or simply because it’s the experience of people with the most power and privilege. In concrete terms that meant not starting with intercourse. Interestingly, once you decide to shift the center of the story (in this case from intercourse to the desire to make a baby however it’s made) a whole range of new possibilities present themselves. And so what the book does is teach the very basics about what one needs to make a baby, what all of us need to be made, and then it asks the parent or adult reader to do some of the work, filling in as much or as little detail on the unique story of that child’s conception, gestation, and birth, as they like.

A second social justice element to this book is that I don’t give all the answers. Which is appropriate. It’s not for me to say how or why every child is born. We need to give parents and caregivers flexible and fun tools so they can tell their own stories. At the same time I want to encourage us to tell children some stories about what connects us to each other.

Storytelling is a theme that runs through the book, you describe the egg and sperm as meeting and telling their stories to each other, DNA is, in the world of What makes a Baby, a series of stories about bodies. What is it about storytelling that you find so compelling when talking about baby making?

Everything is story telling. Baby making is storytelling. When it comes to things related to our bodies and sexuality we have a tendency to think of them as somehow“natural”and fixed, more true then, say, our values or beliefs. But they aren’t. Our bodies, even at the cellular level, are influenced by our environment, our communities, our culture, and our planet. One way we compartmentalize sexuality and reproduction is by teaching our children and ourselves that it’s something different from the rest of life. I don’t see it that way. I want kids to grow up knowing that the world is full of stories, and they are full of stories, and they have a right to hear stories that reflect their experience and write their own stories, not just about how they feel, but about who they are.

What do you say to parents who think learning about eggs and sperm is something to discuss with an older child, not a preschooler?

Sex educators, like myself, say all the time that sex education is a lifelong endeavor. It’s not one talk you have with your kids it’s thousands. And it’s never too early to start, as long as one is following the child’s lead. One of the most important aspects of What Makes a Baby is that it allows both child and adult to enjoy a story and only dig deeper if there are questions and there is comfort answering the questions.

Having said that, there’s nothing inappropriate about explaining, in a way that makes sense to a 3 or 4 year old, the basics of conception, gestation, and birth. In the best-case scenario, these are beautiful stories about love and family and identity. The way you would share them with your five year old will be different then the way you’ll share them with your ten year old. But kids need stories at every age and stage of their lives.

What is the one most important thing a child should know about their birth?

I wish I could say that they were wanted and they are loved. Unfortunately that’s not always the case. But hopefully every child has someone in their life who loves them and is happy they were born. That’s about as close to a universal message as I could come up with; you are here, you are beautiful, and I’m glad you were born.

You’re writing two more books about sexuality for older children. As a sex educator you probably see a lot of misinformation out there. What do you hope to accomplish with this trilogy?

I’m not, by nature, very self-confident or self-assured. And to be honest I don’t really like to take up a lot of space. Having said that, my answer to this has to be that what I hope to accomplish is a complete re-imagining of how we talk about reproduction, sexuality, and gender with young children.

For further information or to arrange an interview with Cory, please contact Ruth Weiner at ruth@sevenstories.com or visit www.sevenstories.com/trianglesquarewww.sevenstories.com/trianglesquare or www.what-makes-a-baby.comwww.what-makes-a-baby.com. What Makes a Baby – $16.95 – Pub Date: May 7, 2013 – ISBN: 9781609804855

Women’s health advocate and writer Sarah Erdreich has been identified as a leading pro-choice activist by Newsweek, and her incisive writings on abortion rights have been noted by Jezebel, Feministing, and the National Partnership for Women and Families. She has worked for several prominent pro-choice organizations, and has been published in On The Issues, Lilith, Feminists For Choice, and RH Reality Check. She has also worked editorially with the magazines HUES and Teen Voice. Generation Roe is her first book.

Generation Roe: Inside the Future of the Pro-Choice Movement delves into phenomena such as “abortion-recovery counseling,” “crisis pregnancy centers,” and the infamous anti-choice “black children are an endangered species” billboards; tells the stories of those who face threats on their lives to pursue careers in this stigmatized field; outlines the outrageous legislative battle grounds that have popped up all over the country; and takes to task pro-choice activists for allowing the very words used in the debate to be controlled by anti-choice rhetoric.

To find out more information about the event, visit the event page.

Rubin describes her past as a “journey towards identity,” one she hopes will resonate with young people struggling with two fundamental questions: “Who am I?” and “Where do I fit in?” Although most of us aren’t blind, Rubin believes that many of us have traits that make us something other than “normal.” These differences, like blindness, may seem like barriers but for the strong and the persistent, dreams can overcome barriers, no matter how large they may seem. This is what makes her story so unique yet universal and so important for young readers.

Come hear Laurie, internationally-acclaimed mezzo-soprano, sing and speak about her book! To find out more information about the event, visit the POAC event page. This event is sponsored by Mountain West Bank and Pend Orielle Arts Council.

RADAR is a non-profit organization committed to providing programs devoted to the cultivation of queer and underground literature. Hosted by Michelle Tea, author, poet, and literary organizer known for her autobiographical work exploring the queer culture, this reading series brings together some of the best voices in LGBT writing.

Chavisa Wood’s debut novel The Albino Album is bold exploration of the intersections of race, class, and sexuality, and contemplates the relationships between political action, art and romance, as our heroine tries on a series of bewitchingly fantastical families looking for the place to call home.

Woods is a Brooklyn-based lesbian writer, artist, and activist, and recipient of the 2009 Jerome Foundation Award for emerging writers. Her debut collection of short stories, Love Does Not Make Me Gentle or Kind, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Debut Fiction.

MISS: Your story is so inspiring – how have you gone about spreading your message and why is it important to you?

LR: I have gone about spreading my message mostly via my concerts and some motivational speaking engagements. In my concerts, I often tell stories from my life which pertain to the pieces I’m about to sing because I always go on stage thinking that there is someone in that audience who needs some lifting up, some encouragement, or else just a fun evening to let their hair down. When I bring my point home with the music, it really gives my message the emotional context it needs for each individual person with his or her own unique story.

It is so important for me to share my story because I know that we all feel like the underdog at times, but we all deserve to achieve the greatest success, and to claim the fulfilling life we deserve. I think that being blind has given me perspective on how it feels to be treated differently. I feel very strongly that difference should be treated as a positive thing, not a negative one, and yet people are so focused on the traits they don’t like about themselves. Often, these insecurities stand in the way of people’s goals, and I feel that people need to find the skill sets, the things they are best at to help them get where they need to be.

I also believe that many people do not see themselves as beautiful. It is so important to feel beautiful which I did not for so many years. It’s when I started to feel beautiful, happy with who I am that I started to have more success, and that is why my partner Jenny and I are in the midst of writing an album with the title track, “The Girl I Am,” about those times when we have been brought down, and how we need to rise above it and remember the people we are, and how wonderful that is. We’ve performed this song for a variety of audiences, most recently a high school girls choir in Rock Springs Wyoming. All the girls in the room were sobbing, and they told us that the music and our words gave them hope in a time when they feel so insecure about who they are. That is who we want to reach, the teens and young adults who need to know that life gets better as long as they remain truthful to who they are.

To read the entire interview, go to MISS online.

The Albino Album is a novel as songs that tells the epic story of a girl who rides the line between abandon and lunacy on a speeding albino horse. A lead character with an un-pronounceable name, our fiery, unhinged, growling, big-hearted country girl in a dirty black tutu and combat boots leaves ashen valentines in her wake along this unique exploration of the bizarre yet familiar aspects of human desire.

Chavisa Woods Book Tour

Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point

As part of the  Lannan In Pursuit of Cultural Freedom series, Banerjee and Hansen  spoke of the “non-human” communities that we are wiping out because of oil drilling, global warming, and climate change, which is often times overlooked in mainstream media and government. They also touched upon clean energy, new fuel sources, the XL pipeline, and what it means to our daily life and our planet’s future.

To hear the whole conversation, watch the video here. To learn more about environmental changes, read Banerjee’s book Arctic Voices.

Sarah Erdreich will be in Washington D.C. at Politics & Prose Bookstore on Monday, March 4 at 7:00pm to celebrate the launch of her new book, Generation Roe.

Generation Roe: Inside the Future of the Pro-Choice Movement delves into phenomena such as “abortion-recovery counseling,” “crisis pregnancy centers,” and the infamous anti-choice “black children are an endangered species” billboards; tells the stories of those who face threats on their lives to pursue careers in this stigmatized field; outlines the outrageous legislative battle grounds that have popped up all over the country; and takes to task pro-choice activists for allowing the very words used in the debate to be controlled by anti-choice rhetoric.

During the event, Andri focused his reading around ideas. He read from LoveStar’s manifesto:

“An idea hijacks the brain, pushes away feelings and memories, makes you neglect friends and relations, and drives you toward a single goal, that of launching the idea into the world. An idea takes over the speech centers, allowing access only to itself, it steals your appetite, reduces your need for sleep, and induces the brain to produce a chemical that is stronger than amphetamines and can keep you going for months at a time.”

If you didn’t make it out to the reading, follow this link to catch up. Pick up your copy of Andri’s Phillip K. Dick nominated novel, LoveStar.

Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck spent two years documenting the failure of the international community to meet the needs of those affected by the earthquake. Fatal Assistance shows multiple humanitarian organizations working on the same project, infighting among NGOs, and new hospitals being built next to existing ones instead of where they are needed. Peck views the failure through a radical lens, showing how even in the most dire of situations, aid and politics go hand in hand.

Peck is the former Minister of Culture of Haiti, and an internationally renowned filmmaker. His acclaimed 2000 feature film, Lumumba, told the story of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and the period around the independence of the Belgian Congo in June 1960. Stolen Images, released last year by Seven Stories Press, features the screenplay of Lumumba along with three of Peck’s other early screenplays and full color screen shots from each film.

Peck’s film will be airing at the French Film Festival in Richmond, VA, at the Byrd Theater (2908 West Cary Street, Richmond, VA, 23221) on Friday, March 22 at 7 p.m. The film will be followed by a discussion with the filmmaker.