Howard County Library System’s author events are a key component of the HCLS curriculum. Notable, best-selling, and local authors provide customers with enlightening experiences throughout the year. Bringing the community together to celebrate the literary arts is a hallmark of HCLS customer service. Join us for these opportunities to meet one of your favorite authors or discover someone new!
There are 5 upcoming classes.
Staff picks and book chat (online)
Date: 08/07/2020Time: 11:00am - 11:45am
Branch: Online Branch
Age group: Ages 18+ (Adults)
Program type: Community & Culture
Description:
Missing out on book suggestions from HCLS staff? Join us virtually every 2nd and 4th Friday at 11:00 am to listen to HCLS instructors talk about their favorite books. Tell us about the books that you loved during this physical isolation or join in just to listen to the book conversation. Class length 45 minutes ****You will receive a link to join the class in a separate email. For a class happening this week you will usually receive this link within one business day. If you are registering for a class that occurs next week or beyond you will receive this link at the beginning of the week when the class is scheduled.** If you prefer to participate by phone register for the online class and then email [email protected] to request the dial-in information at least 1 business day in advance.**
Author Works: 30 Years in the Future! Author & Playwright Chana Porter Teaches Creative Writing
Date: 08/18/2020Time: 7:00pm - 8:00pm
Branch: Online Branch
Age group: Ages 14 - 17 (High School), Ages 18+ (Adults)
Program type: Writing
Description:
As a tie-in to her speculative fiction novel The Seep, author Chana Porter offers an experimental workshop on fantasy world building. A short reading of the novel will be interspersed with guided writing activities, and allow time for interaction.
A blend of searing social commentary and speculative fiction, Chana Porter’s fresh, pointed debut The Seep, explores a strange new world in the wake of a benign alien invasion.
Trina FastHorse Goldberg-Oneka is a fifty-year-old trans woman whose life is irreversibly altered in the wake of a gentle—but nonetheless world-changing—invasion by an alien entity called The Seep. Through The Seep, everything is connected. Capitalism falls, hierarchies and barriers are broken down; if something can be imagined, it is possible.
Chana Porter is a playwright, teacher, MacDowell Colony fellow, and co-founder of the Octavia Project, a STEM and fiction-writing program for girls and gender non-conforming youth from underserved communities.
In partnership with Prince George's County Memorial Library System and Charles County Public Library.
Please register with an email address to receive an immediate registration confirmation with a link to join the event. This email will also contain the dial-in information if you wish to participate by telephone.
Visions of the Future: Voting, Activism, and Art
Date: 08/20/2020Time: 7:00pm - 8:00pm
Branch: Online Branch
Age group: Ages 18+ (Adults)
Program type: Community & Culture
Description:
From Shirley Chisholm to Michelle Obama and beyond, black women and politics have been inextricably intertwined. And now, as more minority women enter and win local races, the black female voting block is proving its importance. As we move toward this year’s presidential election, how will black women keep their seat at the table and engage with politics? Please join us for a lively panel with women of color who will discuss their specific involvement with politics through participation, activism, and art.
Poet and journalist celeste doaks is the author of Cornrows and Cornfields, and editor of the poetry anthology Not Without Our Laughter. Her chapbook, American Herstory was the first-place winner in Backbone Press’s 2018 chapbook contest; it contains poems about Michelle Obama. Her work has appeared in multiple on-line and print publications including Ms. Magazine, The Rumpus, The Millions, Huffington Post, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Asheville Poetry Review among others. Currently, she teaches creative writing at University of Delaware.
Click here for information on how to attend this virtual event.
Presented by the Enoch Pratt Free Library.
Author Works: Alice Randall
Date: 08/27/2020Time: 7:00pm - 8:00pm
Branch: Online Branch
Age group: Ages 18+ (Adults)
Program type: History & Genealogy
Description:
“Black Bottom is a defiant, inventive, modern swagger that has everything to do with being efficient, exact, ambitious, proud—and Black.” - Alice Randall
Singular both in style and in the sweeping story it tells, Alice Randall’s kaleidoscopic novel, Black Bottom Saints is a celebration of African American life, culture and achievement as refracted through the prism of a famed Detroit neighborhood during its decades of glory.
In the mid-twentieth century Detroit’s Black Bottom was a vibrant Black neighborhood that rivaled New York’s Harlem and Chicago’s Bronzeville in terms of importance to Black arts, Black labor movements, Black politics, Black fashion, and Black sports. The first Black poet laureate of the United States, Robert Hayden rose from Black Bottom. Boxer Joe Louis, sports’ first international Black sport superstar; Charlotte Ruth Ellis a pioneering GLTBQ activist; and Lloyd George Richards, Dean of the Yale school of Drama who produced and directed August Wilson—all rose from Black Bottom. Black Bottom insists that crimes perpetuated on you don’t get to define you—you define you.
Alice Randall is the Harvard-educated author of novels, including The Wind Done Gone, Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, Rebel Yell, and Ada's Rules. An award-winning songwriter, she co-wrote the #1 hit XXX’s and OOO’s which celebrates Aretha Franklin. With her daughter, Caroline Randall Williams, she co-authored the acclaimed cookbook Soul Food Love which won the NAACP Image award and the young adult novel The Diary of B. B. Bright, Possible Princess, which received the Phillis Wheatley Award. A Professor and Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University, Randall teaches courses on soul food, African-American children's literature, and African-American film. A native of Detroit, she lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
In partnership with Prince George's County Memorial Library System and Charles County Public Library.
Please register with an email address to receive an immediate registration confirmation and a link to join the event.
Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt - Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do
Date: 09/01/2020Time: 7:00pm - 8:00pm
Branch: Online Branch
Age group: Ages 18+ (Adults)
Program type: Community & Culture
Description:
Dr. Jennifer L. Eberhardt, award-winning social psychologist, discusses her book Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice that Shapes What We See, Think, and Do.
From one of the world’s leading experts on unconscious racial bias come stories, science, and strategies to address one of the central controversies of our time.
How do we talk about bias? How do we address racial disparities and inequities? What role do our institutions play in creating, maintaining, and magnifying those inequities? What role do we play? With a perspective that is at once scientific, investigative, and informed by personal experience, Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt offers us the language and courage we need to face one of the biggest and most troubling issues of our time. She exposes racial bias at all levels of society—in our neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and criminal justice system. Yet she also offers us tools to address it. Eberhardt shows us how we can be vulnerable to bias but not doomed to live under its grip. Racial bias is a problem that we all have a role to play in solving.
Dr. Eberhardt is a professor of psychology at Stanford and a recipient of a 2014 MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant. She has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was named one of Foreign Policy‘s 100 Leading Global Thinkers. She also is co-founder and co-director of SPARQ (Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions), a Stanford Center that brings together researchers and practitioners to address significant social problems.
For more information on Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt, please visit prhspeakers.com.
In Partnership with Prince Georges County Memorial Library System.
ABOUT BIASED
“This book should be required reading for everyone.”—Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility
“Poignant….important and illuminating.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Groundbreaking.”—Bryan Stevenson, New York Times bestselling author of Just Mercy
