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!
In Pain: A Bioethicist's Personal Struggle with Opioids
Date: Monday, September 23, 2019
Time: 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
Branch: Miller
Description:
Bioethicist Travis Rieder discusses his eloquent and riveting memoir of opioid dependence and withdrawal--a harrowing personal reckoning. He issues a clarion call for change not only for government but medicine itself, revealing the lack of crucial resources and structures to handle this insidious nationwide epidemic.
In Pain is not only a gripping personal account of dependence, but also a groundbreaking exploration of the intractable causes of America's opioid problem and their implications for resolving the crisis. Rieder makes clear that the opioid crisis exists against a backdrop of real, debilitating pain--and that anyone can fall victim to this epidemic.
Travis Rieder's gripping In Pain illuminates just how unprepared doctors are to treat pain while offering a multi-faceted examination of the raw sadness, fatalism and misery experienced by opioid users who unwittingly find themselves "dopesick," or in painful withdrawal. This book will engender empathy not just for patients like Rieder, who find themselves trapped in a byzantine system that too often abandons them, but also for the 2.6 million Americans suffering from opioid use disorder. In Pain is a call for nuance and understanding, full of clear-eyed suggestions for doctors struggling to weigh the risks of addiction with treating pain, as well as a guidebook for any one of us who might yet end up in their care.
-- Beth Macy, author of Dopesick
Books available for purchase and signing.
Travis Rieder, PhD, is the Assistant Director for Education Initiatives, Director of the Master of Bioethics degree program and Research Scholar at the Berman Institute of Bioethics. He is also a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Public Health Advocacy within the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
Overdose Response Training
Overdose response training available prior to Rieder's talk from 4 - 6:45 pm. Drop in to the Miller Branch lobby to learn how to respond to an opioid overdose and how to administer naloxone. Learn about legal protections for those who provide aid and about access to opioid response resources in Howard County.
In partnership with Howard County Fire and Rescue Department and Howard County Health Department.
*Registration is required. Register online or by calling 410-313-1950.
Download to CalendarMeet the Author: Nikki Grimes
Date: Friday, October 11, 2019
Time: 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
Branch: Miller
Description:
Acclaimed and award-winning author Nikki Grimes reads from her new book, Ordinary Hazards: A Memoir.
With Ordinary Hazards, Grimes delivers a memoir in the form of a powerful and inspiring collection of poems. She details her early life through adulthood, and she unabashedly explores the highs as well as the lows. Young adults will identify with and connect to the many challenges explored in Grimes' work, which delves into issues of love, family, responsibility, belonging, finding your place in the world, and fighting the monsters you know--and the ones you don't. The memoir has heartbreaking moments--even soul-crushing ones--that will make readers ache for young Grimes and teens grappling with similar circumstances.
Growing up in circa 1950s and 1960s New York with a mother suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and a mostly absent father, Nikki found herself terrorized by babysitters, shunted from foster family to foster family, and preyed upon by her mother's second husband. At the age of six, she poured her pain onto a piece of paper late one night -- and discovered the magic of writing. Through subsequent years, her notebooks were her most enduring companions. In this remarkable memoir told in both poetry and prose, Nikki explores her harrowing past, showing how the power of words helped her conquer the hazards -- ordinary and extraordinary -- of life.
"This powerful story, told with the music of poetry and the blade of truth, will help your heart grow." --Laurie Halse Anderson, author of Speak and Shout
"[A] testimony and a triumph." --Jason Reynolds, author of Long Way Down
About the Author
An award-winning poet and author, Nikki is the recipient of the ALA Children's Literature Legacy Award, the NCTE Award for Poetry, the Virginia Hamilton Literary Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Award, the Coretta Scott King Author Award, and five Coretta Scott King Author Honors.
Books available for purchase and signing. Limit of 2 outside books allowed for signing per customer.
*Registration is required. Register online or by calling 410-313-1950.
Download to Calendar
