One of our favorite authors to work with and one who gets–without question–the highest praise from literary event planners is Laura McBride. “Laura McBride is an incredible author, guest, and speaker. This visit has been excellent, and as one person wrote on our exit surveys last night “She is awesome!” Leslie DeLooze, Richmond Memorial Library […]
Memoirs and historical fiction captivate the reader with rich, life-like characters and detailed descriptive settings. What we may not realize we’re getting in these stories: well-researched history lessons. A foundational knowledge of contemporary Russian history and politics plays an important role in understanding global events and America’s developing relationship with Russia. To that end, here are four […]
In his memoir, Gaining Ground, Forrest Pritchard touches on the harsh realities of market competition and the need for businesses to abandon the business-as-usual paradigm in order to compete. Sharing outsider perspectives of growing and maintaining a healthy business — insights learned from hard-won success beyond the mainstream — Forrest focuses on the concepts of Practice, Perspective, and Vision and explains how even billion dollar companies can take their cues from small farms and achieve sustainable growth for decades to come.
Ocean City Library’s Adult Programming Librarian, Julie Brown, shares some great insights from their Community Reads program, OC Reads: I would recommend working with community groups and organizations as much as possible for tie-in programming. Reach out to local school groups, musical groups, local speakers and community leaders, and see if they will share their talents, skills, expertise, passions, and knowledge as they relate to the program.
Stark County Library’s Literacy Coordinator Julia Shaheen shares some valuable insights about Stark County’s One Book One Community program: what advice or tips can you share with us about starting and hosting a Community Reads program? If someone is looking to start a Community Reads program, it is important to work with local organizations. This really helps with promotion and marketing across the county. It is also important to choose books that appeal to a wide variety of people including students, families, book club attendees, library, and non-library users, etc.
Nathalia Holt spoke with NPR’s Ari Shapiro and one of the original “rocket girls,” Barbara Paulson, about women’s role in shaping the American space project. Nathalia’s book The Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars, is a collective biography of a group of women who “did the math” at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the 1940s.
In this BIC Author Interview, Lori Ostlund speaks about After the Parade and engendering kindness and compassion, battling bullying, and embracing diversity — important discussions for virtually every campus and community.
I can look back and see that right from the beginning my principal concerns have been biological and environmental (my first book, a collection of stories, is called Descent of Man, after all). On the surface, The Tortilla Curtain, may be about illegal immigration from Mexico, but the subtext explores our species’ impact on the environment. And, of course, in 2000, I published A Friend of the Earth, which deals with global warming and the ethics of ecotage.
The most common limitation for colleges, libraries and other literary event planners is the same: dollars and cents. Concurrently, the most common goal is also shared: bring in speakers who will attract the largest crowd, energize the audience, and create quality programming that people will talk about long after the stage lights have dimmed. So, how do event planners reconcile the two?
Andrew Maraniss’ Strong Inside, which chronicles the career of Perry Wallace, the first African-American college basketball player in the south, and serves an important role in facilitating campus and community discussions around racial tensions in the US, is now available in YA format.
