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Authors:
To be considered for PPL's Brown Bag Lecture Series, please send
information to our Programming Manager, Rachael Weyand, via email at
weyand@portland.lib.me.us or
phone at 207-871-1700 ext. 723.
Brown
Bag Lecture Series
Portland
Public Library's Brown Bag Lecture Series features bi-weekly
reading and question-and-answer sessions with authors from
around the nation as well as those who hail from right here in
Maine.
All Brown Bag
Lectures are free to the public. Guests
are encouraged to bring their lunch; coffee provided by Coffee
By Design. Special thanks to our Brown Bag Lecture Series
coffee sponsor, Coffee by Design, and
welcome to our new refreshment sponsor, Whole
Foods. Books
on sale at each lecture courtesy of Longfellow
Books, who generously donates a portion of the
proceeds to the Portland Public Library.
Questions about our Brown Bag Lectures or to be
added to our weekly calendar e-mail, please send us an e-mail.
Brown Bag Lectures are on
Wednesdays
from 12pm-1pm in the Main Library's Rines Auditorium.
Wednesday,
May 16
Kristen Ghodsee, author of Lost in Transition:
Ethnographies of Everyday Life After Communism
Lost
in Transition tells of ordinary lives upended by the
collapse of communism. Through ethnographic essays and
short stories based on her experiences with Eastern Europe
between 1989 and 2009, Kristen Ghodsee explains why it is that
so many Eastern Europeans are nostalgic for the communist
past. Lost in Transition portrays one of the most
dramatic upheavals in modern history by describing the ways that
it interrupted the rhythms of everyday lives, leaving confusion,
frustration, and insecurity in its wake.
Wednesday, May 30
John Ford, author of Suddenly the Cider Didn't Taste So
Good,
Adventures of a Game Warden in Maine
Retired
Maine Game Warden John Ford has seen it all. He's been
shot at by desperate prison escapees, been outwitted by wily
trappers, and rescued scores of animals. As a tenacious
and successful warden, he was always willing to spend the time
needed to nab violators of the state's fish and game laws.
At the same time, though, he wasn't a cold, heartless,
go-by-the-book enforcer; he usually had a good quip ready when
he slipped the handcuffs on a violator, and he wasn't above
accepting a lesson learned as sufficient penalty for breaking
the law.
Wednesday,
June 13
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, author
of Death of a Ventriloquist
"Whether he's overhearing a conversation in a
tavern or the music stuck in his head, Fay-LeBlanc uses his
ventriloquist to raise important questions about how we perform
ourselves through language."--Publishers Weekly
Wednesday,
June 20
Richard Ford, author of Canada
Wednesday,
June 27
Erika Marks, author of Little Gale Gumbo
Filled
with characters as rich and spicy as the foods they love to eat,
Little Gale Gumbo is a tender and spirited celebration of
the loves that we make and the loves that make us, and those
that grow more flavorful with time, like a good gumbo...
Wednesday,
July 11
Richard Russo, author of Interventions
Pulitzer
Prize-winning author Richard Russo unveils Interventions,
a never-before-published novella collection with four long
stories in a uniquely formatted book. Each story is
individually bound and illustrated with an original piece of
full-color art and all are gathered in a slipcase. The four
stories positively crackle with Russo's piercing and understated
insight into the lives of ordinary people.
Wednesday,
July 25
Monica Wood, author of When We Were the Kennedys
1963
Mexico, Maine: The Wood family is much like its close,
Catholic, immigrant neighbors, all dependent on the fathers'
wages from the Oxford Paper Company. But when Dad suddenly
dies on his way to work one April morning, Mum and the four
deeply connected Wood girls are set adrift. Funny and
to-the-bone moving, When We Were the Kennedys is the
story of how this family saves itself, at first by enlisting the
help of Mum's brother, Father Bob, a charismatic Catholic
priest. And then, come November--her brother still
overwhelmed by grief, her country shocked by the president's
death, and her town bracing for a labor strike--Mum announces an
unprecedented family road trip. Inspired by the televised
grace of Jackie Kennedy, herself a new widow with young
children, Mum and her girls head to "our nation's
capital" to do some rescuing of their own. An
indelible story of how family and nation, each shocked by the
unimaginable, exchange one identify for another.
Wednesday,
August 8
Dawn Potter, author of How the Crimes Happened
With
a "pricked ear/canny as a bitten fox" ("Violin
Recital"), Dawn Potter's poems in her second poetry
collection are full of voice: personas ranging from Eve to Mrs.
Dolloway's Peter Walsh, the loves and pains of young people, the
difficulties and joys of parenthood, and a brood of hens strewn
throughout to boot. The poems in How the Crimes
Happened are at once moving, playful, and beautiful, and as
a unified project, this book pays keen attention to
balance: a collection that neither feels whimsical and
limited in its scope nor gloomy.
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