Spooky reads, cozy reads, an avalanche of hugely anticipated new releases! October is quite possibly the best month to be a book lover!
We have several more exciting virtual events through the end of 2021. Be sure to check out the full line-up below and register in advance for a reminder of when we're about to go live.
This October brings with it a new tradition! We're proud to be one of the independent bookstores being honored during #MarginsBookstores Month, a celebration of bookstores owned and managed by and for BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, Disabled, and Neurodiverse communities. This is a collaboration coordinated by The Word | A Storytelling Sanctuary that includes wonderful programming, community building opportunities, and some cool merch!
Happy fall reading!
With love & gratitude,
W&CF
P.S. We have some amazing events through the end of 2021! We've heard that some email providers "clip" our newsletter. Be sure to click "view entire message" at the bottom of your screen so you don't miss anything!
New Releases We Love!
Remember, due to expected supply chain issues, we strongly encourage you to start your holiday shopping today!
Upcoming Virtual Events
Most of our events are recorded and uploaded with closed captioning to our YouTube Channel. Watch them any time!
All tickets to this virtual event include a copy of Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence by Anita Hill.Hill will be joined by New York Times bestselling author Mikki Kendall.
Believing is a story of America's three decades-long reckoning with gender violence, one that offers insights into its roots as well as paths to creating dialogue and substantive change. It is a call to action that offers guidance based on what this brave, committed fighter has learned from a lifetime of advocacy and her search for solutions to a problem that is still tearing America apart.
Join us for a virtual conversation celebrating Stories from Palestine by Marda Dunsky. Marda will be in conversation with beloved local author Sahar Mustafah.
Journalist and scholar Marda Dunsky's most recent book, Stories from Palestine: Narratives of Resilience, focuses on Palestinians in the West Bank, east Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip engaged in creative and productive pursuits in their daily lives as artists, scientists, teachers, farmers, cultural curators, entrepreneurs, and students—challenging dominant mainstream media representations of their community as being subsumed by oppression and violence.
Join us virtually to discuss Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief by Victoria Chang. Chang will be in conversation with poet Dana Levin.
For poet Victoria Chang, memory "isn't something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally." It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly and the silences of her father, who first would not and then could not share more. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on the questions that can no longer be answered.
We're thrilled to gather virtually in celebration of the release of Gentrifier: A Memoir by Anne Elizabeth Moore.
In 2016, a Detroit arts organization granted writer and artist Anne Elizabeth Moore a free house—a room of her own, à la Virginia Woolf—in Detroit’s majority-Bangladeshi “Banglatown.” Accompanied by her cats, Moore moves to the bungalow in her new city where she gardens, befriends neighborhood youth, and grows to intimately understand civic collapse and community solidarity. When the troubled history of her prize house comes to light, Moore finds her life destabilized by the aftershocks of the housing crisis and governmental corruption.
Join us for a reading in honor of Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis. For this event, editor Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore will be joined in conversation by several of the book's contributors—Nels P. Highberg, Berends McKenzie, and Sassafras Lowrey.
Every queer person lives with the trauma of AIDS, and this plays out intergenerationally. Usually we hear about two generations—the first, coming of age in the era of gay liberation, and then watching entire circles of friends die of a mysterious illness as the government does nothing to intervene. And now we hear about younger people growing up with effective treatment and prevention available, unable to comprehend the magnitude of the loss. But there is another generation between these two, one that came of age in the midst of the epidemic with the belief that desire intrinsically led to death and internalized this trauma as part of becoming queer.
Hey, middle grade readers! We have the perfect virtual event celebrating the release of two new books from Chicago-based authors: Betsy Bird & Karla Arenas Valenti!
About Long Road to the Circus by Betsy Bird
Twelve-year-old Suzy Bowles is tired of summers filled with chores on her family farm in Burr Oak, Michigan, and is desperate to see the world. When her wayward uncle moves back home to the farm, only to skip his chores every morning for mysterious reasons, Suzy decides to find out what he's up to once and for all. And that's when she meets legendary former circus queen Madame Marantette and her ostriches. Betsy Bird is the Collection Development Manager of the Evanston Public Library and the former Youth Materials Specialist of New York Public Library.
About Lotería by Karla Arenas Valenti
In the hottest hour of the hottest day of the year, a fateful wind blows into Oaxaca City. It whistles down cobbled streets and rustles the jacaranda trees before slipping into the window of an eleven-year-old girl named Clara. Unbeknownst to her, Clara has been marked for la Lotería.
Join us to celebrate the release of the second edition of The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America by Tamara Winfrey-Harris. For event, Winfrey-Harris will be in conversation with Deesha Philyaw.
When African women arrived on American shores, the three-headed hydra—servile Mammy, angry Sapphire, and lascivious Jezebel—followed close behind. These stereotypes persist to this day through newspaper headlines, Sunday sermons, social media memes, cable punditry, government policies, big screen portrayals, and song lyrics. Author Tamara Winfrey-Harris reveals that while emancipation may have happened more than 150 years ago, America still won’t let a sister be free from this coven of caricatures.
