• Tuesday, September 13th at 8:00 P.M.

Austrailian poet John Kinsella will read at Amherst College, Pruyne Lecure Hall (Fayerweather 115).   As Michael Brennan has written, “ There is little doubt that Kinsella’s vibrant & voracious poetic intellect is a prodigious event on the horizon of international poetry.   As a poet, critic, teacher, pamphleteer, publisher & activist, Kinsella has fast become one of the most widely known Australian voices of his generation.   In what might seem like a short space of time, Kinsella has established not simply a considerable oeuvre which has won high praise internationally from critics such as Harold Bloom, George Steiner, Marjorie Perloff & fellow poets such as Les Murray, Lyn Hejinian & Peter Porter, but become a dynamic, perhaps unequalled force, in the promotion of contemporary poetry at various levels through publishing, editing & essaying.”

• Thursday, September 22 at 5:00 P.M.

Join us in celebrating the publication of Amherst professor Karen Sanchez-Eppler's new book, Dependent States: The Child's Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture.   Read more!   Sanchez-Eppler's first book, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism & the Politics of the Body described how the political rhetoric of the abolitionist & feminist movements, & their ways of talking about the body, leave their traces on a wide range of nineteenth-century American writing.

• Thursday, September 22 at 8:00 P.M.

Poet Russell Edson will read in Memorial Hall at the University of Massachusetts.   Edson is often considered the foremost writer of prose poetry in America, having written exclusively in that form before it became fashionable.   His most recent book is The Rooster's Wife.        

• Thursday, September 29th at 4:00 P.M.

Party to celebrate the publication of University of Massachusetts professor Bruce Laurie's new book, Beyond Garrison: Antislavery & Social Reform.   Read more!   Laurie's previous books include Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America & Working People of Philadelphia, 1800-1850.

• Thursday, September 29th at 7:00 P.M.

Tina Swift of the Jones Library hosts another "Mystery Desserts" in the Large Meeting Room.   Besides the usual scrumptious dessert buffet, this season's event will include mystery writers Clea Simon, Jessica Speart, Leslie Wheeler, & Nancy Means Wright discussing whether their research has ever gotten them into hot water.   Simon, author of Mad House: Growing Up in the Shadow of Mentally Ill Siblings, Fatherless Women: How We Change After We Lose Our Dads & The Feline Mystique: On the Mysterious Connection Between Women & Cats, has just published her first mystery, Mew is For Murder.   Speart is an investigative journalist whose focus is on wildlife law enforcement, endangered species issues, & the environment.   Gator Aide, Tortoise Soup, Bird Brained, Border Prey, Black Delta Night, A Killing Season, Coastal Disturbance & Blue Twilight are the first eight books in the Rachel Porter series.   The ninth, Restless Waters, was just published.   Wheeler is editor of Loving Warriors: Selected Letters of Lucy Stone & Henry B. Blackwell, 1853 to 1893, young adult biographies of Jane Addams & Rachel Carson, a biography of Jimmy Carter, & two Miranda Lewis, “living history” mysteries—Murder at Plimoth Plantation & Murder at Gettysburg.   Wright is author of many books, including Down The Strings, Make Your Own Change, Vermonters at Their Craft, & five—single mother-dairy farmer sleuth Ruth Willmarth—novels: Mad Season, Harvest of Bones, Poison Apples, Stolen Honey, & Mad Cow Nightmare.

• Friday, September 30th at 4:00 P.M.

Jennifer Heuer, a recent arrival on the faculty of the History Department at the University of Massachusetts, will sign copies of her new book, The Family & The Nation: Gender & Citizenship In Revolutionary France, 1789-1830.   Read more!