• Sunday, April 7th at 3:00pm(Talk)

Amherst resident Jeff Rubin & daughter, Emma Sokoloff-Rubin, will talk about their new book, Sustaining Activism: A Brazilian Women’s Movement & a Father-Daughter Collaboration.   In 1986, a group of young Brazilian women started a movement to secure economic rights for rural women & transform women’s roles in their homes & communities.   Together with activists across the country, they built a new democracy in the wake of a military dictatorship.   Starting in 2002, Rubin & Sokoloff-Rubin traveled together to southern Brazil, where they interviewed activists over the course of ten years.   Their vivid descriptions of women’s lives reveal the hard work of sustaining a social movement in the years after initial victories, when the political way forward was no longer clear & the goal of remaking gender roles proved more difficult than activists had ever imagined.   Highlighting the tensions within the movement about how best to effect change, Sustaining Activism ultimately shows that democracies need social movements in order to improve people’s lives and create a more just society.

• Monday, April 8th at 5:00pm(Book launch party)

Join Lisa Henderson in celebrating the publication of her new book: Love & Money: Queers, Class, & Cultural Production.   Henderson, who teaches in the Department of Communication here at the University of Massachusetts, has published in such journals as Signs, Journal of Communication, GLQ, Feminist Media Studies, & Screen.   Her new book argues that we can’t understand contemporary queer cultures without looking through the lens of social class.   Resisting old divisions between culture & economy, identity & privilege, left & queer, recognition & redistribution, Love & Money offers supple approaches to capturing class experience & class form in & around queerness.

• Tuesday, April 9th at 4:00pm(Book launch party)

Join Lizzie Barker, Maria Heim, Marylin Rhie, & Paola Zamperini in celebrating the publication of a new book: Picturing Enlightenment: Tibetan Tangkas in the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College.   The lavishly illustrated book has an extensive catalogue & three essays which introduces the outstanding collection of eighteen Tibetan paintings in the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College.   Among them are two groups of eighteenth-century tangkas of rare & exceptional quality from Central Tibet; a third group presents diverse themes in the bold folk styles of Eastern Tibet.

• Tuesday, April 16 at 8:00pm (Reading)

Novelist & Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Héctor Tobar will read as part of the Amherst College Visiting Writers Series.     Tobar is author of one work of non-fiction, Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States; & two novels: The Tattooed Soldier & The Barbarian Nurseries—which was named a New York Times Notable Book for 2011 & won the 2012 California Book Award gold medal for fiction.   Co-sponsored by the Amherst College Visiting Writers Series.

• Wednesday, April 17th at 5:00pm (Book launch party)

Join David Goodwin in celebrating the publication of his new novel, Slave Camp Nightclub, the story of three college students hired off the streets of Boulder in the summer of 1976 to work at a rock quarry.

• Sunday, April 21st at 3:00pm (Poetry reading)

jubilat/Jones Reading Series at the Jones Library, Amherst.   The reading will feature poets Ben Kopel, Laurie Saurborn Young, & Amanda Nadelberg.   Meet the poets at an informal Q & A session that will follow each reading. Free and open to the public.   For more information go to jubilat/Jones Reading Series on Facebook.

• Monday, April 22nd at 5:00pm (Book launch party)

Join Christy Anderson in celebrating the publication of her new book, Renaissance Architecture.   Anderson is an architectural historian with a special interest in the buildings of the Renaissance & Baroque.   She is currently a professor of Art & Architecture at University of Toronto.   She taught at Yale University from 1995 until 2004, & has lectured at the Courtauld Institute of Art & Harvard University.   Anderson received a M.A. from our own University of Massachusetts & currently lives in the area.

• Tuesday, April 23rd at 7:30pm

"Anne Halley Poetry Prize Reading"   Ross Gay, winner of the 9th annual Anne Halley Poetry Prize, sponsored by the Massachussetts Review, will read from his prize-winning work.    

The Anne Halley Poetry Prize is named in memorial for Anne Halley, to honor her 25 years of work as poetry co-editor of the Massachusetts Review as well as her work as a poet & writer.   Her last collection of poetry, Rumors of the Turning Wheel, was published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2003.

• Thursday, April 25th at 4:30pm (Book launch party)

Join Michael Kasper in celebrating the publication of his Kirghiz Steppes: Accumulated Verbo-Visuals, an album of one-page pieces that mix words & pictures—comics, captioned collages, concrete poems, etc.—made since the 1970’s.   Some were produced using photocopy, press-type, & manual paste-up, some with scanning & computer programs.   A few went out originally as mail art, others appeared in magazines, or chapbooks, or are previously unpublished.

• Thursday, April 25th at 8:00pm (Poetry reading)

Matthew Zapruder & Lisa Olstein, & Dan Chelotti will read at University Museum of Contemporary Art, Fine Arts Center, University of Massachusetts, as part of the University of Massachusetts MFA Program’s Visiting Writers Series.   Zapruder is author of three volumes of poetry, including American Linden; The Pajamaist, which won the 2007 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America & was chosen by Library Journal as one of the top ten poetry volumes of 2006; & Come On All You Ghosts.   Olstein co-directs the Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts & Action at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is Associate Director of MFA Program for Poets & Writers & Director of the Juniper Summer Writing Institute.   Her latest book is Little Stranger.   Chelotti is author of X — a McSweeney’s poetry book.

• Friday, April 26th at 7:00pm (Reading)

James Kelman will read from his recent work.   Kelman is an influential writer of novels, short stories, plays & political essays.   His novel A Disaffection was shortlisted for the Booker Prize & won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 1989.   Kelman won the 1994 Booker Prize with How Late It Was, How Late.   In 1998 Kelman was awarded the Scotland on Sunday/Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award.   In 2008 he won Scotland’s most prestigious literary award—the Saltire Society’s Book of the Year Award—for Kieron Smith, Boy.   His most recent book is Mo Said She Was Quirky.