• Thursday, February 4th at 7:00pm (Memorial)

There will be a memorial for James Tate — celebrated poet, local bon vivant, & friend to many of us, at The New School Auditorium, 66 West 12th Street, New York, NY.

• Tuesday, February 9th at 4:00pm (Talk & book launch party)

University of Massachusetts professor Manisha Sinha will talk about & celebrate the publication of her new book, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, in the Bernie Dallas Room, Goodell Hall, UMass, Amherst.

• Thursday, February 18th at 8:00pm (Reading)

Our own Jeff Parker & Annie Liontas will talk in Memorial Hall, UMass, about their new books,—which include their recent collaboration, A Manner of Being: Writers on Their Mentors; Parker’s Where Bears Roam The Streets: A Russian Journal & Liontas’s new novel, Let Me Explain You.   Part of the University of Massachusetts MFA Program’s Visiting Writers Series.

• Thursday, February 18th at 8:00pm (Reading)

Jo Ann Beard will read from her recent fiction. She is author of In Zanesville & Boys of My Youth.   Co-sponsored by the Amherst College Visiting Writers Series.

• Wednesday, February 24th at 5:00pm (Book launch party)

Join University of Massachusetts professor Sigrid Schmalzer in celebrating the publication of her new book, Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China.   Schmalzer’s first books was, The People's Peking Man: Popular Science & Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China.

• Wednesday, February 24th at 7:30pm (Reading)

Chris Abani will read in the Stirn Auditorium, Amherst College, from his new memoir, The Face : Cartography of the Void.   Abani, born in Nigeria, has published several novels—including The Secret History of Las Vegas, & Graceland; as well as many volumes of poetry.   He has been awarded a PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award, the 2001 Prince Claus Awards, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award & the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.

• Thursday, February 25th at 7:00pm (Reading)

Local celebrity Bruce Watson will read from his new book, Light: A Radiant History from Creation to the Quantum Age.   Watson, who writes regularly for the Daily Hampshire Gazette, is author of numerous books, including Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 That Made Mississippi Burn & Made America a Democracy; Bread & Roses: Mills, Migrants, & the Struggle for the American Dream; & Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, & the Judgment of Mankind.