• Monday, June 12th at 6:30pm (Reading)

Leni Zumas & Diana Khoi Nguyen will read at the Old Chapel, UMass, Amherst, as part of the 2023 Juniper Institute Summer Reading series.   Zumas is author of a collection of stories, The Farewell Navigator; & two novels, The Listeners, & Red Clocks, which won the 2019 Oregon Book Award for Fiction.   It was New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, & was named a Best Book of 2018 by The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, Entropy, & the New York Public Library.   Diana Khoi Nguyen, poet & multimedia artist, is the author of Ghost Of. A recipient of a 2021 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to winning the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, & Colorado Book Award, she was also a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize. For more information see here.

• Tuesday, June 13th at 6:30pm (Reading)

Poets CAConrad & Mahogany L. Browne will read at the Old Chapel, UMass, Amherst as part of the 2023 Juniper Institute Summer Reading series.   For more information see here.

• Wednesday, June 14th at 6:30pm (Reading)

Poets Cynthia Arrieu-King & Tiphanie Yanique will read at the Old Chapel, UMass, Amherst, as part of the 2023 Juniper Institute Summer Reading series.   For more information see here.

• Thursday, June 15th at 6:30pm (Reading)

Poets Santee Frazier & Jeff Parker will read will read at the Old Chapel, UMass, Amherst, as part of the 2023 Juniper Institute Summer Reading series.  For more information see here.

• Wednesday, June 21st at 6:00pm (Reading & talk)

Lucien Miller will read from & talk about his new book, Jesus in the Hands of Buddha: The Life & Legacy of Shigeto Vincent Oshida, OP, an enthralling memoir of Father Shigeto Oshida, a man who was at once a Japanese Zen Buddhist master & a Catholic Dominican priest.   Guided by the hand of God & the Buddha dharma, he became the founder & director of the Takamori Hermitage in the Japanese Alps, a place where pilgrims have been drawn for decades.   He was a unique pioneer in the encounter between Eastern & Western religions.

Miller, professor emeritus at UMass, is author of many books, including, South of the Clouds: Tales from Yunnan & The Hidden Side of the Mountain: Encounters with Wisdom’s Poor & Holy.   He taught comparative literature & Chinese at UMass & was a Roman Catholic deacon at the Newman Catholic Student center for many years.

• Thursday, June 22nd at 7:00pm (Reading & talk)

Dean Cycon will read from his new novel, Finding Home (Hungary, 1945).   —For nine months in Auschwitz, eighteen-year-old Eva Fleiss clung to sanity by playing piano on imaginary keyboards.   After liberation, Eva & the five remaining Jews of Laszlo, Hungary, journey home, seeking to restart their lives.   Yet the town that deported them is not ready to embrace their return.   Through Eva, Cycon examines the problem that many Survivors had in returning to their pre-war homes.  

Dean Cycon, founder of Valley’s coffee roaster Dean’s Beans, is an author, lawyer, human rights advocate, & social entrepreneur who has lived & worked in over sixty countries.   Recently, he raised money & worked in Poland to help transport Ukrainian refugees to safety.   He is author of the travel essay, Javatrekker: Dispatches from the World of Fair Trade Coffee.

• Wednesday, June 28th at 6:00pm (Conversation)

Chuck Collins will read from & discuss his new novel, Altar to an Erupting Sun —a near-future story of one community facing climate disruption in the critical decade ahead.   Bill McKibben wrote, ”A fascinating look at movements & the people who make them up, in the spirit of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future.“

Collins is a campaigner & storyteller who has worked for decades on environmental & economic justice campaigns.   He is the Director of the Program on Inequality & the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies where he co-edits Inequality.org.   He is co-founder of DivestInvest.org, a global movement to divest from fossil fuels & invest in climate solutions; & trustee of the Post-Carbon Institute and Resilience.org.   He is also author of numerous books, including The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions & Is Inequality in America Irreversible?.