• Tuesday, May 4th at 5:00 P.M. (Book launch party)

Join us in celebrating the publication of a new book by Barbara Yngvesson, Belonging in an Adopted World: Race, Identity, & Transnational Adoption.   Since the early 1990s, transnational adoptions have increased at an astonishing rate, not only in the United States, but worldwide.   In her new book Yngvesson offers a penetrating exploration of the consequences & implications of this unprecedented movement of children, usually from poor nations to the affluent West.   Informed by an account of the author’s own experience as an adoptive parent, & fully attuned to the contradictions of race that shape our complex forms of family, Belonging in an Adopted World: Race, Identity, & Transnational Adoption explores the fictions that sustain adoptive kinship, ultimately exposing the vulnerability & contingency behind all human identity.   Yngvesson is the founding director of the interdisciplinary Program in Culture, Brain, & Development at Hampshire College where she teaches anthropology.   Her earlier books include Virtuous Citizens, Disruptive Subjects: Order & Complaint in a New England Court; & a co-authored volume, Law & Community in Three American Towns.

Music provided by “Jonah’s Dream” (Tony Silva & Jonathan Keezing)!

• Friday, May 7th at 5:00 P.M. (Book launch party)

Join us in celebrating the publication of a new book by Jennifer Rosner, If a Tree Falls: A Family's Quest to Hear & Be Heard. Rosner’s new memoir explores family, silence & what it means to be heard.   When her daughters are born deaf, she is stunned.   Then she discovers a hidden history of deafness in her family going back generations to the Jewish enclaves of Eastern Europe.   Rosner shares her journey into the modern world of the hearing impaired, & the tough decisions she & her husband have made about hearing aids, cochlear implants, & sign language.   The story of her daughters’ deafness is at heart a story of whether she—a mother with perfect hearing—will hear her children.   Rosner is editor of a collection of essays, The Messy Self.   Her writings have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Faster Times, Wondertime Magazine, & the Hastings Center Report.   She lives in Leverett, Massachusetts with her family.

• Thursday, May 13th at 8:00 P.M. (Poetry reading)

Jessica Fjeld, Emily Pettit, Phillip Ischy, & Martin Rock will read from their new books, all published by Pilot Books.   Fjeld is the managing editor of jubilat & an MFA candidate at the University of Massachusetts.  In 2006, her chapbook On Animate Life was awarded a Poetry Society of America fellowship by judge Lyn Hejinian.   Recent poems have appeared, or are coming shortly, in the Boston Review, Conduit, Invisible Ear, Absent, GlitterPony, & Fou.   Pettit lives in Northampton, MA where she is an editor for both the online literary journal notnostrums & Factory Hollow Press.   Ischy’s poems have appeared in Washington Square Review & Gulf Coast Review.   He was guest co-editor for the Fall 2004 issue of Mississippi Review Online.   Rock’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Diagram, Tuesday; an Art Project, Mississippi Review Online, NANOFiction, & a number of other journals.   He is editor in chief of Washington Square Review & has received the St. Mary’s & the Starworks Fellowships from New York University, where he is an MFA student.