• Tuesday, October 3rd at 4:30pm (Talk)

Derecka Purnell will talk at the new Amherst College Lyceum, 197 South Pleasant St.   Purnell is a human rights lawyer, writer, & author of Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, & the Pursuit of Freedom.   She works to end police & prison violence by providing legal assistance, research, & training in community based organizations through an abolitionist framework.   For more information go to the Amherst College Calendar.

• Tuesday, October 3rd at 6:00pm (Book launch party)

Join Amherst College professor Robert Hayashi in celebrating the publication of his new book, Fields of Play: Sport, Race, and Memory in the Steel City.   Hayashi teaches American Studies & is author of the previous book, Haunted by Waters: A Journey through Race & Place in the American West.

• Sunday, October 8th at 1:00pm (Reading)

Oakland, California’s Hilary Zaid will talk about her new novel Forget I Told You This with UMass professor Adrian Staub.   In her new novel, which is the inaugural winner of the Barbara DiBernard Award, Amy Black, a queer single mother & an aspiring artist in love with calligraphy, dreams of a coveted artist’s residency at the world’s largest social media company, Q.   A stranger asks Amy to transcribe a love letter for him & then suddenly disappears.   Amy’s search for the letter’s recipient leads her straight to Q— & to a group of data privacy vigilantes who want her to burn Q to the ground.    Forget I Told You This is novel about what it means to see & be seen in an age of surveillance capitalism

• Thursday, October 12th at 4:00pm

Art Sustainability Activism Series: “Interdisciplinary Discussion”
Venue: Bromery Center for the Arts Lobby, UMass, Amherst   Join featured artist Sirintipi, Dr. Shaina Sadai of the Union of Concerned Scientists, Sandy Litchfield, & others in this meeting of minds working at the intersection of climate change, science, literature, performing arts, & social justice.   The discussion will be moderated by UMass professor Malcolm Sen.   Sen teaches courses in the Environmental Humanities in the Department of English; he is a co-chair of the campus-wide Sustainability Strategy Working Group & is leading The Anthropocene Lab project at UMass Amherst.   For more information & other events: Art Sustainability Activism.

• Thursday, October 12th at 6:30pm (Reading)

Amherst College Fall 2023 Creative Writing Series
Wesley Straton (Amherst class of 2011) will read at the new CHI Think Tank (Lyceum 101), 197 South Pleasant St., Amherst, from her recent novel, The Bartender’s Cure.  Her work has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Common, & Meniscus, & has been shortlisted for the Disquiet Literary Prize.  For more information, see here.

• Friday, October 13th at 7:30pm (Reading)

Carol Anderson will be the guest of honor at the President’s Colloquium on Race & Racism: Democracy Under Attack: Voting Rights & Voter Suppression in Johnson Chapel, Amherst College.   Johnson is author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, a New York Times Bestseller, Washington Post Notable Book of 2016, & a National Book Critics Circle Award winner.   She is also the author of Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations & the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955; Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP & the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960, & One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy, which was long-listed for the National Book Award & a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Award in non-fiction.

• Monday, October 16th at 6:00pm (Talk)

Art Sustainability Activism Series: “Bill McKibben on Ecology, Culture, & Democracy”
Bill McKibben will speak in Frederick C. Tillis Performance Hall, Bromery Center for the Arts, UMass.   McKibben is an American environmentalist, author, & journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming.   He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College & leader of the climate campaign group 350.org.   He is author of numerous books, including Fight Global Warming Now, The End of Nature, & We are Better Together.   For more information & other events see: Art Sustainability Activism.

• Tuesday, October 17th at 4:30pm (Talk)

Jonny Steinberg will speak in the Old Chapel, UMass, about his new biography of the Mandela’s—Winnie & Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage.   Steinberg is a South African writer & scholar. He is the author of several books about everyday life in the wake of South Africa’s transition to democracy.   Two of them, Midlands: A Very South African Murder & The Number: One Man's Search for Identity in the Cape Underworld & Prison Gangs, won the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award.   For more information see the UMass Calendar page.

• Wednesday, October 18th at 6:00pm (Poetry readings)

Brad Crenshaw & Deborah Gorlin will read from their recent volumes of poetry.   Crenshaw has published a chapbook as well as four books volumes of poetry, most recently, Memphis Shoals as well as the forthcoming, Chased by Lunacies & Wonders, which won the Catamaran Poetry Prize for West Coast Poets 2023.   Before winning the 2014 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize, Deborah Gorlin won the 1996 White Pine Press Poetry Prize for her first book of poems, Bodily Course.   Her latest book is Open Fire.  Both Crenshaw & Gorlin live in Amherst.

• Thursday, October 19th at 6:00pm (Talk)

UMass Visiting Writers Series
The inimitable Dorothea Lasky will read from her recent volume of poetry, The Shining, in the Old Chapel, UMass.   Lasky is author of seven books of poetry & prose, including Animal; & Open the Door: How to Excite Young People about Poetry.   For more information go here.

• Friday, October 20th (Symposium)

Symposium Honoring the Life & Work of Professor John H. Bracey, Jr.
Symposium from 10:00am - 5:00pm at the Integrative Learning Center, Room S140, UMass, North Pleasant Street, Amherst Bracey was a Black Studies pioneer & longtime faculty member in the UMass Amherst W.E.B Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies since 1972, who died in February 2023 at age 81.     For more information on the symposium go here.

• Saturday, October 21st (Memorial)

Memorial Honoring the Life & Work of Professor John H. Bracey, Jr.
Symposium from 10:00am - 3:00pm at the Amherst Room (10th Floor), Campus Center, UMass, Amherst.   Bracey was a Black Studies pioneer & longtime faculty member in the UMass Amherst W.E.B Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies since 1972, who died in February 2023 at age 81.   Those of us who knew him at the bookstore miss him badly.   For more information on the memorial go here.

• Tuesday, October 24th at 7:00pm (Reading)

Amherst College Fall 2023 Creative Writing Series
Danielle Vogel will read at the new CHI Think Tank (Lyceum 101), 197 South Pleasant St., Amherst.   Vogel is a poet, lyric essayist, & interdisciplinary artist working at the intersections of queer ecology, somatics, & ceremony.   She is the author of four hybrid poetry collections, including Edges & Fray; as well as a triptych of poetic texts: Between Grammars, the recent The Way a Line Hallucinates Its Own Linearity, & A Library of Light (forthcoming 2024).  For more information, see here.