• Friday, September 9th at 11:00am (Talk)

Provost Katherine Newman & Hella Winston will discuss their new book, Reskilling America: Learning to Labor in the Twenty-First Century, in the Bernie Dallas Room, Goodell Hal, UMass, Amherst.   They will be joined by panelists Jeff Bridgford, Sheldon Danziger & Chauncy Lennon.

• Tuesday, September 13th at 6:30pm (Talk)

Ta-Nehisi Coates will talk on “Race in America” at the LaFrak Gymnasium, Amherst College, Amherst.   Coates is a National Book Award winner, a MacArthur Fellow, the author of Between the World & Me & The Beautiful Struggle, as well as being writer of new editions of the comic book series about the Black Panther superhero for Marvel Comics.   For more information.

• Thursday, September 15th at 8:00pm (Poetry reading)

Juliana Spahr, author of the poetry collection, That Winter the Wolf Came, among many other volumes, will read at Memorial Hall, UMass, as part of the University of Massachusetts MFA Program’s Visiting Writers Series.

• Sunday, September 18th at 3:00pm (Poetry reading)

jubilat/Jones Reading Series at the Jones Library, Amherst.   Poets Rosmarie Waldrop & Lynn Xu will read.   Meet the poets at an informal Q & A session that follows the reading.     For more information go to the jubilat Event page.

• Tuesday, September 20th at 7:00pm (Reading)

Amina Gautier will read from recent work.   Gautier’s first volume of stories, Now We Will Be Happy, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize; her second volume, At-Risk, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction; while her most recent, The Loss of All Lost Things, won the Elixir Press 2014 Fiction Award.   Gautier has been the recipient of the Crazyhorse Prize, the Danahy Fiction Prize, the Jack Dyer Prize, the William Richey Prize, the Schlafly Microfiction Award, & the Lamar York Prize in Fiction.

• Wednesday, September 21st at 12:10pm - 1:00pm (Noontime Book Discussion)

Michael Greenebaum will lead a discussion of James Baldwin’s raw & compelling love story, If Beale Street Could Talk.   Feel free to bring your lunch.   Amherst Books will provide coffee & water.   There is a 10 per cent discount on the book until the end of the month.   All are welcome.   (There will be a repeat of this on Wednesday, August 27th.   Choose one day or the other!)

• Wednesday, September 21st at 8:00pm (Reading)

Kaitlyn Greenidge will read from her debut novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman.   Work by Greenidge has appeared in The Believer, American Short Fiction, Guernica, Kweli Journal, The Feminist Wire, Afro Pop Magazine, Green Mountains Review & other places.   She is the recipient of fellowships from Lower Manhattan Community Council’s Work-Space Program; Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference & other prizes.   Co-sponsored by the Amherst College Visiting Writers Series.

• Thursday, September 22nd at 8:00pm (Reading)

Selah Saterstron will read at Memorial Hall, UMass, Amherst, from her recent novel, Slab, as part of the University of Massachusetts MFA Program’s Visiting Writers Series.   Saterstrom is author numerous stories & several novels.

• Friday, September 23rd at 4:00pm (Book launch party)

Join us in celebrating the publication of a new book by Angela Willey, author of Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science & the Possibilities of Biology.   Willey teaches in the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts.   She approaches the politics & materiality of monogamy as intertwined with one another such that disciplinary ways of knowing themselves become an object of critical inquiry.   Refusing to answer the naturalization of monogamy with a naturalization of nonmonogamy, Willey demands a critical reorientation toward the monogamy question in the natural sciences, social sciences, & humanities.

• Tuesday, September 27th at 12:10pm - 1:00pm (Noontime Book Discussion)

Michael Greenebaum will lead a discussion of James Baldwin’s raw & compelling love story, If Beale Street Could Talk.   Feel free to bring your lunch.   Amherst Books will provide coffee & water.   There is a 10% discount on the book until the end of the month.   All are welcome.   (This is a repeat discussion.)

• Tuesday, September 27th at 7:00pm (Reading)

James Carpenter will read from his new novel, No Place to Pray.   Carpenter’s short fiction has appeared in the Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row, Fiction International, & North Dakota Quarterly.   Three of his stories were nominated for the Pushcart Prize & he is a recipient of Descant’s Frank O’Connor Prize.   Edie Meidav said of this new novel, “Carpenter fires up the Southern gothic intensity of ten mortal lifetimes.   The conscience burns, the prose sings, & his characters’s dreams will haunt your own”.   Reception to follow.

• Wednesday, September 28th at 7:00pm (Talk & book signing)

Poet & memoirist Dwayne Betts will talk in the Cape Cod Lounge, Student Center, UMass as part of the Department of History Distinguished Lecture Series on “The U.S. in the Age of Mass Incarceration.”   For more information see the website for the Feinberg Family Series.

• Thursday, September 29th at 7:00pm (Reading & talk)

Local novelists Jacqueline Sheehan & Shirley & Rudy Nelson will read from & talk about their novels set during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996) at the Jones Library, Amherst.   Sheehan is an essayist, psychologist, & author of numerous novels, including Now & Then, Lost & Found, & the Guatemalan novel, The Center of the World.   Aside from their collaborative novel on Guatemala, The Risk of Returning, Shirley Nelson is know for the novel, The Last Year of the War, & Rudy Nelson is author of a biography of Edward J. Carnell, The Making & Unmaking of an Evangelical Mind.

• Friday, September 30th at 7:00pm (Reading)

“Live Lit” Students in the M.F.A. Program at the University of Massachusetts will read from their recent work.   Evenings usually include a mix of poetry & fiction.