Friday night reading and Saturday workshop--DON'T MISS!

On Friday, September 24 at 7:00 p.m., at The Writers Place, 3607 Pennsylvania, Gary Gildner and Christie Hodgen will read from and sign their newest books. This reading will be excellent—two award-winning writers! Bios below. Join us.

On Saturday, September 25, Gary Gildner will present a workshop for fiction and creative nonfiction/memoir writers focused on using the techniques of narrative to best effect. At $20 for TWP members and $30 for non-members, this is a real bargain. Read the bio and workshop description below, and you’ll see why.

These events are co-sponsored by BkMk Press and The Writers Place and were made possible in part by funding from the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency.

Gary Gildner is the author of 21 bookS, including The Second Bridge (a novel), Somewhere Geese Are Flying (new and selected stories), The Warsaw Sparks and My Grandfathers Book (memoirs), and Cleaning a Rainbow (his latest collection of poems). He has received The National Magazine Award for Fiction, Pushcart Prizes in fiction and non-fiction, and the Iowa Poetry Prize. His stories and essays have appeared in New Letters, The Georgia Review, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Southern Review, Grand Street, Antaeus, The Paris Review, and in many anthologies and textbooks.

Workshop by Gary Gildner

Saturday, September 25, 10 AM – 12 PM Body and Soul with Gary Gildner. This workshop is devoted to the writing of fiction and nonfiction and how they can enrich each other in the pursuit and practice of good narrative. For fiction writers who want their inventions to sound and feel real, be entertaining, and matter, and for writers of memoirs and essays who wish to organize their work by borrowing story-telling technique, the workshop will look at the major elements of fiction—character, dialog, exposition, plot—and engage in useful exercises. Bring your work in progress. $30 Nonmembers $20 Members

Christie Hodgen is the author of the novels Elegies for the Brokenhearted and Hello, I Must Be Going, both from W.W. Norton & Co. Her collection of short stories, A Jeweler's Eye for Flaw, won the Associated Writing Programs Award for Short Fiction, and was published by UMASS Press. Her stories have appeared in over a dozen journals and anthologies, and have won two Pushcart Prizes, a grant from the National Endowment for the Art, and the Tobias Woolf Award, among others. She teaches at UMKC.

Honored by the UN and winner of numerous major writing awards, Jewish Chilean activist/writer comes to Kansas City Oct. 4

My dear friend, poet, novelist, memoirist, and human rights activist Marjorie Agosin will speak at the Kansas City Public Library Central Branch, 14 W. 10^th on Monday, October 4^th at 6:30 p.m. (with a reception preceding at 6:00 p.m.)

I’d like to urge you to put this on your calendar and attend. Marjorie is a wonderful, moving speaker. She will be speaking about her life as a writer and activist and as a Jewish Chilean who had to flee Chile as a teenager for life in America.

I’ve listed just a very few of Marjorie’s 30+ published (and many award-winning) books below. She has won awards for poetry, fiction, memoir, and for her scholarly work, which ranges across the fields of women’s studies, Latina literature, Latin American studies, Jewish studies, and human rights. Take a look at Amazon for more (even Amazon doesn’t have all of them).

The Light of Desire: La Luz del Deseo

Of Earth and Sea: A Chilean Memoir

Among the Angels of Memory (a book about her grandmother fleeing the Holocaust for Chile)

Alphabet in My Hands: A Writing Life

Secrets in the Sand: The Young Women of Juarez

Dear Anne Frank ( a stunning poetic dialogue/response to Anne Frank)

Brujas y algo mas: Witches and Other Things

Always From Somewhere Else (memoir of her father)

Toward the Splendid City

Scraps of Life: Chilean Arpilleras

A Cross and A Star (memoir of her mother’s life as a girl in Chile during World War II)

Circles Of Madness: Mothers Of The Plaza De Mayo

Tapestries Of Hope, Threads Of Love (the life of women under the Pinocet dictatorship)

Of Earth and Sea: A Chilean Memoir just won the International Latino Book Award for biography. The award committee had this to say about the book: "The Chilean coup d'état of 1973 was a watershed event in the history of Chile. It was also a defining moment in the life of writer Marjorie Agosín. This collection of prose vignettes and free verse draws upon her experiences as a child in Chile, an expatriate abroad, and a minority Jew—even in the land she calls home—to create a striking portrait of a life of exile. The tone of the book varies as it lyrically explores the geography of Chile and weaves into it the themes of exile and oppression. At times the words become hymns to the physical beauty of her country, evoking the grandeur of this land extending to the southernmost tip of the world. At times they are intimate and melancholy, exploring personal and familial history through miniature portraits that reveal the pain of being different. Finally the tone becomes angry as she denounces the injustices committed against her friends and against the families of the disappeared during the seventeen-year dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Combining themes of memory, childhood, minority issues, Judaism, and political oppression, this collection contains some of Agosín’s strongest work. Of Earth and Sea is a poetic autobiography that explores the world of Chile with eyes that see both despair and hope. "

I’ve posted the Library’s announcement with RSVP link below:

Marjorie Agosín - Of Earth and Sea: A Chilean Memoir

Monday, October 4, 2010

6:30pm @ Central Library

RSVP now!

The Chilean coup d'état of 1973 was a watershed event in the history of Chile. It was also a defining moment in the life of writer Marjorie Agosín. In Of Earth and Sea, she draws upon her experiences as a child in Chile, an expatriate abroad, and a minority Jew—even in the land she calls home—to create a striking portrait of a life of exile. Agosín is a professor of Spanish at Wellesley College. Her appearance is co-sponsored by the Latino Writers Collective as part of the Library's observance of Hispanic Heritage Month. The book will be available for sale.

Marjorie will also appear at KU on October 5^th at 7:00 p.m. in the Centennial Room of the Kansas Union. This event is co-sponsored by KU’s Departments of English, Spanish and Portuguese, Latin American Studies, and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

I hope you’ll take advantage of one of these opportunities to hear and meet one of the remarkable women of our time.