The Body Tourist author at Park Road Books this Saturday

Dana Shavin

Reviewers have been calling Dana Shavin's memoir, The Body Tourist, riveting, brilliant, witty, insightful, courageous and ...excruciating.

The Body Tourist is the Atlanta native's personal journey into and out of anorexia. One reviewer calls it "the biography of an illness as stubborn as the woman determined to kill it.."

Another reviewer says Shavin can "write with both hands."

You can hear the author read and talk about her book at 11 a.m. on Saturday at Park Road Books.

A former therapist, Shavin now makes her living as certified life coach and as an artist and a writer. Since 2002, she has been a monthly columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and she is editor of the Chattanooga Jewish Federation newspaper, the Shofar.

WHAT: Dana Shavin will read and sign copies of The Body Tourist. 

WHEN: 11 a.m., Saturday

WHERE: Park Road Books, Park Road Shopping Center, 4139 Park Rd., Charlotte, 28209.

COST:  Free and open to the public.

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Gail Peck Reads from 'Within Two Rooms' Sunday at Park Road Books

Gail Peck

Before Charlotte poet Gail Peck could give her first reading for her new chapbook, "Within Two Rooms" (Finishing Line Press), she learned that a full-length poetry manuscript, "The Braided Light," had won the Lena Shull Book Contest, sponsored by the North Carolina Poetry Society.

Her prize is $250 and a reading in March at Catawba College in Salisbury. Former poet laureate Fred Chappell calls "The Braided Light," about Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet, "a poignant envisioning of visions, a look into the heart of light." Main Street Rag will publish this book in March.


Meanwhile, back at the chapbook ranch, Peck will read from "Within Two Rooms" at 2 p.m. Sunday at Park Road Books. Charlotte poet and essayist Rebecca McClanahan calls these  poems "a bittersweet litany of praise for the world the mother teaches us to notice, and to love."

WHAT: A poetry reading by Charlotte's Gail Peck
WHEN: 2 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 15.
WHERE: Park Road Books, 4139 Park Road, Charlotte 28209
COST: Free and open to the public

                                                                       

 

'Invisible Racism': Claudia Rankine to read at Queens University Jan. 16

When Alexandra Schwartz interviewed poet Claudia Rankine last summer for the New Yorker, she asked her how her award-winning poetry collection, "Citizen: An American Lyric," came about.

Here's what Rankine answered:

I started working on “Citizen” as a way of talking about invisible racism—moments that you experience and that happen really fast. They go by at lightning speed, and you begin to distrust that they even happened, and yet you know that you feel bad somehow. My husband is a great fan, or used to be a great fan, of Tiger Woods, and so I started by watching a lot of golf tournaments. I am a great fan of the Williams sisters, and I would watch tennis. You began to see a lot of little moments, and they would happen, and they would happen, and they would happen, at the U.S. Open and at various other Grand Slams, and I thought, “I’m going to start documenting these.”

And as I began documenting them in Serena Williams’s playing life, I started doing it in my own life. Then I started interviewing people and asking them for stories in their lives. I specifically said, to people I met and to friends, “Tell me a moment when you suddenly found yourself feeling invisible or internally unsettled by something that came down to a moment that you then read as racism, but I want it to happen between you and a friend.” I didn’t really care too much about what people were doing in Ferguson, at this level. I meant in their day-to-day working lives. And then, as people began to tell me stories, I began to see it in my own life, everywhere, happening, and I just started writing them down.

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, poet Claudia Rankine earned a BA at Williams College and an MFA at Columbia University. She is a former Queens University instructor in its MFA program.

Rankine has published several collections of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), a finalist for the National Book Award; Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004); and Nothing in Nature is Private (1994), which won the Cleveland State Poetry Prize.

Claudia Rankine Reads:

When: 8:30-9:30 p.m., Friday, Jan. 16
Where: Ketner Auditorium, Queens University
Cost: Free and open to the public.

A Saturday reading of prose and poetry from '27 Views of Charlotte'

Saturday, November 22, 2014 @ 3pm  

27 Views of Charlotte: The Queen City in Prose & Poetry.

Contributing authors Elisha Minter, Sandra Y. Govan and Irania Patterson will be on-hand to speak about their work highlighting different aspects of the city of Charlotte and spotlighting its literary community. 

Signed books available for sale. 

Beatties Ford Road Regional Library

2412 Beatties Ford Rd, 

Charlotte, NC 28216 

​http://www.cmlibrary.org/

 

Latin poets to read Wednesday at Mint Museum on Randolph

Latin poets reading Wednesday at the Mint Museum on Randolph Road

I love Latin poets. They tend, as a group, to be so romantic, so imaginative, so flashy and still so tenderly charged.

One of my favorites is Martin Espada, who was born in Brooklyn, but is Latin through and through. In his poem, "The Republic of Poetry," from the book of the same name, he proclaims that in the imaginary Republic of Poetry, "monks print verses about the night / on boxes of monastery chocolate," that "poets read to the baboons /  at the zoo, and all the primates, / poets and baboons alike, scream for joy."
 And, of course, it goes without saying that in the Republic of Poetry, "poets eat free."
 If you, too, love the thrill of Latin writing, you're in luck.
 To celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, six Latin poets -- three Colombians, two Mexicans and one Venezuelan -- will give a bi-lingual reading of poetry and prose on Wednesday, 7-8 p.m., at the Mint Museum on Randolph Road.
The occasion is the publication of the anthology, "La Fragancia del Agua" (The Fragrance of Water") from Main Street Rag Publishing of Charlotte, which includes work by the group Artesanos de la Palabra.
Poets reading are Cielo Ramirez, Claudia Quijano-Tourn, Irania M. Patterson, Jose Vazquez, Kurma Murrain and Patricia Atilano.

In the Republic of Poetry, all poetry readings would be free, and the poets, of course, millionaires. I don't know about any millionaires among them, but the reading is definitely free and open to the public. Mint Museum: 2730 Randolph Road, Charlotte, N.C., 28207.
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Nancy Stancill to read from 'Texas' at Morrison Regional Library

Investigative-reporter-turned-novelist Nancy Stancill of Charlotte will sign copies and read from her debut suspense novel, "Saving Texas," at 6:30 p.m., Wednesday, Sept. 10, at Morrison Regional Library, 7015 Morrison Blvd., Charlotte.

Stancill is a former award-winning Charlotte Observer reporter who's earning her MFA in the University of Tampa low-residency program. She'll talk about the skills a long-time non-fiction writer must learn to produce a good novel.
D.G. Martin of the UNC-TV show "Book Watch," calls Stancill's novel "mesmerizing."

Last November, Stancill pledged royalties from the first thousand copies sold of “Saving Texas” to an Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) endowment to support the Godfrey Wells Stancill Fellowship in memory of her father, the former Suffolk News-Herald editor who died in 1995.