Events

Jack Marshall and Cheryl Dumesnil
$3 suggested donation to Poetry Santa Cruz.

Prize-winning poet Jack Marshall was born in 1936 in Brooklyn to Jewish parents who emigrated from Iraq and Syria.  At 19 he shipped out as a deckhand on a Norwegian freighter to West Africa.  Returned to New York, he worked on 42nd Street, attended night classes in poetry with Stanley Kunitz and Robert Lowell, and moved to the Lower East Side, taking part in the growing poetry scene there.  He married and then in 1968 moved with his family to San Francisco.  He has published twelve books of poetry, the most recent being Gorgeous Chaos: New & Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2002), which won a Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, and a collection of new poems, The Steel Veil, published by Coffee House Press in Fall, 2008.  His memoir, From Baghdad to Brooklyn, was a PEN Center USA finalist.

Read a book review by Steve Kowit in the San Diego Union Tribune.

Watch Jack Marshall on UC Berkeley’s reading series Lunch Poems on YouTube (28 minutes).

Cheryl Dumesnil is the author of In Praise of Falling, winner of the 2008 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.  She is also the editor of Hitched! Wedding Stories from San Francisco City Hall, and co-editor, with Kim Addonizio, of Dorothy Parker’s Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos.  Her poems have appeared in Nimrod, Indiana Review, Calyx, and Many Mountains Moving, among other literary magazines.  Her essays have appeared on literarymama.com, hipmama.com, mamazine.com and in Hip Mama Zine.  For over fifteen years she has taught creative writing at universities, conferences, K-12 schools, and in private settings.  She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wife and their two sons.

Read a poem by Cheryl Dumesnil on Verse Daily.

Read a poem by Cheryl Dumesnil in The Cortland Review.

Learn more on Cheryl Dumesnil’s website.

Bookshop Santa Cruz’s Community Book Group

Led by Julie Minnis with a discussion with Prof. Bruce Bridgeman

Book Choice: My Stroke of Insight—by Jill Taylor

* please note 7:00pm start time of this event

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We are celebrating our third year of Community Book Groups—a monthly Book Group that is open to everyone in the community.  While we’ll continue to honor titles written by local authors in our area, we thought we would also celebrate the amazing minds of our community.  With
art, thought and culture, being Santa Cruz ’s backbone, we decided to
bring some of that creativity and smarts into our Book Group as well.  To
start the idea off, we’ll literally be talking about what sparks ideas
in the first place—brains—with the help of UCSC’s neuroscientist Bruce
Bridgeman. 

Bookshop’s next community selection will be Jill Taylor’s, My Stroke of Insight. At
37, Taylor, a Harvard-trained brain scientist experienced a massive
stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. As she observed her mind
deteriorate to the point that she could not walk, talk, read, write, or
recall any of her life-all within four hours, Taylor alternated between
the euphoria of the intuitive and kinesthetic right brain, in which she
felt a sense of complete well-being and peace, and the logical,
sequential left brain, which recognized she was having a stroke and
enabled her to seek help before she was completely lost. It would take
her eight years to fully recover.  For Taylor, her stroke
was a blessing and a revelation. It taught her that by "stepping to the
right" of our left brains, we can uncover feelings of well-being that
are often sidelined by "brain chatter."  A beautiful personal account of brain science, this is a memoir that will leave you touched and curious.

To help with that curiosity, our Community Book Group will feature a discussion about the book at 7:00 pm facilitated by Julie Minnis, followed by a dialogue with local neuroscientist Professor Bruce Bridgeman at 7:30pm.  My Stroke of Insight will
be discounted to the whole community at 10% off its cover price from
Tuesday, January 12th until the February 10th meeting date (for those
last minute readers!). We hope you’ll join us.

PS—There will be snacks and tea!!

Meltzer’s
began her book Girl Power as a single article in Slate Magazine years
ago when she spoke to the greater loss that women felt when the band
Sleater-Kinney broke up.  At the time, her article
generated a tremendous reader response and inspired Meltzer to take a
deeper look at the role of women in music and the situation they face
today, and so the title for Girl Power was born.

The
nineties were a boom time for women in all genres of music. It was a
time when underground met the mainstream: riot grrrls wearing kilts and
playing in all-girl punk bands, rock musicians like Courtney Love and
Liz Phair writing songs about sex, the Spice Girls’ pop domination
while assuring girls that they could—and should—kick ass. It was Lilith
Fair and Alanis Morissette and Tori Amos.

Meltzer
writes, “Girl power recognizes that not everything is pure: it delights
in ambiguous gray areas. It’s not just about testing out your own
relationship to feminism, but about finding your identity in the world.
But girl power’s ‘do-it-yourself’ message of ‘You can do anything ‘is a
powerful entrée to feminism, especially because its simplicity brings
in the very young . . . Girl power is a way station, not an endpoint,
and a gateway, I hope to a more profound equality of the sexes.”

Interspersing
her own personal accounts with interviews with some of the most
powerful voices in women’s music, from The Indigo Girls to the Spice
Girls, Meltzer gives us a powerful account to the importance of women
in music.

Marisa
Meltzer is the co-author of How Sassy Changed My Life. Her writing has
appeared in The New York Times, New York magazine, Salon, Slate, and
SPIN.  As a one time Santa Cruz resident, Bookshop Santa Cruz is proud to welcome her back to the area to honor her book.

Timothy Ferris, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominee, and author of the acclaimed Coming of Age in the Milky Way, has published a new book, The Science of Liberty, a brilliant chronicle of how science sparked the spread of liberal democracy across the modern world. In his most important book to date, award-winning author Timothy Ferris—"the best popular science writer in the English language today" (Christian Science Monitor)—makes a passionate case for science as the inspiration behind the rise of liberalism and democracy. Ferris argues that just as the scientific revolution rescued billions from poverty, fear, hunger, and disease, the Enlightenment values it inspired has swelled the number of persons living in free and democratic societies from less than 1 percent of the world population four centuries ago to more than a third today.

Ferris deftly investigates the evolution of these scientific and political revolutions, demonstrating that they are inextricably bound. He shows how science was integral to the American Revolution but misinterpreted in the French Revolution; reflects on the history of liberalism, stressing its widely underestimated and mutually beneficial relationship with science; and surveys the forces that have opposed science and liberalism—from communism and fascism to postmodernism and Islamic fundamentalism.

A sweeping intellectual history, The Science of Liberty is a stunningly original work that transcends the antiquated concepts of left and right.

Please help up welcome Mr. Ferris for a reading, signing, and Q&A, on what is sure to be an insightful and interesting night.

Help us celebrate a new novel by Santa Cruz ’s beloved Clifford Henderson. Local and best-selling author Clifford Henderson (co-founder of the Fun Institute, Santa Cruz ’s renowned school of improv and solo performance) will be at Bookshop Santa Cruz to celebrate her newest novel, Spanking New.

Getting born is trickier than Spanky ever imagined. Yearning for life, Spanky chooses Nina, a flighty actress just out of college, and Rick, a sax player who changes tires to get by, to be his parents. Only Nina seems to be hung up on her gay guy friend Pablo, and Nina’s best girlfriend Dink is hung up her! Will Nina and Rick get it together in time to conceive Spanky before he evaporates? And if this hurdle gets crossed, will they choose to keep him? There’s not much Spanky can do but watch from above while his fate plays out—and if that’s not scary enough—an unexpected twist of fate makes Spanky have to completely reevaluate his expectations. He’s a girl! A poignant, hilarious, unforgettable look at life, love, gender, and the essence of what makes us who we are.

We are so happy to welcome Clifford back to Bookshop Santa Cruz and know that this will be a night filled with talent, laughter, and stories to be told. Please help us welcome Ms. Henderson for the debut reading of her newest novel. Signing and Q&A will follow.

February
is Black History Month, and in honor of it, we will be holding a
special event with award winning children’s author Elizabeth Partridge
for her new title, Marching for Freedom.

Only 44 years ago in
the United States , Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was leading a fight to
win blacks the right to vote. Ground zero for that movement became
Selma , Alabama. Author Elizabeth Partridge leads us straight into the
chaotic, passionate, and deadly three months of protests that
culminated in the landmark march in 1965. However, she tells the story
by focusing her eye on the courageous children who faced the terrifying
violence accompanying the journey, while marching alongside King. 

This is an inspiring book that honors all the children who participated in the Selma to Montgomery March during the Civil Right Movement’s fight
for
the vote. Stunningly emotional black-and-white photos accompany the
text, and make this book a tribute that is to be seen as well as read. 

But
one cannot talk about that March in 1965, without also honoring the
music that carried it through. Partridge discusses some of the
spirituals that the children would sing while marching in order to keep
them hopeful and strong. It was the children themselves who created the
verse, “We Are Not Afraid,” to the song We Shall Overcome, letting
the power of those words carry them forward even as violence erupted
around them.

We will be holding this event as an open discussion with
Ms. Partridge and audience members, facilitated by Julie Minnis, and
highest of honors, we will be joined by Gateway School’s 2nd and 5th graders as they sing the song that yesterday’s children sung to give them the strength to carry on.

PS—As an added bonus, in honor of Black History Month, Bookshop Santa Cruz will be offering Marching for Freedom at 10% off its cover price the entire month of February.