Poughkeepsie Library hosts its first Kids Read: A Book Festival at Lourdes High School
Saturday, April 13: The free one-day Kids Read festival showcases talks by 39 authors and illustrators of kid lit on multiple stages.
Books
Mary Giuliani hosts a “hometown” launch of her book Tiny Hot Dogs with a cocktail party in Kingston
Saturday, April 13: In her memoir, Tiny Hotdogs: A Memoir in Small Bites, Giuliani recounts how she went from a “friendless, hairy, deeply uncool” teenager to discovering her passion for food and creating a life around serving it in style.
Poet Gretchen Primack reads from Visiting Days in Woodstock
Saturday, April 13: In her latest volume of poetry, Visiting Days, area poet Gretchen Primack literally goes to jail. A collection of short, imagistically keen dramatic monologues, Visiting Days captures images, stories, voices and fragments of lives on the inside, connecting them in subtly woven themes to the racial, economic, and human realities that feed the booming and largely private prison complex that is barely ever mentioned in public discourse.
What they said, at the Bookfest
The 2019 Woodstock Bookfest featured, as usual, smart panels, bright speakers, and festive parties. I am able to report on a sampling of events, along with my favorite quotes from presenters.
Woodstock Bookfest returns for four days of books and stories
Thursday, Mar. 28- Sunday Mar. 31: Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend and recipient of the 2018 National Book Award for fiction, headlines the list of visiting writers in the tenth annual festival.
Akiko Busch discusses the merits of invisibility
Saturday, Mar. 30: As the impulse to brand and market a persona has come to dominate human intercourse, particularly among people who frequent their screens more often than they meet in the flesh, there’s another side of being human that has been forgotten.
Jacki Lyden interviews Reema Zaman at Bookfest
The author of I Am Yours, just out from Amberjack Publishing, Zaman will be the keynote speaker at the 10th annual Woodstock Bookfest on Saturday, March 30, at 8 p.m. at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts. Zaman will be interviewed by former NPR war correspondent Jacki Lyden, herself the author of a memoir, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba (Penguin, 1998).
Hudson native Gary Grossman to bring his new spy thriller to his old stomping ground
Sunday, March 31: RED Hotel reading at TSL. Gary belongs to the family who built and operated Grossman’s Bakery in the building that now houses Time & Space Limited in Hudson.
Local author reads from her book Never Too Young! in Kingston
Saturday, March 30: Aileen Weintraub tells the inspiring stories of early achievers in Never Too Young! 50 Unstoppable Kids Who Made a Difference. The book became a best-seller when it debuted on Amazon, and won a Parents’ Choice Award. The Accord-based author has written more than 50 children’s books, with her next, Secrets of the American Museum of Natural History, due out this spring.
Famed writer/arborist William Bryant Logan to read from Sprout Lands in Rhinebeck
Thursday, Mar. 28: Once, farmers knew how to make a living hedge and fed their flocks on tree-branch hay. Rural people knew how to prune hazel to foster abundance: both of edible nuts and of straight, strong, flexible rods for bridges, walls and baskets. Townspeople cut their beeches to make charcoal to fuel ironworks. Shipwrights shaped oaks to make hulls. No place could prosper without its inhabitants knowing how to cut their trees so they would sprout again. Pruning the trees didn’t destroy them; rather, it created the healthiest, most sustainable and most diverse woodlands that we have ever known.
