Spring is finally here, which means it is time to get started on your summer reading list. Dodie, our Central Library based readers advisor, will tell you about 32 titles that are new and forthcoming. From thriller to science fiction to “you can’t believe it’s true” nonfiction, there is a title on the list for everyone. You’ll find a link below to all the titles in the DPL catalog, ready for you to place a hold. Don’t forget to check the Recommendations page on the DPL website for even more suggestions for reading, listening and watching.
News & Review Type: News
Denver Public Library recommends Aliah Wright’s NOW YOU OWE ME for “Spring Book Buzz 2024”!
Author Event with AS THE SKY BEGINS TO CHANGE author Kim Stafford with music by Jan DeWeese at Bishop & Wilde in Portland, OR, Thursday May 30th at 6:30 PT
Victoria Thomas spotlights E.P. Tuazon’s A PROFESSIONAL LOLA in Local News Pasadena article on Filipino cuisine!
A Professional Lola is the title of author E.P. Tuazon’s newest collection of short stories, published earlier in May by Pasadena’s Red Hen Press. The title story opens with the author’s mother preparing manok (chicken thighs) for a party.
Tuazon writes, “Even when they came pumped with antibiotics, sterilized twice, prepackaged and freezer-burned here in the States, manok didn’t taste safe to her until it was lemon-drenched and salted clean.”
A few paragraphs further in, the author recounts the eulogy he gave at his Lola (grandmother)’s funeral: “I ended it with the first time she taught me how to eat with my hands. Seven-year-old me seeing her eating her meryenda of salted shrimp, fermented egg, tomato, and rice and asking her for some. Our kind, wonderful Lola Basilia scooped a little bit of everything and held it out for me with her bare hands. I took it like someone accepting a love letter of twenty dollars to go to the movies. What was dripping from our fingers was her heart.”
“A Professional Lola,” thirteen short stories about the Filipino experience through the author’s eyes, is bursting with lasa (flavor). We sip black stewed pig’s blood; we pick bits of crispy salty skin, salty skin like potato chips from the back of a lechon (whole roasted pig), conjure spells with witches using spider eyes that are indistinguishable from ground pepper, snack on cornick (deep-fried crunchy puffed corn snack) and butong pakwan (roasted watermelon seeds), and are wooed with an unexpected love-gift consisting of cans of coconut milk, premade purple balls of mochiko (sweet rice flour), and a bag of uncooked, rainbow-colored tapioca.
Throughout the pages, Tuazon tethers even the most surreal moments with the forgiving earthiness of Filipino food. He’s first generation, the son of parents who arrived in the USA from the Philippines in the 1970s. And although the Lakers-fan author grew up in Eagle Rock, his lilting speech pattern and easy command of Tagalog underscore the experience among Filipinos of “…the importance of not sounding like you came from anywhere in a country where everyone was from everywhere.”
On May 15, the Feast of Saint Isidore the Laborer / Farmer, we had the good fortune to simultaneously Zoom not only with E.P. Tuazon but also with celebrity Chef Marvin Aritrango, who was born and raised in Manila and now lives in Pasadena. The latter is a glamorous gadfly with Michelin stars who’s frequently spotted on the red carpet.
CLMP Firecracker Awards Finalist YOU WERE WATCHING FROM THE SAND by Juliana Lamy for 2024 Season
The CLMP Firecracker Awards for Independently Published Literature are given annually to celebrate books and magazines that make a significant contribution to our literary culture and the publishers that strive to introduce important voices to readers far and wide. Prizes are awarded in the categories of Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Poetry, Magazine/General Excellence, and Magazine/Best Debut. Each year, CLMP also awards the Lord Nose Award, given to a publisher or editor in recognition of a lifetime of work in literary publishing.
Each winner in the books category will receive $2,000–$1,000 for the press and $1,000 for the author or translator–and each winner in the magazine categories will receive $1,000. In addition, a national publicity campaign spotlights and promotes our winning titles each year. In partnership with the American Booksellers Association, promotional materials—including a press release and shelf talkers featuring the winning titles—are distributed to over 500 independent booksellers across the country. Winners are also promoted in CLMP’s newsletters, on our website, and through a dedicated social media campaign. The publishers of winning titles receive a free one-year membership to CLMP, and magazine winners receive a one-year CLMP Member subscription to Submittable. To read press coverage about the 2023 Firecracker Award winners, visit our Press Center.
The winners of this year’s awards will be announced at a virtual awards ceremony on June 27, 2024, at 6 p.m. ET.
Madeleine Nakamura speaks to Local News Pasadena on CURSEBREAKERS and more!
American author of the debut inclusive adult fantasy novel “Cursebreakers,” published by Red Hen Press in September, 2023.
Nakamura grew up in the Pasadena area and says that she gets some of her best inspiration…“through playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friends.” The elements and structure of TTRPGs – puzzle-solving, negotiation, chases, and combat – are present in this story of two troubled heroes, Adrien and Gennady, who move through a perilous and paranoid dystopia that Kirkus Reviews describes this way:
“Nakamura’s treatment is nuanced and thoughtful, avoiding a veritable minefield of harmful stereotypes to deliver genuine characters with heart. This is a society that openly accepts queer people; Adrien is gay, as are the members of his network. Additionally, Adrien’s and Gennady’s conditions – coded as bipolar disorder and autism, respectively – are integral to the story.”
Afaa M. Weaver receives the 2024 Paterson Poetry Prize for A FIRE IN THE HILLS!
The Paterson Poetry Prize is sponsored by The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College. It is a $2000 award for a book of poems, 48 pages or more in length, selected by our judges as the strongest collection of poems published in the previous year.
WINNERS
Mahogany L. Browne, Chrome Valley (Liveright Publishing Co., New York, NY)
“Chrome Valley is a praise song to black women, and to all that survive despite everything that tries to kill the spirit inside them. What an unforgettable book!”
Afaa M. Weaver, A Fire in the Hills (Red Hen Press, Pasadena, CA)
“Afaa M. Weaver’s book, sparks a fire in the heart. Weaver has been writing heart-wrenching, honest poems, and this book continues his tradition of making music out of sorrow and pain and finding the sweetness hidden within our daily lives.”
Comments by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Founder & Executive Director, The Poetry Center at PCCC.
Author Event with AS THE SKY BEGINS TO CHANGE author Kim Stafford with Bethany Lee at Broadway Books in Portland, OR, Tuesday May 21st at 6:00 PT
Please join us for an evening with poet Kim Stafford who will be reading from his latest collection As the Sky Begins to Change, published by Red Hen Press (2024). He will be accompanied by harpist Bethany Joy Lee who will also read from her newest collection of poetry.
In his third poetry collection from Red Hen Press, As the Sky Begins to Change, Kim Stafford gathers poems that sing with empathy, humor, witness, and story. Poems in this book have been set to music, quoted in the New York Times, posted online in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, gathered in a chapbook sold to benefit Ukrainian refugees, posted online in response to Supreme Court decisions, composed for a painter’s gallery opening, and in other ways engaged with a world at war with itself, testifying for the human project hungry for kinship, exiled from bounty, and otherwise thirsting for the oxygen of healing song. As the Sky Begins to Change is a book of poems to wake the world, lyric anthems for earth and kin.
Helen Benedict, author of THE GOOD DEED, featured on the KPFA Radio Wolinsky podcast
Helen Benedict, author of the novel “The Good Deed,” in conversation with host Richard Wolinsky.
Helen Benedict is the author of eight novels, including “Wolf Season” and “Sand Queen,” and five books of non-fiction.Her previous book, “Map of Hope and Sorrow,” co-written by Eyad Awwadawnon, is partly an oral history of refugees coming to Greece after escaping from their home countries. Helen Benedict s a Professor at the Columbia University School of Journalism. “The Good Deed” is a novel based on her research, which was later turned into the non-fiction book.
In the interview, she discusses the origins of her book, the research on which the novel was based, and other elements of life among the refugees in Samos prior to the pandemic. She also talks about the recent events at Columbia involving the police raid on the protest encampment, as well as her view of current journalism regarding the upcoming 2024 election.
Brendan Constantine, author of DEMENTIA, MY DARLING discusses the curious connection between aphasia and poetry with Local News Pasadena
June is Aphasia Awareness Month and the month for national observances regarding dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. These aspects of brain function are the unlikely creative focus for poet and educator Brendan Constantine, who is currently developing his fourth book, which will be published by Pasadena’s Red Hen Press.
We chatted with the poet on Sunday, May 5, Greek Orthodox Easter, just a week ahead of Mother’s Day. The son of actor Michael Constantine who memorably played the Windex-wielding patriarch Gus Portokalos in the movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” Brendan stays close to home in West Hollywood whenever possible.
E.P. Tuazon, author of A PROFESSIONAL LOLA Interviewed By NBC Los Angeles!
Orange County libraries are celebrating AANHPI Heritage Month, and NBC LA interviewed E.P. Tuazon on his own work and involvement. Check out the article and the video interview below!
Lansing State Journal celebrates AAPI Heritage Month with SECRET HARVESTS by David Mas Masumoto
Lansing State Journal lists SECRET HARVESTS as one of 20 books to honor AAPI Heritage Month. Check out the full list below!
Amy Shearn discusses unplugging, being a woman writer, DEAR EDNA SLOANE, and more in LitHub interview!
Welcome to I’m a Writer But, where writers discuss their work, their lives, their other work, the stuff that takes up any free time they have, all the stuff they’re not able to get to, and the ways in which any of us get anything done. Plus: book recommendations, bad jokes, okay jokes, despair, joy, and anything else going on that week. Hosted by Lindsay Hunter.
Today, Amy Shearn discusses her new novel, Dear Edna Sloane, as well as unplugging, being a woman writer of a certain age, the notion of creating content vs. making art, working with an indie press vs. a bigger publisher, her “saucy” upcoming novel, and more!
Amy Shearn: It was so much fun to write. It’s the fantasy of—all writers maybe have that fantasy of like, if you did disappear, someone would be like, “I need to find her!”
THE WEIGHT OF GHOSTS by Laila Halaby featured on a Reading List for Arab American Heritage Month 2024 from CLMP
For Arab American Heritage Month, observed annually during the month of April, we asked our member magazines and presses to share with us some of the work by Arab American writers, as well as Arab writers from around the world published in the United States, that they recommend reading in celebration.
UNDER A FUTURE SKY author Brynn Saito in conversation with The Adroit Journal
Brynn Saito’s third book of poems, Under a Future Sky, was published in August 2023 by Red Hen Press. A 2023 California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellow, Brynn is the recipient of the Benjamin Saltman Award and her poems have appeared in the New York Times and American Poetry Review. Brynn lives in Fresno, CA, located on Yokuts and Mono lands. She teaches in the English Department and MFA program at Fresno State. She’s co-editing with Brandon Shimoda an anthology of poetry written by descendants of the Japanese American / Nikkei incarceration, forthcoming in 2025 from Haymarket Books.
