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Nikki Giovanni Talks About Libraries Supporting Readers on Earth and Mars

Poet and activist Nikki Giovanni joined Books in Bloom in Columbia, Maryland, on May 13 to discuss the importance of libraries, including one in outer space.

The book festival’s headliner was introduced as someone who identifies as an “earthling” by Busboys and Poets founder Andy Shallat. This led to a conversation with Nikki discussing her work with libraries and her curation for a library on Mars.

A library was established in 2008 by NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander, thanks to the funding and development from The Planetary Society, where TV scientist Bill Nye is the CEO. The space shuttle left an encoded archival silica-glass mini-DVD on Mars and called it the Visions of Mars digital time capsule.

The DVD contains a collection of literature and art about Mars from mostly male authors such as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Carl Sagan. California-bred science fiction author Leigh Douglass Brackett, who was dubbed the Queen of Space Opera; Canadian sci-fi author Candas Jane Dorsey, and Finnish speculative fiction author Johanna Sinisalo seem to be the only women whose texts are in the interplanetary library of over 80 literary works. The DVD was designed to last hundreds, possibly thousands, of years, according to the society.

It’s unclear if Nikki was referring to the 15-year-old library already on Mars having its collection updated. At the festival, Nikki said she was tapped to curate a library that will be on the Red Planet. Though the first collection had works in English, she said this time the library she is working on will translate works into the Navajo language as the oldest language in the U.S.

“Whatever life forms might come to Mars and say, ‘What is this?’ It’s going to be a disc. ‘Oh, that one is something called English, but let’s get this. This is our language,'” she said. “Because Navajo is probably someplace else in the universe.”

Her work coincides with the new documentary on her decades-long civil rights activism and Afro-futuristic views on outer space called Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project. It debuted at Sundance Film Festival this past January and is still on a film festival tour.

“The trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans,” she says on the documentary’s website. She sees connecting with other life forms as a way to evolve past the division we see with race and gender in global history, she said at the festival.

“When we go into Mars or we go all the way up to Jupiter, we won’t be lost,” she said. “We will know where we’ll be going, and we’ll be meeting the people there, the other life forms there.”

Nikki was also promoting her newest book, A Library, a children’s picture book released last year and illustrated by Erin K. Robinson. From mentioning her childhood library, she shared how her grandparents lived on a street in the “colored” section of Knoxville, Tennessee, called Mulvaney Street. The library was at the top of the street. After a small Black community was established there, she said the University of Tennessee eventually used eminent domain to force the Black families to move away.

She is now working on a book about the former Mulvaney Street—later renamed Hall of Fame Drive she says in honor of basketball coach Pat Summitt—so the historically Black neighborhood would not be forgotten. Her essay, 400 Mulvaney Street, in her 1971 book, Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-five Years of Being a Black Poet, also touches on her feelings about losing her grandparents’ home to an “urban renewal” project in the 1960s.

Going from Mars to Knoxville, she says our own stories should be considered vital since we would be the only ones to tell our individual stories.

“There is always a story. I think a lot of people forget there’s always a story,” she said. “A lot of people say, ‘I want to write an important book or I want to write a best-seller’… When I was teaching, the first thing I would say to my class: ‘What is the number one best-seller?’ And not one of them ever knew, not one of them knew the number one best-seller. If you don’t know what it is, then why do you want to be it?”

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Book Festivals Highlight Diverse Works Amid Banned Books Movement

Two book festivals in Maryland have kick-started the summer off in a year when literary diversity is under attack in the form of book bans.

Books in Bloom and Gaithersburg Book Festival held family-friendly community events that featured a number of authors who either identify on the diversity spectrum or are passionate about freedom of speech in literature. Over the last year, more parents nationwide are asking school libraries to take books off shelves they deem inappropriate for their children to read while some libraries are reactively subtracting books to avoid controversy.

This movement of banning books is sparking opposition as authors and readers alike are going out of their way to support not only freedom of speech but support the variety of books meant to be read by children. The political divide was felt at these book festivals and may become a theme for other similar events in the U.S. throughout the year.

Banned books gain spotlight

Books in Bloom calls itself a progressive book festival in the master-planned city of Columbia, Maryland. To show support for banned books, the festival dedicated one of its soundstages to authors who discussed freedom of speech.

A vibrant setting in Merriweather District’s Color Burst Park, the book festival had a giant book-shaped display describing some of the top banned books in history from Toni Morrison‘s Beloved and Song of Solomon to Alice Walker‘s The Color Purple. With Busboys and Poets as the independent bookstore for the event and a location in the park, most books for sale were books by authors who are Black and/or LGBTQIA+.

Queer memoirs All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson and Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe had notable stacks on the tables with other titles that have become the face of many bans though they were created for the middle grade and young adult audiences. The bans are usually due to racial and cultural content, sexually explicit content, and offensive language.

Headliners included a panel with PEN America, the nonprofit organization advocating in the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression, and Democratic U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland’s 8th congressional district and author of Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy. Raskin also attended Gaithersburg Book Festival to sell and sign his latest book.

The book festival’s keynote speaker was Carl Bernstein, the well-known The Washington Post reporter who co-headed the news coverage on the Watergate scandal in 1972. On the festival’s main stage, he marveled at his time growing up around Columbia and how he first became a cub reporter as a high school dropout in his new memoir, Chasing History: A Kid In The Newsroom.

The last Books in Bloom was held less than a year ago in-person in October with The New York Times reporter and The 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones serving as the keynote speaker.

Diverse works lead way

Reminiscent of a large outdoor book festival such as Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Gaithersburg Book Festival in Gaithersburg, Maryland marked its 12th year as an event supporting the greater community with inviting traditionally published authors and offering seminars on book publishing and creative writing for children and adults.

Authors such Dhonielle Clayton, who has a new middle grade release with The Marvellers, and Kimberly Jones, who is promoting her social justice young adult novel Why We Fly with co-author Gilly Segal, discussed their works at the annual event. Dhonielle, a Gaithersburg native, and Kimberly are some of the top YA Black authors who have been outspoken about diversity in literature and social justice matters.

Asked about some of her summer read recommendations, Dhonielle mentioned Valentina Salazar Is Not a Monster Hunter by Zoraida Córdova; the Track series by Jason Reynolds; and The Devouring Wolf by Natalie C. Parker, in which Dhonielle says there’s a wolf character named after her.

Another author at the event was Jeanine Cummins, who gained notoriety with her immigration novel American Dirt, interviewing Reyna Grande about her book A Ballad of Love and Glory. American Dirt follows a Mexican woman trying to escape to the U.S. with her young son after her family is murdered.

Some high-profile Hispanic and Latine authors spoke out about the White Latina author’s seven-figure advance because they said the publishing industry would never offer them such a sum for centering stories on Hispanic and Latine characters. They also claimed the book had inaccuracies in the culture and language that wasn’t native to the author. On the other hand, there were Hispanic and Latine authors and celebrities who supported the Oprah’s Book Club selection.

Since American Dirt came out in 2020, Jeanine, like many authors who had released their works at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, now have the chance to work the promotion circuit in-person.

Social justice and historical nonfiction were the focus of many authors’ works at the book festival. Gayle Jessup White talked about her lineage connected to former slave-holding president Thomas Jefferson in her book Reclamation: Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and a Descendant’s Search for Her Lasting Legacy. Kristin Henning shared her experience representing Black youth in the D.C. court system and how she conceived the idea for her book The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth.

Along with Raskin, Democratic U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff for California’s 28th congressional district visited the event to chat about his book Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could.

D.C. area indie bookstore chain Politics and Prose served as the event bookseller.

The pre-summer book festivals helped usher in the first literary events for authors and readers to enjoy as society emerges out of the pandemic and the world of book publishing remains volatile in the wake of book bans.

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‘Books in Bloom’ Literary Festival Lauds Progressive Voices

Annual literary festival Books in Bloom on Sunday marked the grand opening of a multifaceted bookstore chain and welcomed a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist to its main stage.

Based in a mixed-use cultural center called the Merriweather District in the master-planned community of Columbia, Maryland, Books in Bloom has become one of the D.C. metro area’s most well-known progressive book events. In its fifth year, the festival hosted several authors at Color Burst Park throughout the day with The 1619 Project creator and The New York Times investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones serving as the featured author. Over 150 spectators roamed the park’s grounds to eat, drink, and be bookish.

The festival also highlighted the soft opening of the new location of Busboys and Poets, a popular D.C. bookstore chain known for its added restaurant, bar, café, and venue concept. Dozens lined up at the bookstore-eatery after the festival, where the business had a pop-up stand. Beside its tent was the Howard County mobile library.

With past headliners such as White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo, political journalist April Ryan, and award-winning author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, this year’s headliner Nikole Hannah-Jones was joined by the following authors:

Amy Argetsinger, author of There She Was: The Secret History of Miss America

Milagros Phillips, author of Cracking the Healer’s Code

Jake Tapper, author of The Devil May Dance

Maureen Corrigan, author of So We Read On

Ram Devineni, Ashley A. Woods, and Yusef Komunyakaa of Jupiter Invincible

Laura Lippman, author of Dream Girl

Stacey Vanek Smith, author of Machiavelli for Women: Defend Your Worth, Grow Your Ambition, and Win the Workplace

Aparna Verma, author of The Boy with Fire

In anticipation of the Penguin Random House Nov. 16 release of The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story and the children’s version The 1619 Project: Born on the Water with Piecing Me Together novelist Renée Watson, Nikole sat in an hourlong conversation with Busboys and Poets founder Andy Shallat. She broke down the pivotal year of 1619 and how the conflicting nature of events fails to be taught in our schools.

“Two things happened in 1619: the arrival of the White Lion and the beginning of African slavery in the thirteen colonies, but it’s also when the country took its first step towards democracy,” she said. “It’s when the English colonists took a vote on this land for the first time. Democracy and anti-democracy are birthed in the same moment. The idea of freedom and slavery is birthed in the same moment in this country, but we’re not taught that.”

Tweeting under the user name Ida Bae Wells, Nikole also explained why Ida B. Wells is her role model, especially when the newspaper she works for now once called the groundbreaking Black investigative journalist a “slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress,” also referenced in Nikole’s Twitter bio.

“What Ida B. Wells means to me personally is she was the first example of a Black woman doing what I hoped to do, which shows you a lot about our field, right?” she said. “That I had to go to a woman born right at the Emancipation Proclamation to see a model of a Black investigative reporter who was a woman, who was a feminist, who was a civil rights activist, who was doing the type of reporting that I wanted to see.”

“But also that legacy of lineage matters,” she continued. “To understand that there were badass Black women who were doing things at a time when there was no help that was going to come to protect Ida B. Wells when she was investigating lynchings.”

She added the actions of Black female writers before her sets the tone for her work:

It gives you courage. It gives you strength. It helps you understand what you’re doing, and it gives you humility that you didn’t create this. There are a lot of folks who came before you. There are a lot of folks who had to sacrifice and suffer for you to do the work that you do and that, to me, gives the motivation for the work that I’m trying to do because I have to repay this debt that I owe.

Besides the literary content, the park’s atmosphere was filled with Instagrammable features, including a welcome arch made from books, light-studded signs, and pumpkin-and-hay stacks, splashed with the festival’s lavender-hued branding. A chalkboard requested attendees write down what they’re reading. The district also had restaurants with outside seating like Dok Khao Thai Eatery, The Charmery, Clove & Cardamom, and Cured and 18th & 21st.

The event was free with tickets available on Eventbrite. Almost all attendees followed the mask mandate. Street and garage parking around the Merriweather District was free for the festival.

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‘Queenie’ Author Candice Carty-Williams Discusses Heavy Themes in Her Popular Book

Emil Huseynzade

Guest contributor Kidan Araya talks about seeing Queenie author Candice Carty-Williams on her Nov. 19 D.C. book tour stop.

Candice Carty-Williams, the Jamaican-British author behind one of the most widely discussed books of the year, made a stop in Washington, D.C. to discuss her debut novel Queenie.

Solid State Books, a relatively new locally owned bookstore that personifies the hipness of my generation by serving local kombucha, staying open late hours for people to study and meet, and having awesome bean bags, hosted the author in its northeast D.C. bookstore. It was a full house with a few standing attendees, which included mostly women of all races. The event was structured as a Q&A with Candice and local bookstagrammer Jamise Harper.

The audience jumped into questions and comments about Queenie. Many people praised the cover of Queenie and loved the “unapologetic Blackness” of the cover. When Candice was asked if she ever considered how the cover—an image of a Black woman with braids—could be a determining factor for certain demographics never picking up the book, Candice confidently stated she did not consider that at all. She also said she had received encouraging emails from readers saying the cover was the first time they had ever seen a Black woman in natural hair on a book cover and it made them feel more confident about wearing their own natural hairstyles.

There was also a discussion on the power of female friendships. Queenie’s friends and how their personalities offered something unique that helped Queenie significantly overcome her struggles. The audience also expressed their disappointment that Queenie never had a triumphant moment with Tom, her boyfriend who leaves her at the beginning of the novel. But Candice said she wanted the book to be as realistic as possible and most of us do not have a triumphant moment with our exes. Point made. Everyone also agreed that the comparisons between Queenie and Bridget Jones’s Diary were a bit hollow, as Queenie delved into so many different topics of our time such as racial tension and mental health.

Furthermore, the attendees also praised Queenie for its accurate depictions of mental health. In the novel, Queenie decides to see a therapist to help her cope with job stress and relationship drama. Specifically, the therapist helps her understand her behavior of why she chooses toxic relationships and hookups and how to become resilient after Ted, the married man she has an affair with, forces her job to place her on leave. The reader sees Queenie go through a variety of emotions with her therapy sessions: being uneasy at first; describing the anxiety of booking your first appointment; breathing techniques; discussing how earlier life trauma with our families actually influences our behavior; and continuing therapy even when her life starts turning around for the better.

When an audience member asked why Queenie only dates white men in the book, Candice described how growing up in the U.K. in Black Caribbean communities, many people are told that “the closer you can get to whiteness, the better,” including marrying white partners.

She also excitedly announced that Queenie is being adopted into television! She said Queenie will have a diverse array of love interests in the TV show.

Overall, the book discussion was made more excellent as Candice was a very candid and humorous author that was just as personable as the character Queenie (even though she swears that Queenie is not a biographical account). Everyone left happy and looking forward to hearing more news on the Queenie television adaption.

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Marie Forleo Talks About How ‘Everything is Figureoutable’

she lit From left, Grasie Mercedes speaks to Marie Forleo about her "Everything is Figureoutable" book at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

Motivational guru Marie Forleo landed in Los Angeles as a part of her Everything is Figureoutable last Friday at the Skirball Cultural Center. Though the event was not an over-the-top “Beyoncé meets TED talk” compared to her home New York event, around 400 attendees came to listen to her reasoning behind her new self-help book.

In conversation with actress Grasie Mercedes currently writing for NBC’s Perfect Harmony, Marie glowing in a neon green top said her first book has been a work-in-progress since 2011. The event started with brave audience members jumping onto the stage to dance to the hottest pop songs from Gwen Stefani’s Hollaback Girl and Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby.

After showing the audience a photo of her and Grasie in a Bring It On-era Crunch Fitness class from 20 years ago, Marie dropped wisdom about her philsophy behind the title of her book, which she said was inspired by her mother.

“This converation is really a follow-up if even we were to believe and accept this notion that everything is truly figureoutable—which again I believe in my bones to be the truth—then we need to ask ourselves what stops us, what gets in our way, what prevents us from figuring this out,” she said. “And while we can all come up with a laundry list of things that stops us, and one of the biggest things are our excuses. Those nasty little lies we all tell ourselves from time to time.”

Along with real-life stories on overcoming obstacles, the book has guidance on how to think positively in order to find solutions to everyday problems.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean we can change every circumstance to be the exact way that we want it to be—that’s not always possible,” she said. “But ‘Everything is Figureoutable’ awakens your creative wisdom, your own intiutive intelligence, so that you can rise up and meet the circumstances and challenges of your life and come out stronger, better, and bigger than you were before.”

She wants the book to make readers realize they have more control over their lives through thinking outside the box, and how not doing this exacerbates mental health conditions like anxiety and depression. Warning the book should not be used as treatment, she said it could help those dealing with mental health issues find creative and positive solutions to their predicaments.

With the event running about two hours, Marie ended the night with crowd selfies and photos with her book-purchasing fans. Book Soup was the sponsoring seller.

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Free Black Women’s Library Holds Lavender + Lit Poetry Reading

The Free Black Women’s Library held a read-and-relax event Sunday afternoon at the Underground Museum in Arlington Heights section of Los Angeles.

Taking place in the Purple Garden among purple parasols and plants, the Lavender + Lit on July 21 featured a reading by poet Mahtem Shiferraw, who shared her new collection of poems, Your Body Is War. Her curated reading list sparked a conversation on handling generational trauma.

“With the newer generation trying to distance themselves, they end up replicating the same traumatic act of violence or aggression without actually doing it themselves,” said Mahtem, who spoke from her cultural experience of being Ethiopian and Eritrean. “So part of the process of healing, or when distancing ourselves, we can also recognize what happened because of that ugliness and beauty. We came from that.”

Under the parasols shielding the 40 attendees from the 80 plus-degree heat, the poet and attendees, mostly millennials, discussed their roles in helping an older generation understand the obstacles.

“For Ethiopian people specifically, I know they open more when they’re around friendly faces and when they’re eating and they’re joking, so things come out like that, then they get serious,” Mahtem said. “If I try to have a one-on-one sit-down, they will never talk to me. It’ll be like, ‘Who are you asking me this?’ I don’t mean with just strangers; even my family members will not talk to me like that.”

The two-hour event also allowed the attendees to roam among woven baskets of books separated by genres that make up the library that includes hundreds of works all by black women writers. The Los Angeles arm of the New York-based organization launched in April.

 

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Book Launch: ‘More Than Enough’ by Elaine Welteroth

Elaine Welteroth. Photo: Renell Medrano.

Elaine Welteroth, who reached prominence as the first black Teen Vogue editor and now as a Project Runway judge, stopped in Los Angeles Thursday for her book tour and discussed why she wrote the women empowerment memoir to an estimated 400-member audience.

What appeared to be a well-read black girl magic rally at the California African American Museum in Exposition Park started with the cheerful announcement that Elaine’s book had notched itself to the coveted New York Times Best Sellers list. She was then introduced by her former Teen Vogue colleague and friend Lynette Nylander, who conducted the fireside chat.

Right away, Elaine began reading from Chapter 16 in More Than Enough: Claiming Space For Who You Are (No Matter What They Say), which is dubbed “Disturbing the Peace,” which starts with a quote from Audre Lorde and describes how Elaine returned to work from a Christmas vacation from Rwanda for a surprise racial interaction. Her hair was braided into Senegalese twists down her waist—the first time she came to a corporate setting in an overly ethnic hairstyle—and a white female colleague in disbelief asked how her hair had allegedly grown feet over a short amount of time.

This question is sometimes posed to black women who decide to add synthetic or real hair to their braids for a new look to celebrate their heritage, so Elaine took it in stride after an inner dialogue berating the beauty industry for neglecting what is considered beautiful to women of color with telling the woman, “Oh, you of all people must know these are extensions.”

That set the tone for the evening: Elaine describing her humble background in the San Francisco Bay Area as a first-generation college graduate to a high-ranking editor in a magazine media empire. Starting her career in the beginning of the recession, she said she felt the weight of being “black, young, and female,” the trifecta of the media industry teeming with racism, ageism, and sexism.

“We all live in a 180-character world where we are scrolling each other’s success stories every day, and we’re only getting the shiny slice, we’re only getting the prettiest picture, we’re only getting the clearest caption,” she said. “I felt like I owed this community more than I can fit into a caption on Instagram about the most universal aspects of the success story. The parts that get left out from the messy relationships that so often intercept with how we show up in our careers.”

At 32, she said she feared her audience would doubt she was ready to write a memoir, even as her own brother echoed this sentiment soon after she submitted a manuscript questioning her reason to pen an “autobiography.”

“I wanted to throw the plate in his face,” she said of the interaction over a Christmas vacation while he was washing dishes in the kitchen. “I was so emotional because that was the very question that threatened to keep me from doing this and leave it to be my family—it’s always family—that are your harshest critics. At the time, I was so emotional I can only think to say, ‘They don’t even call it autobiographies anymore, you asshole!'”

A round of laughter erupted from the audience, but she continued with the true translation of that moment.

“Then later I really sat with it. I don’t blame my brother for asking that question. That’s the patriarchy talking. We’ve all been conditioned by this mindset that tells us, ‘Your stories are not valid if you look like me.'”

The two-hour event brought up more gems from Elaine’s book like her decision to attend a state university because the boy she was dating was supposed to be there but turned out to be in jail and how on her first Ebony photo shoot she had a serendipitous moment with the hairstylist who happened to be friends with her aunt.

Eso Won Books, the main black-owned bookstore in Los Angeles, was the official bookseller at the event.

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Busy Philipps Says Memoir Prepared Her for Sharing Abortion Story

Author-actress Busy Philipps and author-CEO Jaclyn Johnson hold a fireside chat at Aerie REALtreat at Rolling Greens Nursery in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, June 8, 2019 / she lit

Actress-author Busy Philipps shared how her 2018 published memoir inspired her to share a personal story on TV at the Aerie REALtreat conference in downtown Los Angeles Saturday afternoon.

Arriving from an earlier event with BookSparks in conversation with Taylor Jenkins Reid and Abdi Nazemian in Hollywood, the This Will Only Hurt a Little memoirist spoke to about 150 attendees at a fireside chat at Rolling Greens Nursery in the Arts District with Work Party author and Create & Cultivate CEO Jaclyn Johnson about how her recently canceled late night talk show was another vehicle to share her abortion story. Though she told the story in her book, Busy said she hadn’t shared it publicly until last month in response to the Georgia abortion bill.

“It’s all crazy, but writing about it in my book prepared me for when the extreme abortion bans happened,” she said. “First of all, the Georgia ban was passed the Monday after I had found out that my show was canceled. We didn’t tell people for five weeks, so I knew my show was canceled, and that’s when the Georgia ban was passed through their Senate, but the governor hadn’t signed it in yet.

“So my initial feeling was that I wanted to do it that day. However, my husband and I talked about it, and he said, ‘I don’t want E! to think you’re going on television to talk about your abortion in some way because they canceled your show’… I just didn’t want any of the message to be convoluted.”

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed the Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act, also known as the “heartbeat bill” on May 7. That same day, Busy aired her story on Busy Tonight, in which she said she didn’t let the network know about her decision to share her story because she felt it would lessen the potency or stop the story from being told. She said the show submitted a full script, which she wrote, while she personally placed it in the teleprompter, so the weight of the impact would be all on her. Her last show aired May 16.

Last Tuesday, she was a guest speaker at the “Threats to Reproductive Rights in America” House Judiciary Committee hearing.

“The timing of things with being able to go testify at the House Judiciary Committee; I wouldn’t have been able to do if my show on E! that 40 people watched was still on,” Busy quipped.

Busy is an #AerieREAL role model. Aerie is the intimate apparel lifestyle offshoot of American Eagle Outfitters. In partnership with Create & Cultivate (disclosure: I’m an insider), the event focused on tapping into women’s power for entrepreneurial success.

Regardless of getting an abortion at 15 years old, Busy said she’s felt the emotional toll on making the decision.

“It’s something I had never spoken about publicly, but I held a great deal of shame about for many many years,” she said. “When I wrote my memoir, I knew I wanted to talk about it. But I knew that it would be difficult for my family. I felt very strongly in sharing the whole story.”

She said her talk show was a creative vehicle for storytelling expression and hopes it can be revived via another outlet.

“It speaks to the other thing which was why I wanted even to do a late night talk show in the first place,” she said. “We know that diversity and representation in the media of all kinds makes a difference in our media and having a female voice in late night television is important, especially when our country is dealing with lots of different issues that affect women.”

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Poet Cleo Wade Talks Setting Intentions at Aerie REALtreat Event

Aspiring author-model Iskra, author-gymnast Aly Raisman, and author-poet Cleo Wade hold a panel at Aerie REALtreat in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, June 8, 2019 / she lit

Best-selling poet Cleo Wade emphasized the power of setting intentions and navigating one’s way to success in today’s world at the Aerie REALtreat conference in downtown Los Angeles Saturday morning.

The Heart Talk: Poetic Wisdom for a Better Life author is also an #AerieREAL role model as she pumped up the audience at Rolling Greens Nursery in the Arts District then joined a panel with fellow ambassadors Olympic gymnast and Fierce: How Competing for Myself Changed Everything author Aly Raisman and body-positive model Iskra. Aerie is the intimate apparel lifestyle offshoot of American Eagle Outfitters.

Using advice from her book, Cleo said one of her intentions is to exude kindness when she’s most stressed.

“Another one I have is: Can I be patient? Can I not make rushing everyone else’s problem?” she said. “I’m sure you’re all familiar when you’re the one running late, but then all of sudden it’s the Uber driver’s problem if they’re not going fast enough. And then you’re like, ‘I have to be there in 10 minutes,’ if like you needing to be there in 10 minutes has to do with whether or not it’s 20 minutes away or not, and that is somehow their fault.”

Several of the estimated 100 women in attendance in Cleo’s speaking session went up to the decorated stage to share their intentions. Cleo said she requested Aerie put notebooks and pens in the giveaway bags to do the five-minute, intention-writing exercise.

“For me, intentions are a space where we can say I know I have these default settings as the person I am, but what does it look like for me to carve out the person I know I can be,” Cleo said. “That’s what we really do when we set intentions for ourselves.”

In partnership with Create & Cultivate (disclosure: I’m an insider), the event focused on tapping into women’s power for entrepreneurial success, so Cleo brought up the theme of making connections.

“If you’re someone who doesn’t like to be the first to walk up to someone to say like, ‘Your hair looks really amazing today’ or ‘I love your scarf,’ or ‘Hi, my name is Cleo,’ then maybe your intention for today is ‘I’m going to be the first to say hello,'” she said. “If you came here today, like so many of you I’m sure did, it’s such a beautiful and safe space to create fellowship and participate in sisterhood and make new friends then maybe your intention today is, ‘I am going to be open enough to allow connection to take place between me and another sister I walk or sit next to today.'”

She then had the attendees hug the woman sitting next to them with an introduction. The session ended with her reading a poem from her book while sitting on the edge of the stage.

Joining Aly and Iskra in the next panel, Cleo discussed how many use the internet to connect and grow a brand but recommended to be cautious of what works or won’t work for you.

“Before you endorse anything, there are people who are working with you, for you, not for how many people follow you or how many people’s eyeballs are on what you see or do,” she said. “And you do that by getting to know brands or people before you work with them, so that they are there for your voice, they are there for your story, they are there for the way that you have built your community rather than anyone reducing you to a number or anyone reducing you to an algorithm.”

And with so many connections, the act of gluing the connections can become stressful to the point where slowing down may be the best option.

“I think in that space it’s always OK if you allow yourself to not be Superwoman. I always say with the women who work with me, it’s like I don’t want to be Superwoman because she’s not real,” Cleo said. “That has to be OK because that’s the truth. So when it comes to whether having the answer or that one piece of advice—if I don’t have that, I don’t put pressure on myself to have that.”

Aly later said as the main takeaway she wanted to share with audience was partly inspired by Cleo’s book, and that’s to be “authentically you.”

“Know your value and what you want in your life,” she said. “If you are willing to, I would recommend when you leave here, or when you feel like it, to really take time and really get to know what you want and who you want to be with… I think it’s about really knowing your value and really getting to know what makes you happy.”

Cleo co-signed actively surrounding ourselves with people who support us with recalling a moment she shared with her brother in their mother’s kitchen one day in Louisiana. After realizing it would’ve been a good anecdote in her book, she said her mother was cooking food in a pan when she and her brother mentioned “haters.”

“She looks up from the pan and says, ‘Haters? What are haters? I have no idea who hates me. I don’t hang out with those people.’ I always think of that as some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten because you’re like, ‘Exactly!'” Cleo said. “Sometimes, I don’t think we realize we’re moving in this world looking for people to criticize us because we don’t believe in our own power and we don’t believe in our own place in the world. We actually look around whether it’s on the internet or in social spaces for people who might reject us or tell us we’re not enough.”

The panel ended with Aly having the audience engage in a 10-minute meditation rather than the originally scheduled fitness workout.

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experiences

Free Black Women’s Library Los Angeles Holds Launch Party in Slauson Community

Asha Grant, founder of The Free Black Women's Library Los Angeles, at the launch party on April 27, 2019.

Free Black Women’s Library celebrated its Los Angeles launch Saturday night at the Hilltop Coffee & Kitchen on Slauson Avenue in the View Park-Windsor Hills neighborhood with the performances by eight Black female poets.

The featured local poets were Amoni Thompson-Jones, bridgette bianca, Camari Carter, Iman Milner, Jessica Gallion aka YELLAWOMAN, Nadia Hunter Bey, Shakira Peterson, and Shonda Buchanan.

The party started with a networking hour for attendees to bond over literary happenings in the coffeehouse that’s quickly becoming a haven for similar events. A live artist, Brittney Price, painted a piece she later donated to the cause. Quotes were pasted on the glass from Black women writers such as bell hooks, Octavia Butler, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Ntozake Shange. Bouquets of flowers sat on the tables with most attendees sitting in seats in front of the window that provided a backdrop of the sunset with painted skies for the poets as they recited their melodies.

As each poet spilled her soul to the crowd, applause naturally erupted. The poems magnified the Black female experience from different perspectives. For example, bridgette bianca and Camari Carter mentioned the death of six adopted Black children killed by their White lesbian mothers where one drove their SUV over the cliff in Mendocino County, a story forgotten in the constantly ticking news cycle. YELLAWOMAN lyrically spoke about her experience as a light-skinned woman with Louisiana roots while Shonda Buchanan played a drum and chanted a song before her poetry to honor her African-American and American-Indian roots.

The library’s goal is to compensate Black women for their artistry while collecting #300BlackWomenBooks, or 300 books authored by Black women, by June. Donations will be accepted at subsequent events and this address: 5350 Wilshire Blvd P.O. Box #36618 Los Angeles, CA 90036.

The original branch of the library was created in 2015 by Ola Ronke Akinmowo in Brooklyn, New York, the same year and place where Well-Read Black Girl began. The idea is to provide “a free, feminist pop-up library and book swap with Black women writers at the center,” as its mission states.

Asha Grant, the director of the Free Black Women’s Library LA, was the mistress of ceremonies at the launch party. She said she recently moved back to the LA area and wanted to bring Akinmowo’s mission here.

The next event has not been announced yet but Grant said it will involve interactive journaling with sitting on pillows, a more relaxed atmosphere compared to the party.

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experiences what's lit

How to Work the LA Times Festival of Books

Los Angeles Times

The magnificent Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is approaching this weekend, and since almost every top author of the moment will be in attendance, aspiring writers and enthusiastic readers could turn the event into a networking mecca.

Every year, the festival is on the University of Southern California campus where parking on-site is $12 with bus and Metro stops nearby. It’s a walking-intensive event, which not only means comfortable footwear is a must but also an undetected corner either inside or outside may translate into a missed opportunity.

Attend specific panels

The festival is free as in the outdoor activities are accessible to everyone, but most of the specific panels, which usually happen inside the campus buildings with well-known authors, have tickets ranging from $2.50 to $30. The $2.50 is the service fee of buying tickets on Eventbrite.

Authors highlighting these panels include Erica Jong, Tayari Jones, Terry Tempest Williams, Elizabeth Acevedo, and Ibi Zoboi, just to name a few, and many have a theme like the genre the authors write in.

Top events such as the discussion with former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett comes with the VIP membership packages at $40 and $125.

Visit selective booths

Outside are the hundreds of booths occupied by bookstores, authors, nonprofits and the likes trying to reach the book-loving audience.

Since it will feel like an endless labyrinth, it will also be beneficial to exercise (physical with the walk and mental with the analysis) by checking out the booths that catch your eye. Though it gets crowded, walking close to the middle and switching sides of the aisle often may work with quick scans. There will be so many local book-related outlets from indie publishers to book clubs that could spark an interest. And buying the books the groups are selling could help them move their missions forward, so you might want to be selective with what you buy because that will leave a larger impression, especially with a smaller group that may recognize your sale if you want to connect later.

Establish connections with like-minded people

While at the booths and in the panels, only a small fraction of participants actually approach the people behind the booths and panelists and get the information they want.

To make an impact, for example, while listening to the panelists, prepare questions for the one or two you would like to meet. Meaningful questions as in ones that were not asked during the panel, so you don’t waste the panelist’s time, or worse, fail to make an impression. You want the panelist to light up at your words and better yet exchange contact information.

At a booth, if truly interested in the mission the organization is promoting, discuss it with the people more with on-the-spot questions. Other event attendees will be stopping by the booth every few seconds or minutes, so the people behind the booth are hurriedly catching up with everyone who stops by. Take their marketing materials to ask more questions later. The average time at a booth that you might have an interest could be 1-2 minutes, and if you’re buying a book, it could be another 2 minutes. Minimize time at each booth mainly because there are way too many booths and a lot of attendees split their time at the indoor panels scheduled at various times, meaning the day could become a harried mess if not careful about managing time.

Luckily, the festival provides a planner you can create ahead of the event as well as a long list of exhibitors to mark whoever commands your attention before struggling with a map on campus.

What’s your strategy?

If it’s your first time attending the festival or umpteenth time, drop your advice on mastering this book festival and others. When you love books, an event like this becomes overwhelming but satisfying.

 

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experiences

Author Event: Laura Dave, Robinne Lee and Gretchen Bonaduce for National Reading Group Month

The Women’s National Book Association Los Angeles chapter held its annual Great Group Reads event at Skylight Books last week to ring in National Reading Group Month. Along with the announcement of the books we as an organization designated as must-reads over the next year, our chapter welcomed three notable authors to share how they navigated the imperfect road to publication.

The author of best-selling Hello, Sunshine and Eight Hundred Grapes, Laura Dave said though she has several novels now under her belt she had lost her first book to a liquid spill on her laptop. Only the first chapter was backed up. Despite the pitfall, she started over with a new novel while juggling 15 gigs at the time.

Also on the panel was Robinne Lee, an actress recognizable for her roles in the Fifty Shades of Grey series and Seven Pounds, who is experiencing debut novel success with The Idea of You. The top-ranking “romance” novel took her 15 months to complete. How did she do it? She said she lugged her laptop everywhere from movie sets to Starbucks, taking advantage of every free moment to write.

Former celebrity wife and reality star Gretchen Bonaduce gained fame from being married to Danny Bonaduce of Partridge Family fame. So when she decided to write a memoir after people told her she could tell her story in comical way, she said it was hard to get published. Like a lot of writers, she said she didn’t realize the amount of rejection she would see. Weighed down by rejection, she said she looked for alternative ways to publish her book and found an indie publisher for Surviving Agent Orange: And Other Things I Learned From Being Thrown Under the Partridge Family Bus.

The major takeaways from this event:

  • Back up your work – Use programs such as Google Drive to keep your work in the cloud in case your computer or flash drive go missing. Also, save on your computer and flash drive. Have a “receptacle” document or program where you can place extra chunks of work for later or keep notes, then back that up, too.
  • Carve out time – Within your busy schedule, see if there’s a block of time you can take for yourself to write. Anywhere from half an hour and up every day or a few times a week can propel your novel. Treat this time like it’s a fixed class or job, so you can stick with it. When it’s not sticking anymore, change it. Writing time might not be fixed with changing every week, but carve out the time ahead of the week to drop in it into your schedule.
  • Look for alternative avenues – Querying can mean a mountain of rejections. Some authors keep going no matter what while other authors look for indie publishing and self-publishing options. With more and more authors taking advantage of self-publishing models through outlets such as Amazon.com, the traditional route may not be ideal for every author.

WNBA-LA organizes events featuring great women authors who luckily reside in the Los Angeles area. What’s so great about these events is that authors share their adventures and misadventures of trying to get their work out there in the world. These pearls of wisdom could be enhanced with actually interacting with the authors in person, more personal than social media exchanges. Follow @wnba_la on Instagram and @WNBA_LA on Twitter.

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experiences

Book Launch: ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ by Celeste Ng

With so many concerts going on around the LA area Friday night, I decided to look for an event more my pace. Luckily, on Facebook I found Celeste Ng was scheduled to speak and sign books at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena. Her newest novel Little Fires Everywhere had been gaining momentum on the best-seller lists, and since I recently read and enjoyed Everything I Never Told You, I went to the event to get insight on the author’s work and writing process.

In Little Fires Everywhere, a suburban mother is dealing with her house burning down amid her seemingly perfect life and trying to piece together what sparks ignited the blaze. The story takes place in Shaker Heights, Ohio — the author’s second hometown — and at the event she spoke about the “metaphorically rich” planned community and how rules shape it. She used the example of how residents couldn’t leave trash cans out on the curb for collection; it was too messy, so the city had golf carts go in the back of residents’ houses to fetch the trash to bring it up the driveway to the truck at the curb.

This fascinated me. In the book jacket, her bio reads she grew up in Shaker Heights — where she said she lived from 10 to college — and Pittsburgh. Recently I had just realized I spent half my childhood in Chicago and the other half in Sacramento. The most recent novel I’m working on surrounds a teenage girl secretly becoming a mermaid at a nightclub in Chicago, but I based the character’s neighborhood on my original neighborhood of Rogers Park that had such an idyllic quality that it didn’t feel like it was in Chicago, and from Celeste’s description maybe more like Shaker Heights. And I too had moved to Sacramento at age 10 up to college. Chicago has more personality, of course, but maybe Northern California suburban living might creep up into a later story.  

Celeste also discussed her writing process and how the idea of her latest novel  germinated in 2009 but the actual writing didn’t come until after 2014’s Everything I Never Told You. So the characters evolved in her head, so she encouraged writers to not be so consumed with how long the story is taking to get on paper and then the long road to being published. She even praised how Sweet Tarts and other candies got her through writing, with a tweet about Sweet Tarts catching the attention of the company that sent her a package. Like many writers, she worked at home, the library, and cafes, which felt inspiring since it felt like I could create a great novel though I spent so much time writing it in all the same places near me.

The event drew a packed room with about 75 or so people braving rush hour traffic. I bought the hardcover book and got it signed, but I choked when I met her because I wanted to tell her about my author aspirations. Sometimes, I can get my words out when meeting authors quickly at book signings and sometimes not, but she was polite and I’m looking forward to reading the novel soon. 

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experiences

Author Event: Jade Chang and Natashia Deón

Meeting two authors in one night is an amazing treat, but when they drop knowledge, it’s even more amazing. That knowledge: build your reputation as a writer before your work comes out.

Jade Chang of The Wangs vs. The World and Natashia Deón of Grace spoke together at a Women’s National Book Association meeting last Wednesday night at Skylight Books in Los Angeles.

At the event, the authors dove into what inspired them to write their novels and how being a woman writer — especially women of color writers — affected their work. They spoke about their past experiences and how it took them both about eight years to get to the finish line for their debut novels. 

It turned out they both completed the same fellowship. After the talk, I went up to Chang to tell her how much I adored her book, which I had conveniently finished earlier in the day. Then I went to Deón to buy her book since my daily attempts to win a Goodreads giveaway seemed to be fruitless.

They suggested applying for the literary fellowships that would be convenient to your life, e.g. you can keep your day job if necessary, to learn about the publishing industry and how to navigate it. If you don’t have a masters in fine arts in creative writing, these fellowships can help lessen the barriers of entering the publishing industry.

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experiences

Book Launch: ‘The Education of Margot Sanchez’ by Lilliam Rivera

Tuesday night, I attended the launch party for The Education of Margot Sanchez by Lilliam Rivera. After hearing buzz around the novel for months, I traded in a night of writing to see a novel officially enter the literary space.

I’m working on a young adult novel with elements of The Little Mermaid that will deal with teenage hardships, gang violence, academic pressures, and young love. So when I heard about this novel, I waited with anticipation and luckily received an invitation through my book club.

The story surrounds the title character punished for stealing her father’s credit card to buy designer duds to wear at her prep school. Her punishment is to become one of the cashieristas at her family’s market. Coming of age in the Bronx as a young Latina juggling with class issues and gentrification was a story rarely seen in the young adult genre. 

The past two years have exploded with more characters of color ushering a new face to the genre. When I was a teen devouring library books, all the heroines I admired were presumably white, with the race of other characters defined. I saw my personality traits in those characters but wished at least one or two could look like me on the cover and understand my brown-skinned world. With Lilliam Rivera and Nicola Yoon, who presently has both her latest novels on the bestseller’s list at the same time, the game is evolving for the generation of girls looking for characters they can relate to, on a cultural and racial level. 

The party attracted around 60 people at Other Books in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood undergoing gentrification, and incorporated the book’s New York flavor with a deejay blasting hip-hop goodies. I usually bail on book launch parties because they take place after a long day at work, but it was nice to see a celebration for a book and the author talking about it with others.