Join us in our newly renovated reading room!
Join us in our second-floor reading room for a “one step short of crazy” introduction to a new kind of treasure hunt! What started as a simple podcast called National Treasure Hunt (NTH) has expanded to include a book dedicated to exploring the National Treasure films in a new way.
Join us for an afternoon of poetry featuring local authors Cindy Savett, Liz Chang, and Paul Hutchinson, followed by an open mic session.
Cindy Savett is the author of Child in the Road (Parlor Press) and the chapbooks The Story of My Eyes, Battle for the Metal Kiss, Rachel: In the Temporary Mist of Prayer, and Overtures of Survival. Her latest work, The Breath (BlazeVOX), is a riveting meditation on grief and resilience, written in response to the death of her young daughter.
Liz Chang's new book of poems, Museum of Things (Finishing Line Press), is "a powerful and ingenious collection of personal artifacts -- and the associated memories -- in poetry form" per Kirkus Reviews. She was the 2012 Montgomery County Poet Laureate, and has previously published Animal Nocturne, What Ordinary Objects, and Provenance.
Paul Hutchinson juxtaposes words and art in his work. becoming white grass, his fourth book, is a collection of short, naturalistic poems combining a clean page layout and black-and-white images. His goal is to allow readers to reconnect with themselves and reconsider with a meditative freshness their long journey through this world.
Big Blue Marble is so happy to welcome back former staffer Kasey Jueds and celebrate the release of her 2nd poetry collection, "The Thicket." She'll be joined by special guest Anne Marie Macari, whose newest poetry collection is "Heaven Beneath."
About the Book
“In Kasey Jueds’s gorgeous new book, The Thicket, every flower, thorn, and body of water is both archetype and fact. These rich lyrics act as doors to a transformation like sleep or like season. Jueds’s poems are like living inside a spell, a magic that is both story and circle. With her close attention to nature and stunning litanies, she enchants the natural world around us and reminds us that through all of our painful changes ‘how long it takes to become human again.’ Read this book and let yourself be spellbound.” — Traci Brimhall
About the Book
An incisive history of self-serving white feminists and the inspiring women who've continually defied them. Women including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger, and Sheryl Sandberg are commonly celebrated as leaders of feminism. Yet they have fought for the few, not the many. As award-winning scholar Kyla Schuller argues, their white feminist politics dispossess the most marginalized to liberate themselves.
In "The Trouble with White Women," Schuller brings to life the two-hundred-year counter history of Black, Indigenous, Latina, poor, queer, and trans women pushing back against white feminists and uniting to dismantle systemic injustice. These feminist heroes such as Frances Harper, Harriet Jacobs, and Pauli Murray have created an anti-racist feminism for all. But we don't speak their names and we don't know their legacies. Unaware of these intersectional leaders, feminists have been led down the same dead-end alleys generation after generation, often working within the structures of racism, capitalism, homophobia, and transphobia rather than against them.
About the Author
Kyla Schuller is Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Faculty Director of the Women's Global Health Leadership Certificate Program at Rutgers University--New Brunswick. She is the author of "The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century" (Duke UP, 2018), and her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Post Road.
About this book
Donna says, "I was first introduced to tattoos when my son inadvertently fell asleep on the couch and his shirt sleeve rolled up to reveal his tattoo that prior had remained intentionally hidden from me. He was 17 at the time. I was not happy to say the least as I had the old idea of tattoos belonging to gangs, inmates and drunken sailors. I had to either alienate him and stay angry or join him in his fascination for body art. That was a no brainer for me. I later began paying attention to my patient’s tattoos and hearing about the deep meaning they had, decided that someday I would do a book about tattoos and my women patients. In 2016, I started interviewing women along with Ken Kauffman, the book’s photographer and the rest is history."
About the Author
Donna L. Torrisi, MSN has been a Nurse Practitioner since 1976. In 1992 obtaining a federal grant, she founded a Community Health Center in Philadelphia which grew to five sites serving over 25,000 patients. That CHC model and her work are recognized nationally and have been the recipient of multiple awards. While directing the network of centers, she continued to provide primary care to the low income communities. It was here that she was inspired by her courageous and resilient patients to write this book.
She is a graduate of Villanova University and the University of Pennsylvania. She has received the Villanova University Leadership in Nursing award, the University of Pa. Lillian Brunner Sholstis award for Excellence in Nursing Practice, the Pa. Nurses Association Leadership award for Innovative Practice, and the National Alliance for Resident Services in Affordable and Assisted Housing, Practitioner of the Year.
About this book
Donna says, "I was first introduced to tattoos when my son inadvertently fell asleep on the couch and his shirt sleeve rolled up to reveal his tattoo that prior had remained intentionally hidden from me. He was 17 at the time. I was not happy to say the least as I had the old idea of tattoos belonging to gangs, inmates and drunken sailors. I had to either alienate him and stay angry or join him in his fascination for body art. That was a no brainer for me. I later began paying attention to my patient’s tattoos and hearing about the deep meaning they had, decided that someday I would do a book about tattoos and my women patients. In 2016, I started interviewing women along with Ken Kauffman, the book’s photographer and the rest is history."
About the Author
Donna L. Torrisi, MSN has been a Nurse Practitioner since 1976. In 1992 obtaining a federal grant, she founded a Community Health Center in Philadelphia which grew to five sites serving over 25,000 patients. That CHC model and her work are recognized nationally and have been the recipient of multiple awards. While directing the network of centers, she continued to provide primary care to the low income communities. It was here that she was inspired by her courageous and resilient patients to write this book.
She is a graduate of Villanova University and the University of Pennsylvania. She has received the Villanova University Leadership in Nursing award, the University of Pa. Lillian Brunner Sholstis award for Excellence in Nursing Practice, the Pa. Nurses Association Leadership award for Innovative Practice, and the National Alliance for Resident Services in Affordable and Assisted Housing, Practitioner of the Year.
Big Blue Marble welcomes Rebecca Subar as she launches her book, “When to Talk and When to Fight: The Strategic Choice Between Dialogue and Resistance.”
When to Talk and When to Fight is a conversation between talkers and fighters. It introduces a new language to enable negotiators and activists to argue and collaborate across different schools of thought and action. Weaving beautiful storytelling and clear analysis, this book maps the habits of change-makers, explaining why some groups choose dialogue and negotiation while others practice confrontation and resistance. Why do some groups seemingly always take an antagonistic approach, challenging authority and in some cases trying to tear down our systems and institutions? Why are other groups reluctant to raise their voices or take a stand, limiting themselves to conciliatory strategies? And why do some of us ask only the first question, while others ask only the second?
Threaded among examples of conflict, struggle, and change in organizations, communities, and society is the compelling personal story that led Subar to her community of practice at Dragonfly, advising leaders in social justice organizations on organizational and advocacy strategy. With lucid charts and graphs by Rosi Greenberg, When to Talk and When to Fight is a brilliant new way of talking about how we change the world. In his foreword, Douglas Stone, coauthor of the international best-seller Difficult Conversations, makes the case that negotiators need this language. In a separate forward, Esteban Kelly, cofounder of AORTA Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance, explains why radicals and progressives need it. If you are a change-maker, you will soon find yourself speaking this language. Be one of the first to learn it. Read this book.
Mt. Airy native Rosi Greenberg, leadership trainer and graphic facilitator, created the organizing illustrations for “When to Talk and When to Fight.”
Long-time Mt. Airy resident Rebecca Subar taught Peace and Conflict Studies at West Chester University from 2005 to 2019. She is a senior partner at Dragonfly, where a multiracial band of consultants supports organizations that make social change. She has coached leaders of political advocacy groups large and small on their race consciousness, their organization’s growth, and their strategy for changing the world.
THE book for this time - members of the Girls’ High Class of 1968 reflect on the pandemic, politics, racism, and, at 70, the great changes their lives have seen. Joining us will be contributors Susan Dukow, Marsha Kramer Prosini, Jane Murray Gilmore, Fran Nachman, and Linda Notto Stulz
In 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic was in the early stages when a group of women who graduated from an all-girls public high school – The Philadelphia High School for Girls - came together via Zoom. As they rekindled old and cultivated new relationships, their conversations became more profound. Discussions regarding politics in and around the presidential election, the racial tensions in the country and fears that stemmed from the pandemic were shared. They were reminded that they had experienced tumultuous times before – the years leading up to and including another fateful time in history - 1968 – the year of their high school graduation
As the now seventy-year-olds laughed and cried with one another, they felt they were only scratching the surface of their individual experiences while on Zoom. It was then that forty-three of the women thought to write what this time in their lives meant to each of them. A world-wide pandemic, politics, racism and bigotry off the rails, these ‘sisters’ originally from Philadelphia who were now spread as far now as California, Washington State, Alaska, Montreal, Toronto, Spain and France wrote their stories. Their original hope was to leave something behind - to leave a little piece of themselves for their children and grandchildren and for those without - for the ages. Their humorous and often gut-wrenching stories, each of them as unique as the writers themselves, will keep you, the reader, engaged with their tales. It was only after they realized what they had collectively created that they decided to publish this book and to have the profits from sales go towards scholarships at their alma mater, The Philadelphia High School for Girls.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
A Woodstock Icon, a Judge, a Columbine survivor, an Archaeologist, a Midwife/Pot Farmer/CEO, a Sex Therapist, Accountants, a Linguist, a Dancer, a Molecular Biophysicist, Artists, a Film Production masochist, a Ballistic/Engineer Scientist, numerous Teachers, Writers and Doctorates and many Mothers - all well imagined and fully realized women, these are our Authors:
Pauline Miriam Braverman * Paula Campbell * Judy Chu Pembroke * Susan Dukow *Kathryn Flynn Tessier * Lois Gatker * Dina Ghen * Psylvia Gurk Tessler * Susan Halpern Rosenfeld * Sandra Heginbothom Lewis * Karen Israel * Terry Jones Candis * Emily Kahn Freedman * Wendy Keene (aka Anaiis Salles) * Marsha Kramer Prosini * Jackie Krenetz Dering * Katherine LaMonaca Hanson * Gloria London * Arlene Margolis Slepchik * Patricia Anne McDonnell * Karen Meketon Soskin * Janice Miller Abrams * Jane Murray Gilmore * Fran Nachman * Linda Notto Stulz * Margit Novack * Sharon Ozlek Dunoff * Jane Pearl Barr * Eileen Perkins Lashin * Carlotta Picazio Cundari * Nona Safra * Lily Samuel Rothman * Lois Sharp Rothenberger * Rachel Stark Farrell * Ruth Stark * Medellin Stephens * Robin Thomas Poponne * Diana White Sims * Candace Whitman * Ellen Williams Lebelle * Judy Wong Greco * Fran Yeager Bembenek * Janet Yassen
Online Event: Editors and Contributors from "Through the Looking Glass" will be reading their work and discussing this urgent new anthology
Join 158 writers and artists from across the globe as they journey Through the Looking Glass to unveil the truth about life with mental illness. Diverse, raw, and urgent, the poetry, prose, and art work in this anthology dig deep into the experience of living with depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and other neurodivergent conditions, as well as the challenges of loving someone who struggles with such an illness.
Full of hope and despair, acceptance and rebellion, the creativity contained within these pages reflects the reality that we cannot walk around or behind the looking glass, but must walk through it unflinchingly to educate, foster compassion, and reduce the stigma so often associated with mental illness.
“Many editors of anthologies might balk at publishing such raw material, but the commitment of Indie Blu(e) is to give voice to what is so often silenced, sanitized, hidden, and there is in this enterprise something that gives us all hope. For by speaking out our deepest experiences of trauma, abuse and unhappiness there comes a sense of freedom, a sense of the possibility of recognition, connection, acceptance. And thus healing. We are not alone. Others are battling similar enemies. We are lovable. Our feelings are valid. We belong to the human race. We deserve to live.”
ABOUT INDIE BLU(E) PUBLISHING
Indie Blu(e) Publishing is a progressive, feminist micro-press, committed to producing honest and thought-provoking works. Our anthologies are meant to celebrate diversity, raise awareness, and embolden our sisters and brothers to speak their truths. The editors all passionately advocate for human rights; mental health awareness; chronic illness awareness; sexual abuse survivors; and LGBTQ+ equality. It is our mission, and a great honor, to provide platforms for those voices that are stifled, and stigmatized.
This event will be on zoom. Registration is free but required through Eventbrite.
Hand embroidery can be a joyous respite from busy daily life. It is an exploration of material, an invitation to slow down, and it allows time for contemplation. Mystical Stitches combines this beloved and accessible craft with a spiritual element, introducing nearly 200 original designs for different symbols readers can use to create personal icons to wear or embellish items in the home. Christi Johnson offers patterns inspired by botanicals, animals, numbers, the cosmos, earth elements, and mythological icons for novice or well-practiced crafters to combine into talismans with personal meaning. Johnson’s folk art style is vibrant and unintimidating and provides a framework for bringing spiritual elements into physical form. In addition to basic techniques, an overview of material options, and an illustrated encyclopedia of stitches, the extensive treasury of symbols is lavishly photographed in hand-stitched, full-color spreads that will inspire readers to create personalized designs to stitch on clothes, hang on the wall, place on an altar, carry with them, or display in a place of prominence.
My mission, as both an artist and a teacher, is to break through the lies we tell ourselves about our own creative capabilities so we can better access our abilities to transform. I teach embroidery and textile arts for the imperfect human - for the visionary who wants to transform their dreams into textural designs on fabric through the art of embroidery.
These teachings are for the hesitant creative, those who think they don’t really know how to draw, those who feel they aren’t that skilled - to show them the skills they need to embrace their most creative selves.
You are not a machine. Your imperfections make you more human, we’re drawn to them like moths to a porch light.
Somehow that flaw; like an unusual face or an oddly grown flower; makes us stop and stare, bringing us in closer for further inspection. It makes us question the way things should be, opens us up to new forms.
This event will be on zoom. Registration is free but required through Eventbrite.
The inspiring story of worker centers that are cropping up across the country and leading the fight for today's workers
For over 60 million people, work in America has been a story of declining wages, insecurity, and unsafe conditions, especially amid the coronavirus epidemic. This new and troubling reality has galvanized media and policymakers, but all the while a different and little-known story of rebirth and struggle has percolated just below the surface.
On the Job is the first account of a new kind of labor movement, one that is happening locally, quietly, and among our country's most vulnerable―but essential―workers. Noted public health expert Celeste Monforton and award-winning journalist Jane M. Von Bergen crisscrossed the country, speaking with workers of all backgrounds and uncovering the stories of hundreds of new, worker-led organizations (often simply called worker centers) that have successfully achieved higher wages, safer working conditions and on-the-job dignity for their members.
On the Job describes ordinary people finding their voice and challenging power: from housekeepers in Chicago and Houston; to poultry workers in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and Springdale, Arkansas; and construction workers across the state of Texas. An inspiring book for dark times, On the Job reveals that labor activism is actually alive and growing―and holds the key to a different future for all working people.
Jane M. Von Bergen is an award-winning journalist who covered labor for more than half of her 35 years at the Philadelphia Inquirer. A graduate of Temple University, she was editor-in-chief of the Temple News, the college's student daily, before going on to be editor-in-chief of the Center City Welcomat (later the Philadelphia Weekly) and a feature writer at the North Penn Reporter in Lansdale. In addition to writing, Von Bergen teaches at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and at the District 1199C Training & Upgrading Fund. A longtime member of Summit Presbyterian Church and Weavers Way Co-op, she lives in East Mt. Airy with her husband, I. George Bilyk, a photographer and sculptor. They have two grown sons, Joey and Michael Bilyk.
Join us as we welcome Mt. Airyites Becca Ehrlich and Callie Swanlund as they discuss Becca’s new book “Christian Minimalism: Simple Steps for Abundant Living.”
Ehrlich's insightful self-help guide will resonate with Christians wishing to streamline an overstuffed life.
--Publishers Weekly
Logically, we all know our purpose in life is not wrapped up in accumulating possessions, wealth, power, and prestige--Jesus is very clear about that--but society tells us otherwise. Christian Minimalism attempts to cut through our assumptions and society's lies about what life should look like and invites readers into a life that Jesus calls us to live: one lived intentionally, free of physical, spiritual, and emotional clutter.
Written by a woman who simplified her own life and practices these principles daily, this book gives readers a fresh perspective on how to live out God's grace for us in new and exciting ways and live out our faith in a way that is deeply satisfying.
Becca Ehrlich is an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) living in West Mt Airy in Philadelphia. A Christian minimalist in a consumer society, she got rid of 60 percent of her personal possessions in six months, took part in a year-long shopping fast, and moved into a smaller home. Becca blogs about minimalism from a Christian perspective at www.christianminimalism.com and shares inspiration and encouragement to live a more minimal life on the Christian Minimalism Facebook page, Christian Minimalism Twitter @jesusminimalism, and the Christian Minimalism Instagram @jesusminimalism.
Callie Swanlund is an Episcopal priest residing in Mt. Airy. She leads individuals and groups in the work of Dr. Brené Brown as a Certified Daring Way Facilitator. Callie is a creator and dreamer who has created a virtual and traveling space—The Epiphany Space—for others to discover and use their creative gifts, and learn the digital tools to tell their story. Find out more at CallieSwanlund.com, listen to her podcast Journey to Epiphany on all platforms, and follow her Wholehearted Wednesday movement through @callieswanlund on instagram.
Becca Ehrlich
Callie Swanlund
The event is on Zoom and registration is required
A thoughtful and long-overdue exploration of fatherhood and masculinity in the 21st century that "redefines what it means to be a good father" (Adam Grant).
There are hundreds of books on parenting, and with good reason—becoming a parent is scary, difficult, and life-changing. But when it comes to books about parenting identity, rather than the nuts and bolts of raising children, nearly all are about what it's like to be a mother.
Drawing on research in sociology, economics, philosophy, gender studies, and the author's own experiences, Father Figure sets out to fill that gap. It's an exploration of the psychology of fatherhood from an archetypal perspective as well as a cultural history that challenges familiar assumptions about the origins of so-called traditional parenting roles. What paradoxes and contradictions are inherent in our common understanding of dads? Might it be time to rethink some aspects of fatherhood?
Gender norms are changing, and old economic models are facing disruption. As a result, parenthood and family life are undergoing an existential transformation. And yet, the narratives and images of dads available to us are wholly inadequate for this transition. Victorian and Industrial Age tropes about fathers not only dominate the media, but also contour most people's lived experience. Father Figure offers a badly needed update to our collective understanding of fatherhood—and masculinity in general. It teaches dads how to embrace the joys of fathering while guiding them toward an image of manliness for the modern world.
Jordan Shapiro, PhD, is father to two children and step-father to two more. He lives in Philadelphia with his partner Amanda Steinberg. He teaches in Temple University’s Intellectual Heritage Program. He’s senior fellow for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, and nonresident fellow in the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. His previous book, The New Childhood (2018), received wide critical acclaim and has been published in 11 languages.
Big Blue Marble welcomes Mt. Airyite Doron Taussig and celebrates his new book “What Me Mean by the American Dream.” Joining Doron to explore ideas about meritocracy will be author and professor Jason England.
Doron Taussig invites us to question the American Dream. Did you earn what you have? Did everyone else?
The American Dream is built on the idea that Americans end up roughly where we deserve to be in our working lives based on our efforts and abilities; in other words, the United States is supposed to be a meritocracy. When Americans think and talk about our lives, we grapple with this idea, asking how a person got to where he or she is and whether he or she earned it. In What We Mean by the American Dream, Taussig tries to find out how we answer those questions.
Weaving together interviews with Americans from many walks of life--as well as stories told in the US media about prominent figures from politics, sports, and business--What We Mean by the American Dream investigates how we think about whether an individual deserves an opportunity, job, termination, paycheck, or fortune. Taussig looks into the fabric of American life to explore how various people, including dairy farmers, police officers, dancers, teachers, computer technicians, students, store clerks, the unemployed, homemakers, and even drug dealers got to where they are today and whether they earned it or not.
Taussig's frank assessment of the state of the US workforce and its dreams allows him to truly and meaningfully ask the question that underpins so many of our political debates and personal frustrations: Did you earn it? By doing so, he sheds new light on what we mean by--and how we can deliver on--the American Dream of today.
Doron Taussig is the author of, “What We Mean by the American Dream: Stories We Tell about Meritocracy.” He is a faculty member in Media and Communication Studies at Ursinus College. Before becoming a pointy-headed academic, he was a journalist with the Philadelphia City Paper and the Philadelphia Daily News, and lives in Mt. Airy with his wife Chelsea and his children Sam, Leo, and Hana.
Jason England is Assistant Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also serves on the DEI Committee for the Dean of Humanities. His short fiction has been anthologized, and his essays on race, meritocracy, education, sports, and societal issues have appeared in various publications, including Sports Illustrated, The Root, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He is currently finishing his first novel and a collection of essays.
Doron Taussig
Jason England
When a million bugs come out of the ground at once, children pay attention. Periodical cicadas don't disappoint. Almost every animal in the area fills its stomach. Then after a month the feast and the cacophony suddenly stops.
This book is about one of the oddest insect life cycles on the planet - the periodical or 17-year cicada.
The beautiful photographs and engaging text bring to life every aspect of this insect's life from a unique view of the eggs inside a twig, to its transformation to the noisiest insect around. Author Doug Wechsler, once again, brings the natural world in focus for children.
Doug Wechsler takes his inspiration from the jungles, swamps and seashores of the world as well as from his own backyard. By showing the wonders of nature and its humorous side he hopes to motivate his readers to deepen their interest in their natural surroundings. Doug is a wildlife biologist, a nature photographer, and the author of more than twenty books for children, including Marvels in the Muck: Life in the Salt Marshes and The Hidden Life of a Toad (photographed in the Wissahickon). For 28 years Doug worked at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Now he and his wife Debbie spend the two winters in Ecuador volunteering for the Jocotoco Conservation Foundation.
Philadelphia is thick with American firsts. Some – including the first zoo, first hospital, first public library, first university, first computer—are well known. Others are not and are here to be appreciated: Girl Scout cookies were originally baked by a commercial bakery here, and American Bandstand was born in a West Philadelphia TV studio. This Used to Be Philadelphia goes deep inside the buildings, monuments, and familiar sights of the city to uncover its rich history, layer by layer.
This book will introduce you to the city’s first residents, the Lenni- Lenape; the tireless workers who made this the “Workshop of the World,” and the current residents who love all these stories as told through the spaces they have filled. Learn how buildings from the 1876 World’s Fair, the first to be held in the US, are used today. Appreciate the city’s creative adaptive reuse projects, including a former technical school turned office space with a rooftop bar, and the railroad headquarters that now house artists’ studios.
Take a colorful tour of the city’s bygone days with local sisters Natalie and Tricia Pompilio. You’ll never look at an old building in Philadelphia the same way again.
Natalie Pompilio is an award-winning journalist who left her job at the New Orleans Times-Picayune for a position at the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2002. She’s written for the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the Newark Star-Ledger, and the Philadelphia Daily News. She is also coauthor of More Philadelphia Murals, Walking Philadelphia, and the Stories They Tell.
Tricia Pompilio moved to Philadelphia in 2000. In 2020, Philadelphia Family magazine named her the city’s best portrait photographer. She continually hones her skills by photographing her husband and her three daughters.
Big Blue Marble invites you to imagine alternative paths for post WWII European Jews with novelists Simone Zelitch and Max Gross.
Registration is free but strictly required through Eventbrite
Simone Zelitch's novel "Judenstaat" imagines a world in which a Jewish state is founded not in Palestine but in Germany, where citizens find themselves pulled into the pressures of the Cold War while dealing with trauma and secrets. Max Gross's nove "The Lost Shtetl" imagines a village so remote and isolated that it goes untouched by the Holocaust and the Cold War, until a bitter divorce crashes the town into the 21st century.
Simone Zelitch is the author of five novels, most recently Judenstaat (PM Press 2020), an alternative history about a Jewish State established in Germany after World War Two. Her novels range in subject matter from a medieval peasant revolt, to 1964’s Mississippi Freedom Summer, to re-imaginings of Exodus and Numbers and the Book of Ruth. Her work has been taught in colleges across the country, including at the University of Miami in a class called “Bad Jews”. She teaches at Community College of Philadelphia where she and her students recently survived their first semester online. Find out more about the author and her work at www.simonezelitch.com
Max Gross was born in New York City and grew up in Brooklyn. He is the son of two writers and attended Saint Ann's School and Dartmouth College. Gross lived in Israel for a year after college and worked for the Forward newspaper and the New York Post. He is currently the editor in chief of the Commercial Observer, a weekly real estate publication. He lives in Forest Hills, N.Y. with his wife and son. "The Lost Shtetl" is his first novel.
Big Blue Marble is happy to welcome back Philly authors Janet Mason, with her novel The Unicorn, The Mystery and Louis Greenstein, with his new novel The Song of Life.
Janet Mason, an award-winning creative writer, is the author of THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (Adelaide Books; 2018). Her book Tea Leaves, a memoir of mothers and daughters (Bella Books; 2012) was chosen by the American Library Association for its 2013 Over the Rainbow List. Tea Leaves also received a Goldie Award. Mason is also a teacher, a Unitarian Universalist lay minister, and blogger. “In The Unicorn, The Mystery, we meet a unicorn who tells us the story of the seven tapestries, called “The Hunt of the Unicorn” from the 1500s on display in “the unicorn room” in The Cloister in Manhattan, now part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The tapestries tell the story of what is still called an “unsolved mystery.”
Louis Greenstein is the author of two novels and twelve plays; he has been awarded a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts playwriting fellowship and has edited books on subjects ranging from self-help to Led Zeppelin. He has produced two documentary films, covered professional boxing for The Ring magazine, and written for the Emmy-winning TV show, Rugrats. The Song of Life is a comedy about suffering and forgiveness. When 24-year-old Margaret Holly gets hit on the head with a Hindu scripture known as the Bhagavad Gita, she is propelled on a seven-year spiritual odyssey. During this time, she grieves a heartbreaking loss, forgives those who abused her, masters the practice of meditation, and comes to better understand the nature of the universe. Her journey introduces her to the inscrutabilities of brain science, the promise of Big Data, and—thanks to her charming, reckless cousin Roy—the colorfully brutal world of professional boxing. Elliott Fenwick is a college professor, an expert in predictive analytics, and a neurotic with lagging social skills who embarks on his own quirky odyssey and—despite himself—changes his and Margaret’s lives forever.
Join us as we welcome Mt. Airyite Susan Lindee, professor of History and Sociology of Science at University of Pennsylvania. She’ll be discussing her new book about the history of science and war, published by Harvard University Press this fall. The book explores the history of science and technology in war and explores how human intelligence has been leveraged to produce massive human injury. Modern science and the modern state essentially grew up together in Europe, she shows, which means that evolving relationships between socially sanctioned violence and sophisticated technical expertise are fundamental to human history. Their interrelationship was at the heart of the rise of the sovereign state and the European conquest of much of the rest of the world.
In conversation with Susan will be Alex Wellerstein, Assistant Professor and Director of Science and Technology Studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He is the author “Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States,” forthcoming from University of Chicago press, 2021.
Buy the book
Join author Irene Levy Baker to celebrate the 2nd edition of her book 100 Things to Do in Philadelphia Before You Die. Explore secrets even long-time Philadelphians don’t know, plan a stay-cation, and start your list of safe places to visit while social distancing!
The event will take place on Zoom and registration in advance is required. Please use the ticket link above to register, or visit: https://forms.gle/4oj8LFHEBCJxNaGcA. Book can be purchased here.
The new second edition of Baker’s book includes many more things to do, see, and eat in the region, with new itineraries and tips and updates to every page. It has everything from the Wharton Esherick Museum, a real gem in Malvern, to a Rodeo, that’s in New Jersey but will make you feel like you’re in the wild west and from a place to take a helicopter ride to a museum where you can study birds in flight.
Irene Levy Baker is author of two Philly-centric books, 100 Things to Do in Philadelphia Before You Die (first and second editions) and Unique Eats and Eateries of Philadelphia, and owner of Spotlight Public Relations, a firm specializing in restaurants and hospitality. Prior to that she spent many years working at the Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau. For more information about Philadelphia, follow: @100ThingsToDoInPhiladelphia on Facebook and Instagram. @100Philly on Twitter.
Due to COVID-19 we are postponing all events through at least late April. Stay in touch, and we’ll let you know when the smart people talking about the cool stuff resumes again.
What if this were the story of a post WWII Jewish state:
In 1948, a Jewish State was carved out of Germany as a direct act of retribution for the Holocaust. In 1988, archivist Judit Klemmer pieces together film footage to mark her country’s 40th anniversary, from its liberation by Soviet troops to its current role as a center for global capital, a “bridge between east and west.”
Simone Zelitch's "Judenstaat" establishes this alternate history, and then unfolds a mystery about what a society chooses to know and what it wishes to forget. The reading will be followed by a discussion of the role of alternate histories in social change. As we work for the future, what can we learn by imagining how our pasts might have been?
Read Simone’s essay on how Judenstaat is Orwell fan fiction
“Judenstaat uses the technique of alternate history to offer biting commentary on modern Israel, on the post–Cold War era in which we live, and on religion and nationhood.”
—Cory Doctorow, co-editor of Boing Boing and author of Little Brother
Simone Zelitch has written and published historical fiction for twenty-five years, including The Confession of Jack Straw (set in 14th Century England), Moses in Sinai (set in ancient Egypt) and Louisa (set in Hungary and Palestine, prior to the second world war), and Waveland (Mississippi 1964). Her work has also appeared in The Lost Tribe Anthology and has been featured in the NPR broadcast and the published anthology Hanukah Lights. Recent honors include A 2010 National Endowment for the Arts grant in Fiction, and residences at the Edward Albee Barn and Yaddo. She is faculty in the English Department at Community College of Philadelphia. Her fifth novel, Judenstaat, was published in hardcover by Tor Books in 2016.
Beautiful. The Promise of the Land will reopen the wonder of Passover, adding a deep layer of connection to the planet making the old rituals new for the 21st century.
—Bill McKibben, Co-founder of 350.org, author of Falter: Has the Human Game begun to Play Itself Out?
For the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, Rabbi Bernstein has created a new haggadah that connects the Passover story to the understanding that our freedom and our lives are dependent upon the planet's well-being. "The Promise of the Land" builds a seamless connection between the Seder as we know it and the Seder as a window into the ecology of our lives.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE PROMISE OF THE LAND
“A must for every Jewish household. The Promise of the Land takes us on a journey from the narrowness of Egypt to the spaciousness of Gaia, teaching us the true meaning of freedom.”
─ Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Author, Surrendered─The Sacred Art
“Original and fascinating. . . A knowledgeable and heartfelt piece of work. Includes traditional liturgy with beautiful translations and wide-ranging commentary.”
─ Rabbi Jill Hammer, Author, Jewish Book of Days, A Companion for all Seasons
Unique, insightful, mind-liberating!
—Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Author of the original Freedom Seder (1969), Founder and Director, The Shalom Center
“Glorious, earthy, provocative, profound, moving and relevant.”
─ Yoni Stadlin, Founding Director, Eden Village Camp
“One of the most beautiful haggadot I have ever seen - both in words and illustrations. Weaves a deep ecological consciousness back into this sacred ritual.”
─ Mary Evelyn Tucker, Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology
Ellen Bernstein has given the Jewish world a precious gift by reweaving the story of our peoples’ liberation from Egypt back into Judaism’s cosmic story of creation. This haggadah will engage and delight everyone: young and old, secular and religious, the knowledgeable and the new-comer.
—Rabbi David Ingber, Founder, Senior Rabbi, Romemu, NYC
Dubbed the birth-mother of the Jewish environmental movement, Rabbi Ellen Bernstein founded Shomrei Adamah, Keepers of the Earth, the first national. Jewish environmental organization in 1988. She graduated one of the country’s first Environmental Studies programs at U.C. Berkeley; co-directed Turtle River, a wilderness river company; helped pioneer the field of religion and ecology; and authored numerous articles and books on Judaism, Bible and ecology. Today she is the rabbi at Hampshire College and continues to write, teach and consult on the ecological dimensions of Judaism and the Hebrew Bible.
Linda Backiel lives in Puerto Rico, where she practices criminal defense and appellate law. She lived in Philadelphia during the 1970s and ‘80s. She worked with Women in Transition, and as a teacher at Parkway Program, Community Women’s Education Program, and Rutgers and Community College Weekend Education programs. She was also a lawyer at Kairys & Rudovsky and at the Defender Association. During those years she published her poetry in Off Our Backs, 13 Moons and other feminist publications. Since moving to Puerto Rico, she has turned to narrative, studying with Sandra Cisneros at the Macondo writer’s community, with Magda Bogin and Álvaro Enrigue at Under the Volcano in Tepoztlán, Mexico, and with Mayra Santos Febres in Puerto Rico. Her most recent publications in English have been in Monthly Review (poetry and essays) and in Spanish in Borealis (fiction).
Known as America’s most historic neighborhood, the Germantown section of Philadelphia (established in 1683) has distinguished itself by using public history initiatives to forge community. Progressive programs about ethnic history, postwar urban planning, and civil rights have helped make historic preservation and public history meaningful. The Battles of Germantown considers what these efforts can tell us about public history’s practice and purpose in the United States.
Author David Young, a neighborhood resident who worked at Germantown historic sites for decades, uses his practitioner’s perspective to give examples of what he calls “effective public history.” The Battles of Germantown shows how the region celebrated “Negro Achievement Week” in 1928 and, for example, how social history research proved that the neighborhood’s Johnson House was a station on the Underground Railroad. These encounters have useful implications for addressing questions of race, history, and memory, as well as issues of urban planning and economic revitalization.
Germantown’s historic sites use public history and provide leadership to motivate residents in an area challenged by job loss, population change, and institutional inertia. The Battles of Germantown illustrates how understanding and engaging with the past can benefit communities today.
In You Throw Like a Girl, former Syracuse University quarterback and NFL veteran Don McPherson examines how the narrow definition of masculinity adversely impacts women and creates many “blind spots” that hinder the healthy development of men. Dissecting the strict set of beliefs and behaviors that underpin our understanding of masculinity, he contends that we don’t raise boys to be men, we raise them not to be women.
Using examples from his own life, including his storied football career, McPherson passionately argues that viewing violence against women as a “women’s issue” not just ignores men’s culpability but conflates the toxicity of men’s violence with being male. In You Throw Like a Girl, McPherson leads us beyond the blind spots and toward solutions, analyzing how we can engage men in a sustained dialogue, with a new set of terms that are aspirational and more accurately representative of the emotional wholeness of men.
Set against the backdrop of 1976 Philadelphia, The Year of the Return follows the path of two families, the Jewish Silks and African American Johnsons, as they are first united by marriage and then by grief, turmoil, and the difficult task of trying to live in an America failing to live up to its ideals.
Nate will be in conversation with author and Mt. Airyite Lori Tharps, whose work also explores issues of multicultural/multiracial families.
Join us for the evening of great writing and inspired conversation about family and race.
Set against the backdrop of 1976 Philadelphia, The Year of the Return follows the path of two families, the Jewish Silks and African American Johnsons, as they are first united by marriage and then by grief, turmoil, and the difficult task of trying to live in an America failing to live up to its ideals.
Paul Silk and Charlene Johnson are journalists whose love for each other and commitment to social justice were formed in the peace movements of the 1960s. But the idealism of that era leads to the urban deterioration of the 1970s. Mayor Frank Rizzo's Philadelphia is a place of crime, white flight, and class resentment that is inhospitable to their interracial marriage, forcing them to move away. But when Charlene dies of cancer, Paul returns.
Unmoored and unable to let go of Charlene, he wades back into the lives of the two families, with the hope of helping Charlene's younger brother Monte, once a prodigy and now a troubled veteran of the Vietnam War. Their explosive reunion leads to the baring of personal revelations and dangerous secrets.
The Year of the Return is a vivid story of families trying to reconnect with and support each other through trauma and loss, and a meditation on the possibility of moving on to a better future.
“Emotionally honest, authentically rendered. The Year of the Return deftly shifts narratives to tell the intertwined stories of the Johnsons and the Silks, the interracial marriage that inextricably binds them, the loss that shatters them. Nathaniel Popkin has crafted a novel that is both haunting and graceful with a soulfulness that lingers.
—Diane McKinney-Whetstone, author of Lazaretto
A harrowing collection of sixty narratives—covering over fifty years of shootings in America—written by those most directly affected by school shootings: the survivors.
“If I Don’t Make It, I Love You,” a text sent from inside a war zone. A text meant for Stacy Crescitelli, whose 15-year-old daughter, Sarah, was hiding in a closet fearing for her life in Parkland, Florida, in February of 2018, while a gunman sprayed her school with bullets, killing her friends, teachers, and coaches. This scene has become too familiar. We see the images, the children with trauma on their faces leaving their school in ropes, connected to one another with hands on shoulders, shaking, crying, and screaming. We mourn the dead. We bury children. We demand change. But we are met with inaction. So, we move forward, sadder and more jaded. But what about those who cannot move on?
These are their stories.
If I Don’t Make It, I Love You collects more than sixty narratives from school shooting survivors, family members, and community leaders covering fifty years of shootings in America, from the 1966 UT-Austin Tower shooting through May 2018’s Santa Fe shooting.
Nikki Harmon, an alumna of The Philadelphia High School for Girls, Wesleyan University and Temple University, started her professional life as a filmmaker, television producer and an educator.
Writing began as a personal challenge, specifically, the NaNoWriMo write 50,000 words in a month challenge. She managed to complete the challenge … twice! She does not write full-time, and has not pursued an agent or a publisher but decided to publish the books herself under the name Mt. Airy Girl Press. With the help and encouragement of friends, she has been able to finish the novels and get them out in to the world. Neither Here Nor There is her second novel.
"Neither Here Nor There" tells the story of Kim, a typical rebellious black gay nerd biding her time in college until she can get to her dream job at NASA. Returning home from work-study in the biology lab one day, Kim experiences a strange kind of double vision. She can somehow see her “choices” before she makes them. Just as she begins to investigate her new skill, Kim is kidnapped. Held in a remote farmhouse, she discovers that her abilities are no accident but that she has been an unwitting subject of an experiment by the professor she is working for at the lab. Confused and overwhelmed, she sets off on a mission to save the world from those who seek to control it for themselves.
Elise Seyfried returns to Big Blue Marble with her newest essay collection, "In Discovery: Thoughts on an Unfolding Life."
“Seyfried has an inexorable skillfulness for seeing the miracle within the mundane. The real gift in reading In Discovery allows a reader to open up a new package with every chapter. The author’s insights into her daily life disclose the connecting points between all of us, and how the God of the universe really does care for each of us. I appreciated how the topics in the book unfold in the way our lives do for us—one choice tidbit at a time, and an opportunity to learn and grow from each new insight. Parents and grandparents will especially treasure her playful, humorous, and always heartfelt style as her latest submission is simply a joy to read.”
--Daniel D. Maurer, award-winning author and former ELCA pastor
Saint Paul, Minnesota
The first decades of the AIDs crisis tore through Gay communities, robbing all of us of musicians, actors, artists, and writers. Some voices - already then famous - we have culturally mourned. But there were so many others just rising into their art.
Poet Karl Tierney was just establishing his career when he died in 1995, and his work has remained unpublished as a book until this year. Tierney's literary executor, Philadelphian Jim Cory, has gathered Tierney's work so that we may all re-discover it.
Jim Cory
At Big Blue Marble, Jim will be sharing Karl's poems and discussing his life and legacy. He'll be introduced by poet and LGBT literary critic Janet Mason. Following the reading there will be a Q&A.
“Reading Karl Tierney’s collection is like entering a portal into San Francisco in the ’80s and ’90s, a time when it was still dirty and sexy and alive, even as men across the city were dying. With sharp intimacy, Tierney’s poems had me laughing and crying in recognition for all that we lost. And I’m deeply grateful to the editor and publisher for rescuing his work from the dustbins of history. This is vital reading.” - ALYSIA ABBOTT, author of FAIRYLAND
Karl Tierney was born in Westfield, Massachusetts, in 1956 and grew up in Connecticut and Louisiana. He received a Bachelor’s Degree in English from Emory University in 1980 and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas in 1983. That same year, he moved to San Francisco where he dedicated himself to poetry. He was twice a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award, a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and a 1992 fellow at Yaddo. Though unpublished in book form during his lifetime, his poems appeared in many of the best literary magazines of the period, including Berkeley Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, and Exquisite Corpse. He published more than 50 poems in magazines and anthologies before his death. In December of 1994 he became sick with AIDS and took his own life in October of 1995. He was 39 years old.
ABOUT THE EDITOR: Jim Cory’s most recent publications are Wipers Float In The Neck Of The Reservoir (The Moron Channel, 2018) and 25 Short Poems (Moonstone Press, 2016). He has edited poetry selections by contemporary American poets including James Broughton (Packing Up for Paradise, Black Sparrow Press, 1998) and Jonathan Williams (Jubilant Thicket, Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Poems have appeared recently in Apiary, unarmed journal, Bedfellows, Cape Cod Poetry Journal, Capsule, Fell Swoop, Painted Bride Quarterly, Skidrow Penthouse, Trinity Review, Have Your Chill (Australia), and Whirlwind. Recent essays have appeared in Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, New Haven Review, and Chelsea Station. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Pennsylvania Arts Council, Yaddo, and The MacDowell Colony. He lives in Philadelphia.
