Presenter: Laura Jiménez
Time: December 1st, 7:00pm, via Zoom

Dr. Laura Jiménez, Department Chair for Language and Literacy Education at Boston University, studies literature and literacy through a social justice lens. The current renaissance of picture books and graphic novels written by and about marginalized communities provides new ways to engage with history. Jiménez describes how contemporary authors and illustrators use visual literature to center narratives previously unseen in mainstream publishing.

To register for this online talk, click here.

Presenters: Diana Whitney, Shanta Lee Gander, Christal Brown
Time: April 6, 7:00pm
Place: Brooks Memorial Library (in person)

Poets and writers Diana Whitney and Shanta Lee Gander join Christal Brown, associate professor of Dance at Middlebury College, in a conversation that explores how girlhood and womanhood in America are manifested across the boundaries of poetry, dance, and lived experience.

Diana Whitney’s edited work “You Don’t Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves” ranges across intersectional, intergenerational, and gender-fluid voices.

In “GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues” Shanta Lee Gander navigates between formal and vernacular styles to examine butterflies and female sexuality, vulnerability, classical Greek myths, and more.

Christal Brown’s original dance piece “The Opulence of Integrity” was inspired by the public life and inner searching of Muhammad Ali, boxing’s outspoken superstar.

(The letterhead PDF version of the following letter is available here.)

Back when the internet became omnipresent, many thought the age of books — and by definition, libraries — was over. Forbes even dared to hypothesize that public libraries were unnecessary. Why pay taxes to keep a bricks-and-mortar library going? they reasoned. Why not privatize? Why not buy books at Amazon, read them at Starbucks and watch movie choices on Netflix?

The article elicited so much outrage that Forbes immediately removed it from its website. We could have told them. People are passionate about their libraries. Last year at this time, Brooks was so full it was hard to book a meeting space. Downstairs, you could browse the shelves, read magazines, play chess, check your email, listen to a lecture, make photocopies, have Jeanne help you with research, have Matt help you with a tech problem, peruse the latest display put together by Courtney, fill out a job application, trade book recommendations with Ellen, Klara, Lorena, and Sarah, search your family’s ancestry or exchange gossip with a friend while getting checked out. Free yoga classes, writers’ workshops, Scrabble games and serious lectures competed for space. The Children’s Room was often filled with children playing, dancing, listening to stories with Lindsay or making art and checking in with their pals Jeni, John, Judy and Julia. Chloe enriched and honored the teen experience with her interactions in the Spicy Lime. You could take out snowshoes in the winter and enjoy hours of warmth catching up on the latest magazines processed by Maria. Jenn could get the most esoteric texts through interlibrary loan, and Leslie and Marybeth kept the new books flowing. Brooks was truly the center of our community.

Continue Reading