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January 9, 2009:
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January 30, 2009:
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Twin Cities Book
Festival

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2008 Twin Cities Book Festival Events

As always, we’re proud to introduce Twin Cities readers to innovative, interesting, and varied authors and their books. This year’s lineup includes:

NPR's "Voice of Books" ALAN CHEUSE    •    Mexican author ANA CLAVEL

comics legend JAIME HERNANDEZ    •    acclaimed novelist VALERIE MARTIN

Allen Ginsberg biographer BILL MORGAN    •    Icelandic author BRAGI ÓLAFSSON

esteemed poet NATHANIEL TARN    •    debut novelist JESS WINFIELD

PLUS:

• Twin Cities Book Launch featuring ROBERT BLY and ROBERT HEDIN

• MORNING MIXER with local authors

• PANEL DISCUSSION on Juggling Life and Literature

• all-day readings in the CHILDREN'S STORYTELLING CIRCLE—
with FREE BOOKS for all children who attend!

Details about each featured event are listed below. ASL interpretation will be available for the starred events in the schedule below.

Book sales for our featured authors are provided onsite by Magers & Quinn Booksellers, and booksignings will take place after each event.

2008 GUEST AUTHORS

With the ear of a poet and the eye of a historian, famed book commentator Alan Cheuse has crafted a masterwork of American historical fiction in his latest novel, To Catch the Lightning. Lyrical and impressively researched, the book tells the story of photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952) and his struggle to complete “The North American Indian,” his epic project of photographing all the native tribes of the western United States. This is a saga about the American spirit, sure to engage and enlighten.

Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio's longtime "voice of books," is the author of four novels, three collections of short fiction, an essay collection (Listening to the Page) and the memoir Fall Out of Heaven. As a book commentator, Cheuse is a regular contributor to National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and many other places. He has edited many collections of and about writing, including Seeing Ourselves and Writers Workshop in a Book, and he teaches in the Writing Program at George Mason University and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.

A highly acclaimed Mexico City novelist makes her Twin Cities debut! At this special bilingual event, Ana Clavel and her U.S. translator Jay Miskowiec will read from and discuss her newest work to appear in English, Shipwrecked Body (Aliform Publishing)—a subversive novel in which the main character, Antonia, wakes up one day in the body of a man. Able now to enter the taboo space of the men's room, “Anton” discovers the power and eroticism of that most mysterious receptacle: the urinal. Inspired by figures as diverse as Virginia Woolf, Marcel Duchamp, Hélène Cixous, and W.G. Sebald, this book demonstrates that Ana Clavel is a writer to watch.

Ana Clavel has been noted by Publishers Weekly as "part of Mexico's new literary pack" and touted by La Jornada Semanal as "one of the best fiction writers born in the ’60s." She is the author of three collections of short stories and three novels, two of which have been translated into English and published by Aliform. Clavel's many awards for her writing include the Premio Internacional Juan Rulfo, a Silver Medal from the Société Académique Arts-Sciences-Lettres, and fellowships from the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA) and the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico.

Jay Miskowiec is the director and translation editor of Aliform Publishing. After studying Spanish and English at the University of Minnesota, he received his MA and Ph.D. from the City University of New York, where translator Gregory Rabassa served as his dissertation supervisor. Miskowiec received a grant from FONCA to translate Shipwrecked Body and recently was awarded a National Literary Translation Grant by Colombia's Ministerio de Cultura.

Perhaps Alan Moore says it best: Jaime Hernandez is “one of the twentieth century's most significant comic creators at the peak of his form, with every line a wedding of classicism and cool.” Indeed, we are honored to have Hernandez, the influential co-creator of the groundbreaking independent series Love and Rockets and a key artist in elevating the medium of comics to new critical heights, as our guest. His visit celebrates the release of Love and Rockets: New Stories #1 (Fantagraphics Books), which reboots the ongoing “Love and Rockets” comic as an annual graphic novel. At this special Twin Cities Book Festival event, Hernandez will be interviewed live on-stage by local cartoonist ZAK SALLY—a conversation sure to be packed with insights and revelations about where comics have been and where they’re going.

Jaime Hernandez enjoyed a pleasant childhood in Oxnard, California, and along with his four siblings was raised reading comics by a mother who had been an avid fan; when the Los Angeles punk rock scene began to thrive, an anarchistic aesthetic was added to the mix. Mostly self-taught, Jaime assimilated these influences, and in his hands the much-hyped and often misunderstood punk netherworld became a real place populated with human beings rather than stereotypes. Such were the humble beginnings of Love & Rockets, the internationally acclaimed series Jaime created with his brother, Gilbert, in 1981. Over 25 years later, Love & Rockets has been translated into many languages, won numerous awards for excellence, and is one of the defining works of comic book history. Indeed, Jaime’s ongoing “Love and Rockets” storyline Locas—which follows a group of Latina characters from Southern California—is renowned for its graceful portrayal of realistic characters and its exquisite black and white art. Locas was collected into a 700-page hardcover graphic novel in 2004, and can also be found in seven Love and Rockets paperback collections issued last year, beginning with Maggie the Mechanic and ending with Amor Y Cohetes. Jaime resides in Pasadena, California, with his wife and daughter.

Zak Sally, a native of Duluth, Minnesota, is currently Visiting Artist in the Comic Art Program at MCAD. Sally served as bassist in the famed minimalist rock band Low for ten years, leaving the band in 2005. Since then he has focused on drawing and publishing comics; his small press La Mano has published books by John Porcellino, William Schaff, and Nate Denver, as well as his own critically acclaimed title Recidivist. Recently, Fantagraphics has released two issues of Sally’s surreal comic Sammy the Mouse as part of their premier “Ignatz” line, and will publish a volume of his selected comics next year.

One of America’s finest writers of literary fiction, Valerie Martin follows the Orange Prize-winning novel Property with Trespass, newly released in paperback from Vintage Books. The politically charged story of two families—suspicious, territorial, naïve in their confidence that they are free of the past—Trespass is a bracing yet tender novel for the 21st century. The Chicago Tribune once wrote “An enrapturing and ruthless storyteller, Valerie Martin possesses a predator’s ability to mesmerize her prey.” We couldn’t agree more—come get captured!

Valerie Martin is the author of three collections of short fiction, most recently The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories, and eight novels, including the bestselling Mary Reilly, which tells the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story from the viewpoint of a servant in the house (later made into a film with Julia Roberts and John Malkovich) and Property, a chilling novel of racial and sexual transgressions which beat out books by Zadie Smith and Carol Shields to win the prestigious Orange Prize. She is also the author of the nonfiction work Salvation: Scenes from the Life of St. Francis. Having lived in Italy for several years until recently, she currently resides in upstate New York.

Allen Ginsberg, one of the most celebrated and widely read poets in American history, was also a prolific letter-writer who corresponded with the most interesting and original artists, writers, and public figures of his time. In this special presentation accompanied by numerous photographs, Ginsberg’s literary archivist Bill Morgan will offer a comprehensive look at the poet’s life as seen through the missives that make up his newly released volume The Letters of Allen Ginsberg (Da Capo Press). Addressed to everyone from William S. Burroughs to William Jefferson Clinton, Ginsberg’s correspondence, with all its “rough horny communist un-American goofy edges,” tells the intimate story of a lifetime lived for the imagination.

Bill Morgan was Allen Ginsberg’s personal archivist and bibliographer from the early 1980s until the author’s death in 1997. Over the two decades of their professional relationship, Morgan became quite close to Ginsberg, and has written extensively on the Beat Generation and its key figures. He is the author of the 2005 biography I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg and the editor of numerous Ginsberg-related works, including Deliberate Prose, a volume of the poet’s selected essays; The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice, Ginsberg’s early journals; and Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression. He lives in New York City.

Join us as Icelandic author Bragi Ólafsson rocks the house! In The Pets, his first novel to be translated into English, Olafsson gives us a hilarious novel of cowardice, comeuppance, and assumed identity—not to mention whose main character is hiding under a bed! Influenced as much by filmmakers like Tati and David Lynch as by literary forebears from Gogol to Harold Pinter, Olafsson’s writing has been taking Europe by storm, but the storm comes to Minnesota this October!

Bragi Ólafsson played bass guitar for The Sugarcubes, the internationally renowned avant-garde pop group that featured Björk as lead vocalist. He is the author of several books of poetry and short stories, and four novels, including Time Off, nominated for the Icelandic Literature Prize, and Party Games, for which he received the DV Cultural Prize in 2004. His most recent novel, The Ambassador, received the Icelandic Bookseller’s Award as best novel of the year. Bragi is also one of the founders of the book and record publishing company smekkleysa (Bad Taste), and has translated Paul Auster’s City of Glass into Icelandic.

Reviewing Nathaniel Tarn’s Selected Poems 1950-2000, Brenda Hillman called it “a prophetic volume, a handbook for the coming decade.” The release of this acclaimed poet’s latest volume bears this out—Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers (New Directions) dives deep into the physical, spiritual, and political challenges of our time. Join us for a riveting reading with this legendary figure in global letters—one whose poetry weaves mythology and philosophy, nature and science, and anguish and love into a moving exploration of what it means to be human.

Nathaniel Tarn was born in Paris and educated at Cambridge, the Sorbonne, and the University of Chicago; he emigrated to the United States in 1970, and currently lives just outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. Although he is perhaps best known as a poet and essayist, he is also an internationally respected anthropologist (with a particular interest in Maya and Buddhist studies), as well as a translator of the highest order (see his versions of Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu and Stelae by Victor Segalen). In the 1960s he edited Britain’s legendary Cape Editions, publishing a series of seminal modern works. His other recent books include The Embattled Lyric: Essays and Conversations in Poetics and Anthropology and Avia, a book-length poem about international air combat, 1939-1945. Tarn celebrates his 80th birthday this year by touring the world, reading poetry.

“Bawdy puns, a clever construction, and a deliciously irreverent sense of humor make this debut novel irresistible”—so says Booklist about Jess Winfield’s My Name is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare, and the sentiment has been echoed in reviews across the country. Winfield deftly portrays the story of two Wills intertwined across the centuries—one a graduate student struggling to write a thesis on Shakespeare and the other the Bard himself—both comically enmeshed in the political upheavals of their day. You’ll be laughing in the aisles as Winfield distills his lifelong love of Shakespeare into the very essence of contemporary humor.

Jess Winfield is the co-creator of the Reduced Shakespeare Company and their hit show The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), and has won two Emmy Awards as a writer and executive producer for Disney Television Animation. Also the author of What Would Shakespeare Do? Personal Advice from the Bard, he blogs about food at L.A. Food Crazy (lafoodcrazy.blogspot.com), has been known to perform Shakespeare in the voice of Bullwinkle the moose, and lives in Hollywood, California.

Join us for the Twin Cities Book Launch of The Dream We Carry: Selected and Last Poems of Olav H. Hauge, newly published by Copper Canyon Press. The book’s translators, acclaimed Minnesota poets Robert Bly and Robert Hedin, will give a joint poetry reading from this new volume of Norwegian translations. Perhaps they’ll also dip into their award-winning 2001 translation, The Roads Have Come to an End Now: Selected and Last Poems of Rolf Jacobsen, also published by Copper Canyon Press. Hauge and Jacobsen are two of Norway’s greatest twentieth century poets—this window into their work is not to be missed!

Robert Bly was born in Madison, Minnesota, and educated at St. Olaf College, Harvard, and the University of Iowa. One of the most influential poets, translators, editors, and publishers of his generation, he is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, including Silence in the Snowy Fields, The Light Around the Body, Eating the Honey of Words, and The Night Abraham Called to the Stars. He has also published three bestselling books of cultural commentary—Iron John, The Sibling Society, and The Maiden Kind—as well as numerous volumes of translations, including The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations. His many honors and awards include Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Bush Foundation fellowships, the 1968 National Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Minnesota Book Award, the Minnesota Humanities Prize for Literature, and the 2000 McKnight Distinguished Artist Award. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he was the first recipient of the A. P. Anderson Award, in recognition of literary excellence spanning more than forty years. In 2008, he was named Minnesota’s first Poet Laureate.

Robert Hedin was born in Red Wing, Minnesota, and holds degrees from Luther College and the University of Alaska. He is the author, translator, and editor of twenty volumes of poetry and prose, including The Old Liberators: New and Selected Poems and Translations. Awards for his work include three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Minnesota Book Awards, a Bush Foundation Fellowship, a McKnight Foundation Fellowship, Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship, and the Loft Poetry of Distinction Award. In 1998, he was presented with the Arts Leadership Award from the Minnesota State Arts Board for his writing and contributions to the arts in the state. He has taught at many colleges and universities throughout the country and, in 2001-2002, was named Edelstein-Keller Minnesota Writer of Distinction at the University of Minnesota. He is co-founder and current director of the Anderson Center and also co-edits Great River Review.

The writing life can be challenging: often people must craft their words (and promote the results) during the down times and in-between spaces of their lives. At this cross-disciplinary panel discussion, authors with newly published books will discuss how their careers and real-world responsibilities played a role, whether as stumbling block or stepping stone, in their road to publication. Panelists include novelist Elizabeth Oness, travel writer Rolf Potts, art historian Olga Viso, poet and artist Marjorie Welish, and memoir author Frank Wilderson; moderated by poet Margaret Hasse.

Margaret Hasse has just published her third volume of poetry, Milk and Tides (Nodin Press). Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, and she has been the recipient of several literary awards, including a Loft-McKnight Poetry Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. For many years, Hasse was involved as a teaching poet with programs such as Arts & Corrections, COMPAS Writers in the Schools, and The Loft; she now works as an independent consultant to arts, education, and community non-profit organizations. Her previous books are Stars Above, Stars Below (New Rivers Press, 1984) and In a Sheep’s Eye, Darling (Milkweed Editions, 1993). She lives in Saint Paul with her husband and two sons.

Elizabeth Oness is the author of the newly released novel Twelve Rivers of the Body (Gival Press), which lyrically evokes downtown Washington, DC in the 1980s, as the city limped from one crisis to another—crack addiction, AIDS, a crumbling infrastructure. Her previous books include the 2004 novel Departures (Berkley), and a collection of short stories, Articles of Faith, which won the 2000 Iowa Short Fiction Prize and was published by the University of Iowa Press. Oness’s stories have appeared in many literary magazines, and have received an O. Henry Prize and a Nelson Algren Award. She directs marketing and development for Sutton Hoo Press, a literary fine press based in Winona, Minnesota, where she lives on a farm with her husband and their son.

Rolf Potts has reported from more than fifty countries for the likes of National Geographic, the New York Times Magazine, Outside, The Nation, The Believer, and National Public Radio. A steadfast promoter of independent travel, his book on the subject, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel (Random House, 2003), has been through eight printings and translated into several foreign languages. His second book, Marco Polo Didn’t Go There: Stories and Revelations From One Year as a Postmodern Travel Writer (Travelers’ Tales), has just been released this fall. Potts’s essays have appeared in over twenty literary anthologies, and fifteen of his works have been short-listed for The Best American Travel Writing series, including “Storming ‘The Beach,’” which Bill Bryson chose as a main selection in 2000, and “Tantric Sex for Dilettantes,” which Tim Cahill selected in 2006. He has won multiple awards for his writing and has been cited as a travel expert by publications around the world, from TIME Asia to the Russian edition of Newsweek. Though he rarely stays in one place for more than a few weeks or months, Potts feels somewhat at home in Bangkok, Cairo, Pusan, New Orleans, and north-central Kansas, where he keeps a small farmhouse on thirty acres.

Olga Viso is the author of the new book Unseen Mendieta (Prestel). She is the Director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and a distinguished art historian and museum professional who has been active in the field of art since 1989 as a curator, author, and museum administrator. She was previously the director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., where she also served as a curator of contemporary art since 1995. In that capacity she first came to the work of the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, whose performance art, “earth-body” sculptures, and photographic and video work deal with political and feminist issues. Viso has devoted a significant part of her career and curatorial research to the contemporary art of Latin America, and has published three major artist monographs, on the Cuban-American painter Carlos Alfonzo (1998), the Spanish sculptor Juan Muñoz (2001), and a previous book on Mendieta (2004).

Marjorie Welish is an acclaimed poet, artist, and critic. Her most recent volume of poetry is Isle of the Signatories, published earlier this year by Coffee House Press; a limited edition artists’ book collaboration with James Siena, Oaths? Questions?, is forthcoming later this year from Granary Books. As an artist she has had recent solo shows at Baumgartner Gallery and at Bjorn Ressle, and her writing on art has appeared in Art in America, Art News, Bomb, the Partisan Review, and other places. A collection of her art criticism entitled Signifying Art: Essays on Art after 1960 came out in 1999 from Cambridge University Press. Welish lives in New York City and teaches in the M.F.A. Writing Program at Columbia University as well as in the Graduate Fine Arts/Art History program at the Pratt Institute; she has also frequently taught poetry at Brown University and was a Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University in 2005.

Frank B. Wilderson, III is the author of the new book Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (South End Press), which contains a stunning account of Wilderson’s childhood in the Twin Cities, where his family moved in 1962 and became the first Black homeowners in Kenwood, and moves on to discuss the author’s experience as an expatriate writer and activist in apartheid-era South Africa. With Incognegro, Wilderson topples common-sense notions of how racial justice is defined. Wilderson is also the author of Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms (forthcoming from Duke University Press) and the director of Reparations. . . Now, a film in progress. He has received numerous prizes for his writing, including a Loft-McKnight Award and the Maya Angelou Award. He teaches African American studies in the Drama Department at the University of California, Irvine.

Each year, Minnesota writers publish great books with out-of-state presses who aren't able to exhibit at the Festival. We're celebrating some of these new releases with a “morning mixer”—a chance for readers to meet and greet the authors! Books will be available for purchase and the authors will be happy to sign them. Authors appearing will include:

Charles Baxter, The Soul Thief (Pantheon Books)
H. M. Bouwman, The Remarkable & Very True Story of Lucy & Snowcap
      (Marshall Cavendish)
Cass Dalglish, Humming the Blues (Calyx Books)
Ellen Hart, The Mortal Groove (St. Martin's/Minotaur)
Geoff Herbach, The Miracle Letters of T. Rimberg (Three Rivers Press)
Jeff Hertzberg, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day (St. Martin's Press)
Pamela Carter Joern, The Plain Sense of Things (Bison Books)
Patrick Jones, Chasing Tail Lights (Walker and Co.)
Laurie Lindeen, Petal Pusher (Washington Square Press)
George Rabasa, The Wonder Singer (Unbridled Books)
David Schwartz, Superpowers (Three Rivers Press)
Warren Woessner, Clear all the Rest of the Way (Backwaters Press)

Joining these terrific writers will be plenty of locally published authors as well. Drop by, say hello, and get the Festival off to a great start!

Children's book authors and other gifted storytellers will tell tales from 10:30 AM to 3:30 PM. Drop by anytime and sit for a spell—plus, visitors to the Storytelling Circle are welcome to take home FREE BOOKS! Generously provided by General Mills, these giveaways will include special paperback copies of:

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
      by Judith Viorst (ages 5-9)—an enduring picture book classic.
Salt in his Shoes: Michael Jordan in Pursuit of a Dream
      by Deloris Jordan (all ages)—inspirational tale of the basketball legend,
       written by his mom!
Rosie's Walk / El Paseo de Rosie
      by Pat Hutchins (ages 3-6)—a bilingual edition of this ALA Notable Book.
Sylvester and the Magic Pebble
      by William Steig (ages 4-8)—selected as one of the 100 Best Books of the
      Century by the National Education Association.

And of course, more kids books can be found in our Used Book Sale area—all at amazingly low prices!

Select authors appearing at the Storytelling Circle include:

Heather Bouwman reading The Remarkable & Very True Story of Lucy & Snowcap (10:30am to 11:00am)
Kathy-jo Wargin reading I Spy with My Little Eye: Minnesota (11:00am to 11:30am)
Susan Marie Swanson reading The House in the Night (11:30am to 12:00am)
Diane Hovey reading Princess Sophia's Gifts (12:00pm to 12:30pm)
Marion Robinson reading Polly Pig and Sweetie Find a Home (12:30pm to 1:00pm)
Joanne A. Reisberg reading Zachary Zormer Shape Transformer (1:00pm to 1:30pm)

Books will be available for purchase and the authors will be happy to sign them!

Also, children of all ages (and adults, too!) are invited to swing by the Storytelling Circle for

Book Arts Activities with MCBA

Make a book you can wear! Join Minnesota Center for Book Arts to learn how to transform paper and string into a miniature book necklace. You'll learn a simple pamphlet stitch technique to bind your mini-book. All supplies included.

To go to the Exhibitor Listing & Specials page, click here.

To go to the Author Signings page, click here.

To return to the main Twin Cities Book Festival page, click here.