Into California....When the Desert Blooms: Literary Bounty in our Driest Lands
May 13, 2010 Riverside Art Museum.
Susan Straight, Ruth Nolan, Juan Felipe Herrera, Malcolm Margolin
A reading and panel discussion focused on California's Inland Empire and Mojave Desert. Sponsored by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Co-sponsors: Heyday Books and the Inlandia Institute.
Heyday Books founder and No Place for a Puritan contributors at Riverside Art Museum on May 13. Article published on May 11, 2010 by LA Books Examiner. By Laura Frazin
No Place for a Puritan explores the literature of California's rich and diverse deserts
This Thursday May 13, 2010, Malcolm Margolin, the founder and publisher of Heyday Books, will be at the Riverside Art Museum at 6:00 p.m. Appearing with Malcolm Margolin will be Ruth Nolan, the editor of No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts, Susan Straight and Juan Felipe Herrera, contributors to No Place for a Puritan.
Heyday Books, based in Berkeley, California, aspires to deepen the awareness of California's rich cultural, natural, literary, and historic resources. Heyday Books recently participated in the April 2010 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.
One of Heyday's many unique and fascinating books is No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts edited by Ruth Nolan. No Place for a Puritan is an anthology that includes the works of over 80 respected and award winning authors and poets, including John Steinbeck, Aldous Huxley, Susan Straight, and Juan Felipe Hererra.
Editor Ruth Nolan begins No Place for a Puritan with her descriptive tale of her early memories of California's wide and vast Mojave Desert. Her love of the desert was immediate and her intimate knowledge and appreciation of the desert's rich complexity is expressed through her books and poetry. Ruth Nolan teaches poetry, creative writing, desert literature, and Native American literature at College of the Desert in Palm Desert, California, where she is an associate professor of English. She is the founder and editor of Phantom Seed, a California desert literary magazine, and is a former wildland desert firefighter. Her poem "Mirage," which evokes strong desert imagery, is included in No Place for a Puritan.
Susan Straight, who will also be at the Riverside Museum of Art this Thursday, contributed the short story "Cellophane and Feathers" to No Place for a Puritan. "Cellophane and Feathers," originally published in Susan Straight's award winning collection of short stories, Aquaboogie, is the story of a desolate prisoner who is tasked with picking up trash alongside of the desert Interstate 10 freeway. Susan Straight is a novelist and writer of short stories and essays for adults and children, and is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.
Juan Felipe Herrera, the award winning author and activist for at-risk youth and migrant communities, will also be at the Riverside Museum of Art this Thursday. The son of migrant workers, Juan Felipe Herrera teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside where he is the Tomas Rivera Endowed Chair. He is a prolific writer of poetry, prose, short stories, novels for adults and young adults, and children's picture books. His poem "Loss, Revival, and Retributions," originally published in his collection of poetry Night Train to Tuxtla, is one of the many richly unique contributions in the anthology No Place for a Puritan.
For more information about the event on Thursday May 13, 2010 at the Riverside Art Museum featuring Heyday Books' Malcolm Margolin, Ruth Nolin, Susan Straight, and Juan Felipe Herrera click here. http://www.examiner.com/x-31737-LA-Books-Examiner~y2010m5d11-Heyday-Books-founder-and-No-Place-for-a-Puritan-contributors-at-Riverside-Art-Museum-on-May-13?cid=edition-rss-Los_Angeles
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