Gallery Bookshop's Book Events 2008 Alumni Presenters

For those of you who wish to learn more about some of our former Book Event presenters, here is a list of the writers, illustrators and other literary illuminaries who have appeared at a Gallery Bookshop Book Event in 2008. Links to the Book Events guest speakers' websites will open in a separate window, so you may easily return to the Gallery Bookshop website.

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DATE	AUTHOR	TITLE
May 4	Janine Canan	Goddesses, Goddesses
May 2	Raj Patel	Stuffed & Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System
Feb. 24	Maureen Eppstein	Quickening

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Janine Canan Goddesses, Goddesses Sunday, May 4, 3:00 pm
	Award-winning author Janine Canan presented Goddesses, Goddesses, a memoir recounting her encounters with visionary writers and poets. Among the individual whose lives touched hers are Iris Murdoch, Else Lasker-Schuler, Marija Gimbutas, James Broughton, Diane Di Prima, Alma Villanueva, Ali Akbar Khan, and Mata Amritanandamayi. Poetic snippets written by these illuminating individuals intersperse the thoughtful discussion, fond memories, and moments of epiphany. Canan is the author of several other books, including Walk Now In Beauty: The Legend of Changing Woman, which tells the story of the Navajo Creation Goddess in poetry, exquisitely illustrated with contemporary sand paintings by artist Ernest Posey. For more information about Janine Canan, visit her website at http://janinecanan.com. Orders/Information: Goddesses, Goddesses Paperback, Regent Press, $16.00 ISBN 9781587901294

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Raj Patel Stuffed & Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System Friday, May 2, 3:00 pm
	Author Raj Patel talked about his new book, Stuffed & Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. Naomi Klein called Stuffed & Starved "One of the most dazzling books I have read in a very long time. The product of a brilliant mind and a gift to a world hungering for justice." Half the world is malnourished, the other half obese -- both symptoms of the corporate food monopoly. To show how a few powerful distributors control the health of the entire world, Raj Patel conducts a global investigation, traveling from the "green deserts" of Brazil to bankrupt Ugandan coffee farms and barren fields of India. What he uncovers is shocking -- the real reasons for famine in Asia and Africa, an epidemic of farmer suicides, and the false choices and conveniences in supermarkets. Yet he also finds hope -- in international resistance movements working to create a more democratic, sustainable, and joyful food system. Raj Patel has written for the Los Angeles Times and the Guardian, and though he has worked for the World Bank, WTO, and the UN, he's also been tear-gassed on four continents protesting them. For more information about Stuffed and Starved, visit http://stuffedandstarved.org. For more info about the author, visit http://www.rajpatel.com/ Orders/Information: Stuffed & Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System Paperback, Melville House, $19.95 ISBN 9781933633497

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Maureen Eppstein Quickening Sunday, February 24, 2008, 3 pm Special location: Mendocino Community Library, 10591 Williams Street, Mendocino, CA.
	Local poet Maureen Eppstein presented her new poetry collection at a gala reading and reception. Originally from New Zealand, Maureen Eppstein now lives in Mendocino, where she helps run the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. Her widely published poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, received awards in many competitions, been included in a textbook on computer graphics, and used in a university-level geology course. Cover reviews on her new books are by internationally acclaimed poets Jane Hirshfield and Eavan Boland. Jane Hirshfield's most recent poetry collection is After. She is also author of the influential essay collection Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. She wrote: "With a naturalist's eye for the precise and sensuous image and a writer's care for the precise and sensuous word, Maureen Eppstein plants our human griefs into this book, roots them, and invites them to quicken into new life." Eavan Boland, a major Irish poet, is director of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University and author of many poetry and essay collections, including Object Lessons: the Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. In her comments she noted that: "These eloquent poems appear at first to record detail, the ordinary, the everyday. They celebrate a swallow's nest, sand grains, even the growth of weeds. But there is a twist: these are also dark pastorals that -- in the poet's words -- review and regret "the damaged earth". Again and again, these poems return to defenseless nature, to creatures looted and evicted and to human lives hurt and interrupted. This shadowing of the relation between the poet and every kind of nature is the real theme of these fine poems. It deepens and sharpens their music." Orders/Information: Quickening Paperback, March Street Press, $9.00 ISBN 9781596610798

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