The Literary Masters: Author Interviews & A Year Celebrating Toni Morrison
Towwn, the new mobile app for culture seekers, is showcasing four new literary events to inspire. With four writers, some known very well and others not so much, teeing them up with word memes. Watch for the way one word — or a small group — expresses an essential characteristic of each writer’s work. Each helps us identify their work to distinguish it from the others below. Easier to recall? We hope so, particularly since these writers all have multi-talents.
Introducing, Maria Kalman. 3XGENIUS. Elizabeth Kolbert. BRILLIANT. OR, CRAZY? Toni Morrison. THE MASTER. And Douglas Kearney. RE-MAPPING
Seattle Arts & Lectures Presents: Maira Kalman. March 15th @ 8:30 pm MT
A genius 3X(4X?) over if you count illustrator, author/writer AND designer, you might recognize Ms. Kalman as the creative force behind many a New Yorker Illustration, or two columns for the New York Times: The Principles of Uncertainty and The Pursuit of Happiness, now in book form. Her highly inventive mind produced an illustrated edition of the essential writer’s handbook: Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style (which she turned into a song cycle with composer Nico Muhly). Moving on to fabrics and accessories design for Isaac Mizrahi and Kate Spade, ballet sets and costumes for the Mark Morris Dance Company, and the eye-opening 10.1.4 watch in the permanent Museum of Modern Art collection, we arrive breathless — since the list doesn’t stop there. Welcome the Wit. The Wow. And The Wonder.
Smithsonian Associates: Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Nature of the Future” March 17th @ 4:30 MT
Brilliant? Or Crazy? We’re asking about investigative journalist, Elizabeth Kolbert, and her new book Under A White Sky: The Nature of the Future. In her Pulitzer-winner, The Sixth Extinction, Kolbert called the human treatment of nature a “ten-thousand year exercise in defying it”. Her new book does a 180: What if actions imperiling the planet could actually save its future? Follow her to Iceland, where carbon dioxide is turned into stone, to a fake cavern in the Mojave that houses the world’s rarest fish, to the halls of Harvard, where researchers are contemplating shooting tiny diamond particles into the stratosphere to lower the earth’s temperature — which could turn our blue skies white. Is it terrifying? Or “darkly comic” as one reviewer says. Brilliant? Crazy? You decide.
92Y: Reading Tony Morrison. March 28th, April 22nd & May 27th @ 5 pm MT
Winner of The Pulitzer and the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature, the soft-spoken Toni Morrison has been oft-lauded for her mastery of words — from the first, The Bluest Eye (1975) written as a single mother working at a day job as a book editor, to her 11th and last, God Help The Child. In 2015, she read from this novel at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, the last of many appearances at this venue, before her death in 2019, to delight legions of passionate readers. It is fitting that this event — presenting a year-long discussion series on all her novels — be organized by the 92Y to include conversation by notable Black Scholars, and other celebrated critics and novelists. Consider this an invitation to discover how a good book listens.
Seattle Arts & Lectures Presents: A Talk by Douglas Kearney. March 31st @ 8:30 pm MT
The never-still poet, performer, and librettist, calls his work, “remapping”. Why? His six multi-award-winning books bridge politics, African American culture, the Trickster figure, and contemporary music. But it is Buck Studies that got the attention of Bomb Magazine, who said it…“remaps the 20th century in a project that is both lyrical and epic, personal and historical.” Why should we read Kearney, why learn more? Listen up, says a reader of Mess and Mess: If you want to be challenged, charged, pummeled, and hopefully much improved as a poet and human, I can think of no better book to pick up and read.” The format for this event will be a talk by Kearney, co-presented with the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. Q&A with Writers in The Schools Writer-in-Residence Daemond Arrindell.
Discover more Literary experiences and livestream author interviews on the new (and free!) Towwn mobile app and on towwnapp.com. With 250+ livestream concerts, virtual events, podcasts, films and classes, Towwn puts the best Art & Culture experiences in the palm of your hand.
