Menlo Park Library BOOKISH Events
APRIL 2022
ADULTS
Story Time for Adults
Friday, Apr. 1
Noon-12:30 p.m.
https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ucg1bnzhT0CRiXAC_nlOWQ
Odd-numbered Fridays at noon: take a break, as Menlo Park librarians read aloud from selected essays and short stories.
You’re never too old for a good story! Take some time out for yourself to enjoy Story Time for Adults, featuring essays and short stories read to you by your Menlo Park librarians.
Treat yourself to a half-hour break for your very own live, local audiobook-style performance. This program will bring Menlo Park librarians and enriching, entertaining literature directly to you -- wherever you might be!
Story Time for Adults is a free, virtual event that takes odd-numbered Fridays at noon.
Melanated Reads: Bad Feminist, by Roxane Gay
Monday, Apr. 4
6:30-8 p.m.
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_BoIcSzYkQpS0NjqNmZFkUg
Melanated Reads is a book discussion group by and especially for African American women. This month we discuss Roxane Gay’s sharp, funny collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism.
Join us this month to talk about Bad Feminist, in which Roxane Gay takes readers on the journey of her evolution as a woman of color, and on a ride through the culture of the last few years, sharing her commentary on the state of feminism today.
About Roxane Gay:
Roxane Gay is also the author of the novel An Untamed State, a finalist for the Dayton Peace Prize; the memoir Hunger, which was a New York Times bestseller and received a National Book Critics Circle citation; and the short story collections Difficult Women and Ayiti. A contributing opinion writer to the New York Times, she has also written for Time, McSweeney’s, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Rumpus, Bookforum, and Salon. Her fiction has been selected for The Best American Short Stories 2012, The Best American Mystery Stories 2014, and other anthologies. She is the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She lives in Lafayette, Indiana, and sometimes Los Angeles.
About Melanated Reads
The Melanated Reads book group meets online on the first Monday of each month. The group chooses from books written by African American authors. The goal of this community-based group is to introduce a variety of African African American writers who will help build a love of reading in a positive environment while meeting new people and gaining new perspectives.
The Melanated Reads book group meets on the first Monday of each month.
Book Discussion: My Name is Lucy Barton, by Elizabeth Strout
Tuesday, Apr. 5
6:30-7:45 p.m.
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_PIXaVwhLRi2gRjOIDuhIaw
The library’s Fiction Book Group discusses Elizabeth Strout’s bestseller diving into the complicated relationship between a woman and her mother.
Spend some time with our Fiction Book group to talk about Pulitzer Prize-winner Elizabeth Strout’s short novel about the complicated love between mothers and daughters.
About Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout was born in Portland, Maine, and grew up in small towns in Maine and New Hampshire. From a young age, she was drawn to writing things down, keeping notebooks that recorded the quotidian details of her days. She was also drawn to books, and spent hours of her youth in the local library lingering among the stacks of fiction. Her other acclaimed novels include Amy and Isabelle, Abide with Me, Olive Kitteridge, The Burgess Boys, and Anything is Possible.
The Menlo Park Library Fiction Book Group meets on the second Tuesday of each month.
AUTHOR EVENT: James J. Siegel
Virtual Workshop: Why Can’t I Finish This Poem?!
Thursday, Apr.14
6:30-8 p.m.
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_2x7P9wBdQzu09DxP7hVSLg
James J. Siegel, author of the poetry collections “How Ghosts Travel" and "The God of San Francisco," will help attendees sharpen their own work, and give beginners fuel to spark their poetic fires.
Every poet has been there: inspiration strikes, the lines and stanzas flow from your pen, but then you hit a dead end. You have the beginnings of a great poem, but you can’t bring it to a conclusion. So what do you do?
James J. Siegel will facilitate this workshop for all poetic levels, where we will look at different techniques and exercises that can help us push our unfinished poems across the finish line (or help you get started on brand new poems).
We will experiment with different poetic forms, structures, themes, and editing techniques that will enable us to see the possible paths our poems can take.
Bring an open mind and the poems you have been struggling with. Find out what is working and what isn’t. We will get creative with our poems by taking them apart and putting them back together in shapes and forms that you might not have considered.
If you don’t have poems you are currently working on, that’s ok! You can use these workshop exercises to inspire yourself and get started on new work.
At the end of the workshop, feel free to volunteer to share your poem and receive feedback and critique.
About James J. Siegel
James J. Siegel is a San Francisco-based poet and literary arts organizer. He is the host and curator of the popular monthly Literary Speakeasy show at Martuni's piano bar. Originally from Toledo, Ohio, his first poetry collection, How Ghosts Travel, was inspired and fueled by his coming of age in the Midwest. Siegel’s second collection, The God of San Francisco, examines queer grief during the onset of the AIDS crisis. James was a scholarship recipient to the Antioch Writers' Workshop in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and his poems have been featured in a number of journals including The Cortland Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Assaracus, The Fourth River, HIV Here & Now, The Good Men Project, and more. He was also featured in the anthology Divining Divas: 100 Gay Men on Their Muses.
This free event received partial funding support from the Friends of the Menlo Park Library.
Story Time for Adults
Friday, Apr. 15
Noon-12:30 p.m.
https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ucg1bnzhT0CRiXAC_nlOWQ
Odd-numbered Fridays at noon: take a break, as Menlo Park librarians read aloud from selected essays and short stories.
You’re never too old for a good story! Take some time out for yourself to enjoy Story Time for Adults, featuring essays and short stories read to you by your Menlo Park librarians.
Treat yourself to a half-hour break for your very own live, local audiobook-style performance. This program will bring Menlo Park librarians and enriching, entertaining literature directly to you -- wherever you might be!
Story Time for Adults is a free, virtual event that takes odd-numbered Fridays at noon.
Mystery Readers Group: Murder in Academia
Wednesday, Apr. 20
3-4:30 p.m.
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_7bZW5eufSwiJbS46lPcroA
Ivory towers, ivy leagues – higher education can be murder! Share some of your favorite titles, and add a few to your reading list, as you enroll in this session we’ll call Murder U.!
The academic world has often been described as an ivory tower far away from the cares of life—but the characters in mysteries set in that world may beg to differ! Backbiting, political intrigue and even murder can be found within these not-so-hallowed halls.
We’ll share some of our favorites, including mysteries from Amanda Cross and Lev Raphael. Join us and share your own favorites!
The Mystery Readers Group meets on the third Wednesday of each month.
Sci-Fi/Fantasy Book Group: Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
Monday, Apr. 25
6:30-7:45 p.m.
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_qj--mW8uQnKxrEJAJ7Rcog
“All this happened, more or less.” Our group discusses the novel the New York Times called “very tough and very funny…sad and delightful…very Vonnegut.”
During World War II, as a prisoner of war in Germany, Kurt Vonnegut witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or the Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death.
Vonnegut’s satirical, sci-fi infused novel centers on the fire-bombing of Dresden, and Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.
About Kurt Vonnegut
World War II veteran, pacifist, satirist, humanist, environmentalist, visual artist, and internationally-acclaimed writer Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University. He was first published in 1950, and went on to write fourteen novels, four plays, and three short story collections, in addition to countless works of short fiction and nonfiction. He died in 2007.
Menlo Park Library’s Sci-Fi/Fantasy Book Group meets on the 4th Monday of each month.
AUTHOR EVENT: Elisa Macellari
Elisa Macellari: Kusama, The Graphic Novel
Thursday, Apr. 28
12:30-1:30 p.m.
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ECZGDcGARaiiRjza0xUyZg
Take a virtual trip to Milan to meet Thai Italian illustrator Elisa Macellari, and have a look at her vivid graphic biography of international art icon Yayoi Kusama.
Elisa Macellari finds Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s world “eccentric, captivating and inclusive. I just took a small step inside it and her dense life mesmerized me.” In Kusama: The Graphic Novel, Macellari follows the icon’s incredible journey, detailing her bold departure from Japan as a young artist, her embrace of the buzzing New York art scene in the 1960s, and her eventual return home and rise to twenty-first-century super-fame.
Learn more about Elisa Macellari and her own art, as she joins us virtually from her home in Italy.
This event is part of this year’s Peninsula Libraries Comic Arts Fest, a virtual event series held being held Apr. 23-30 in coordination with other local libraries. PLCAF is a celebration of the importance of comics, both as an art form and as valid literature, and includes virtual author visits, workshops, and comics-related programs. View the entire schedule at https://smcl.org/comicartsfest/.
About Elisa Macellari
Elisa Macellari is a Thai-Italian illustrator. Her clients include The New York Times, Corriere della Sera, Mondadori, Feltrinelli, and Nobrow Press. Her first graphic novel, Papaya Salad (2018), has been published in Italian, French, and Spanish.
Story Time for Adults
Friday, Apr. 29
Noon-12:30 p.m.
https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ucg1bnzhT0CRiXAC_nlOWQ
Odd-numbered Fridays at noon: take a break, as Menlo Park librarians read aloud from selected essays and short stories.
You’re never too old for a good story! Take some time out for yourself to enjoy Story Time for Adults, featuring essays and short stories read to you by your Menlo Park librarians.
Treat yourself to a half-hour break for your very own live, local audiobook-style performance. This program will bring Menlo Park librarians and enriching, entertaining literature directly to you -- wherever you might be!
Story Time for Adults is a free, virtual event that takes odd-numbered Fridays at noon.