October

Cedar Street Book Club Oct 21, 2021 from 07:00 PM to 08:00 PM — Anamosa Library & Learning Center, Anamosa, Community Meeting Room,: The Cedar Street Book Club meets on the third Thursday of the month at 7 PM. This year, we are meeting both in-person and on Zoom! Check out our website or Facebook page for details.
2021 All Iowa Reads Author: Remy Lai Virtual Visit Oct 21, 2021 from 04:00 PM to 05:00 PM — Virtual event,: Remy Lai, author of the 2021 All Iowa Reads title Pie in the Sky, will appear in a free virtual visit webinar open to the public. The Zoom webinar will be hosted by Iowa Center for the Book and will last about an hour, and the author will discuss the book and answer questions from attendees submitted in the chat window during the webinar.
Meet the Author, Reid Forgrave Oct 06, 2021 from 06:30 PM to 07:30 PM — Beaverdale Books,: Love, Zac: Small Town Football and the Life and Death of an American Boy In December 2015, Zac Easter, a twenty-four-year-old from small-town Iowa, decided to take his own life rather than continue his losing battle against the traumatic brain injuries he had sustained as a no-holds-barred high school football player. For this deeply reported and powerfully moving true story, award-winning writer Reid Forgrave was given access to Zac’s own diaries and was able to speak with Zac’s family, friends, and coaches. Forgrave shows us how football mirrors America, from the fighting spirit the game has helped inscribe in our national character to the side effects of the traditional notions of manhood that it affirms. But above all, Love, Zac is a warning to parents and those entrusted with the care of our kids not to ignore concussions and warning signs of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy). For parents struggling to decide whether to allow their kids to play football, this eye-opening, heart-wrenching, and ultimately inspiring story may be one of the most important books they will read.
Meet the Author, Beth Hoffman Oct 07, 2021 from 06:30 PM to 07:30 PM — Beaverdale Books,: Bet the Farm: The Dollars and Sense of Growing Food Half of America’s two million farms made less than $300 in 2019. Between rising land costs, ever-more expensive equipment, the growing uncertainty of the climate, and few options for health care, farming today is a risky business. For many, simply staying afloat is a constant struggle. Bet the Farm chronicles this struggle through Beth’s eyes as a beginning farmer. She must contend with her father-in-law, who is reluctant to hand over control of the land. Growing oats is good for the environment but ends up being very bad for the wallet. And finding somewhere, in the midst of COVID-19, to slaughter grass-finished beef is a nightmare. The couple also must balance the books, hoping that farming isn’t a romantic fantasy that takes every cent of their savings. Even with a decent nest egg and access to land, making ends meet at times seems impossible. And Beth knows full well that she is among the privileged. If Beth can’t make it, how can farmers who confront racism, lack access to land, or don’t have other jobs to fall back on? Bet the Farm is a first-hand account of the perils of farming today and a personal exploration of more just and sustainable ways of producing food.
Meet the Author, Mary Christopher Oct 11, 2021 from 06:30 PM to 07:30 PM — Beaverdale Books,: Our Friend Sitting Bull: The True Story of A Pioneer Couple’s Friendship With The Famous Lakota Chief It was a steamy, late-summer day when newlyweds Lizzie and George Dell pulled up their two covered wagons at the site where they would live as cattle ranchers for the next twelve years. Lizzie was twenty years old. She was exhausted, hungry, thirsty, sweaty, AND six months pregnant. Her skin was tanned like leather and her hands were calloused from driving George’s team of horses four months while he drove the oxen- pulled wagon. Surrounding her were the cowboys, cattle, and horses that accompanied the couple on their long journey. It would not be long before Lizzie discovered that there were no neighbors for miles in this beautiful but remote part of the Dakota Territory. She wondered if the years ahead would bring a lonely, isolated existence. They might have—but one summer day Chief Sitting Bull rode up on his horse. He must have liked the dinner and company that day because he came back often and brought a lot of family and friends with him.
Meet the Author, Kim Harris Oct 13, 2021 from 06:30 PM to 07:30 PM — Beaverdale Books,: Life Reconstructed: Navigating the World of Mastectomies and Breast Reconstruction Breast cancer survivor Kim Harms combines her own experience with extensive research and walks readers through the process of mastectomy and breast reconstruction, weighing the pros and cons, detailing the physical and emotional costs, navigating relationships, and laying out the questions cancer fighters need to ask to be their own best advocate. With a foreword by the medical director of Katzmann Breast Center and chapters on everything from the distinct differences between reconstruction and augmentation, to body image and intimacy issues created by the mastectomy and reconstruction, Life Reconstructed is a compassionate, honest roadmap for the journey to recovery.
Meet the Author, Ben McDougal Oct 15, 2021 from 06:00 PM to 07:00 PM — Beaverdale Books,: You Don’t Need This Book: Entrepreneurship in the Connected Era Jam-packed with hard-earned tips, tactics, and approaches or entrepreneurs of all stripes. – Seth Godin A synthesized narrative brewed as innovative energy to help students, first-time founders, experienced entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, and community builders start that new business, improve an existing company, or evolve an entrepreneurial ecosystem. Come early and mingle as we celebrate Ben’s audiobook release. (There will be wine.)
Reading and Booksigning Debra Marquart & Romeo Oriogun Oct 12, 2021 from 06:30 PM to 07:30 PM — Beaverdale Books,: The Night We Landed on the Moon Debra Marquart’s newest memoir, an assemblage of essays, explores the space between states of exile and belonging, the seemingly irresolvable dilemma of the restless homebody. Marquart was born into a family of land-loving people―farmers known as the ethnic group Germans-from-Russia―who had emigrated from Russia to the United States between 1886 and 1911 and taken up land claims in Dakota Territory. Her grandparents tended their farms and fields, never dreaming of moving another inch away from the homes they had made. By contrast, Marquart grew up a restless, imaginative child in that same agricultural place, yearning to strike out for places more interesting as soon as she was old enough to take flight. All seemed simple enough until Marquart realized that her family’s stubborn attachment to place grew out of a traumatic multi-generational history of flight, migration, dispossession, and exile from their previous homelands in Europe. Her grandfathers and all her great-grandparents had emigrated to the United States from villages in south Russia, along the Black Sea. And, in a familial pattern going back several more generations, their own great- grandparents had experienced a traumatic uprooting one hundred years earlier when they fled the Rhine region of western Europe on the run from the chaos of the French Revolution. Her more distant ancestors had migrated east along the Danube in 1803 to reach their land claims in south Russia, just as her more immediate ancestors had fled their villages in south Russia to come west to America. As Marquart researched her family history, the revelation about multi-generational patterns of forcible removal from homelands helped her to contextualize her own complicated relationship with ideas of exile and belonging. She realized she came by her restlessness honestly, an American kid weaned on wanderlust and the promise of education calling her to leave home and never return. In The Night We Landed on the Moon, Marquart works out the tensions between divergent impulses―the restlessness in the feet to always move forward into the world, mixed with the opposing desire to turn around, look back, and sometimes even settle in and claim to belong. Debra Marquart is a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University and Iowa's Poet Laureate. She is the Senior Editor of Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment. A memoirist, poet, and musician, Marquart is the author of six books including an environmental memoir of place, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere and a collection of poems, Small Buried Things: Poems. Marquart's work has been featured on NPR and the BBC and has received over fifty grants and awards including an NEA Fellowship, a PEN USA Award, a New York Times Editors' Choice commendation, Elle Magazine's Elle Lettres Award, and most recently, she was named a 2021 Poet Laureate Fellow by the Academy of American Poets. Sacrament of Bodies 2021 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist In this groundbreaking collection of poems, Sacrament of Bodies, Romeo Oriogun fearlessly interrogates how a queer man in Nigeria can heal in a society where everything is designed to prevent such restoration. With honesty, precision, tenderness of detail, and a light touch, Oriogun explores grief and how the body finds survival through migration. Romeo Oriogun, a Nigerian poet and essayist, is the author of Sacrament of Bodies (University of Nebraska Press) and three chapbooks. He is the winner of the 2017 Brunel International African Poetry Prize. A finalist for the Lambda Prize for poetry and for The Future Awards African Prize for Literature, Oriogun has received fellowships and support from Ebedi International Writers Residency, Harvard University, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Oregon Institute for Creative Research, and the IIE- Artist Protection Fund. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Poetry Review, Narrative Magazine, The Common, and others. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his poems have been translated into several languages.
Meet the Author, Katie Purcell Oct 23, 2021 from 02:00 PM to 03:00 PM — Beaverdale Books,: Molly’s Big Score A friendship story that opens a discussion on inclusion and children with disabilities. Molly wants nothing more than to score a goal for the soccer team, but just trying to kick the ball causes her to fall over. If only her legs worked as well as her brothers. With the braces on her legs, Molly doesn’t believe she’ll ever be good at anything. Let alone soccer. Until her friend, Anna, encourages her to go for her dreams. Maybe now she has a chance at scoring big in the upcoming game? This friendship story opens the discussion on inclusion and children with disabilities by demonstrating no matter what our bodies say, we are all important and have value. Molly may have cerebral palsy, but she’s not going to let it keep her from living life to the fullest. And neither should you.
Meet the Author, Amy Lillard Oct 27, 2021 from 06:30 PM to 07:30 PM — Beaverdale Books,: Dig Me Out In this multilayered, provocative, and outrageously imaginative literary debut, Amy Lee Lillard gives us ten deeply absorbing stories about the women who won’t smile: angry, aching women reacting to the dismissal of their most secret or beloved needs and desires, women returning to base instincts, primal fears, and mythic power. Across past, present, and future, around the Midwest and the world, these women demand we witness as they work to break through, to defy, to become. It won’t be pretty, and it won’t be safe, but it will be real. Spanning genres, continents, and eras, Dig Me Out takes on misogyny and homophobia, societal and climatological violence, and the specter of our technologized future — all with a punk rock literary twist. This collection constitutes a brilliant and rightfully dangerous work of art from a writer to tell your friends about.
Meet the Author, Anna Lind Thomas Oct 30, 2021 from 02:00 PM to 03:00 PM — Beaverdale Books,: We’ll Laugh About This Someday Everything’s funny...eventually. A hilarious argument in favor of taking life a smidge less seriously. Popular humor writer Anna Lind Thomas had an epiphany after her essay about a humiliating fart went mega-viral: Everything’s funny . . .eventually. You’ll cry-laugh your way through the many grave offenses she’s endured, like not getting credit for Lady Gaga’s career, an epic financial crisis, and exercising while her children dole out biting critiques about her dimpled thighs. Anna’s wit, charm, and painful relatability will encourage you to remember that your most humiliating moment may be the best thing to ever happen to you—or at the very least, it’ll make for a really good story.