The calendar shows events we are part of and events we are sponsoring. Do you have an event we should know about? Send us a message.
For our June 17th JEDI Book Club, we will be reading the anthology Tales of Two Planets: Stories of Climate Change and Inequality in a Divided World, edited by John Freeman.
To register, click here to email Anne Melia, JEDI Book Club organizer.
Building from his acclaimed anthology Tales of Two Americas, beloved writer and editor John Freeman draws together a group of our greatest writers from around the world to help us see how the environmental crisis is hitting some of the most vulnerable communities where they live.
In the past five years, John Freeman, previously editor of Granta, has launched a celebrated international literary magazine, Freeman’s, and compiled two acclaimed anthologies that deal with income inequality as it is experienced. In the course of this work, one major theme came up repeatedly: Climate change is making already dire inequalities much worse, devastating further the already devastated. But the problems of climate change are not restricted to those from the less developed world.
Galvanized by his conversations with writers and activists around the world, Freeman engaged with some of today’s most eloquent storytellers, many of whom hail from the places under the most acute stress–from the capital of Burundi to Bangkok, Thailand. The response has been extraordinary. Margaret Atwood conjures with a dystopian future in a remarkable poem. Lauren Groff whisks us to Florida; Edwidge Danticat to Haiti; Tahmima Anam to Bangladesh; Yasmine El Rashidi to Egypt, while Eka Kurniawan brings us to Indonesia, Chinelo Okparanta to Nigeria, and Anuradha Roy to the Himalayas in the wake of floods, dam building, and drought.
This is a literary all-points bulletin of fiction, essays, poems, and reportage about the most important crisis of our times.
For our July 15th JEDI Book Club, we will be reading Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine.
To register, click here to email Anne Melia, JEDI Book Club organizer.
A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine’s long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.
Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time.
For our August 19th JEDI Book Club, we will be reading Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations by Mira Jacob.
To register, click here to email Anne Melia, JEDI Book Club organizer.
Anne notes: “I read this several years ago, and found it to be a unique and imaginative way to share difficult conversations. Since then, it has been on my list for us to read in the JEDI Book Club. While the content is poignant and heavy at times, the graphic memoir format is a refreshing departure from other books we have read.”
