In honor of Banned Books Week 2019, the ACLU of RI and The Providence Athenaeum present: Banned Books Live - a celebration of our right to read.
Back by popular demand! Join us to hear local writers and artists read from their favorite banned books.
Featuring:
VIKKI WARNER - Reading Mary Shelley
Vikki Warner is the author of the Providence-based memoir Tenemental: Adventures of a Reluctant Landlady, published by the Feminist Press in 2018. Her work has appeared in BUST, The Boston Globe, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, Hyperallergic, The Ocean State Review, The Providence Phoenix, and other publications. She has a B.A. in English from the University of Rhode Island and an M.A. in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College. She is an acquisitions editor with Blackstone Publishing, where she works with books in print and audio.
JOHN STEPHENSON - Reading Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison
John Stephenson is the Founder and Managing Director of the Rhode Island Writers Colony, a two week retreat for Writers of Color.
COLIN CHANNER - Reading TBA
Colin Channer's most recent book is the poetry collection Providential (2015), which Eileen Myles describes as "one of the most lucid and telling poetry books of this exact time." Other work includes the novella The Girl With the Golden Shoes (2007) — "a nearly perfect moral fable" in the words of Russell Banks. He was born in Jamaica, and raised there and in New York. He received the 2019 Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship from Brown University.
TINA CANE - Reading James Baldwin and Shane McCrae
Born and raised in New York City, Tina Cane serves as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island where she is the founder and director of Writers-in-the-Schools, RI and an instructor with the writing community, Frequency Providence. Her poems and translations have appeared in numerous publications, including The Literary Review, Two Serious Ladies, Tupelo Quarterly, Jubliat and The Common. She also co-produces, with Atticus Allen, the podcast, Poetry Dose. Cane is the author of The Fifth Thought (Other Painters Press, 2008), Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, poems with art by Esther Solondz (Skillman Avenue Press, 2016, Once More With Feeling (Veliz Books, 2017) and Body of Work (Veliz Books, 2019). In 2016, Tina received the Fellowship Merit Award in Poetry from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts.
MATT BURRIESCI - Reading Voltaire
Matt Burriesci is the author of Dead White Guys: A Father, his Daughter, and the Great Books of the Western World (Viva Editions, June 2015), and Nonprofit (New Issues Press, 2015), which won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Award for the Novel, and was shortlisted for several other national awards. He is currently the Executive Director of the Providence Athenaeum. He began his career at the Tony Award Winning Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier, and later served as Executive Director for both AWP and the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. During his tenure at AWP, he helped build the largest literary conference in North America, and he served as a national advocate for literature and the humanities.
This program is free and open to all. Refreshments will be served.
