Alison Hawthorne Deming

Alison Hawthorne Deming is the author of three books of poetry, three nonfiction books, and two limited-edition chapbooks. Her place-based writing has earned her fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown , the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and the Tucson/Pima Arts Council; as well as many awards, including the Bayer Award in science writing from Creative Nonfiction for the essay “Poetry and Science: A View from the Divide.” Deming was born and raised in Connecticut, but currently lives near Aqua Caliente Hill in Tucson, where she serves as Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. Here, she is introduced by Stonecoast faculty member Barbara Hurd.

Nalo Hopkinson

Nalo Hopkinson is one of the world’s best known fantasy and science fiction writers. She is the author of four novels (most recently The New Moon’s Arms, Warner, 2007) and numerous short stories, and editor or co-editor of several anthologies, including So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Visions of the Future (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004). Hopkinson was born in Jamaica and lived in the Caribbean until the age of 17, when her family moved to Toronto. Here, she is introduced by fellow science fiction writer Michaela Roessner Herman.

Please leave your feedback on Hopkinson's reading, which includes much-anticipated new work, as a comment on this blog post.

Thanks to the Animals

When the Born to Read program selected books for its anti-bias initiative, Many Eyes, Many Voices, there was a distressing gap in the field of contenders: a suitable children’s book about Maine Native Americans. The few titles available were either too stereotypical or too distant—tales populated by warriors with headresses, or set amidst Plains buffalo or Southwest deserts. That changed in 2005, when Tilbury House publishers in Gardiner, Maine, published Thanks to the Animals by Passamaquoddy storyteller Allen Sockabasin. Born to Read Program Officer Brita Zitin sat down with Sockabasin and his editor, Audrey Maynard, to talk about the story behind this important book.

To learn more about Sockabasin, see this newsletter article. To leave your feedback on this podcast, add a comment to this blog post. Thanks for listening.

Teaching American History

Charles Calhoun's first talk at the 2008 Teaching American History program was entitled "Why Are Some Biographies So Good?" What do you think of Charles' answer to that question, and what would your answer be? Please leave your thoughts here.

Views of the East

Bowdoin sociologist Nancy Riley spoke at the 2008 Views of the East program about family and gender in contemporary China. Please leave your feedback on her talk, or any of the others, as a comment on this blog post. Thanks!

Miriam Colwell

Miriam Colwell was born in Prospect Harbor in 1917 and still lives in the house built by her great-great-grandfather in 1817. She is the author of Wind Off the Water (1945), Day of the Trumpet (1947), and Young (1955). As a small town resident and long-time postmistress, she has watched change upon change wash over the fabled coast for nearly nine decades. She explores those themes in her fourth novel, Contentment Cove (Islandport Press, 2008), which is set in a Down East coastal village in the 1950s, when social clashes and changing values were starting to tear at the fabric of Maine’s traditional way of life.

Helen Nearing

Scholar Mimi Killinger researched the life of homesteader and writer Helen Nearing for her doctoral dissertation in American History. Her dissertation became the biography The Good Life of Helen K. Nearing (University of Vermont Press, 2007). Here, Killinger recounts the inspiration for her project at the Good Life Center in Harborside, Maine, and reads excerpts from the biography. Killinger earned her Ph.D. from the University of Maine, where she is now Rezendes Preceptor for the Arts at the Honors College.

To learn more about the Nearings, visit the Good Life Center or the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods.