Corvallis-Benton Public Library Main Meeting Room
645 NW Monroe Ave, Corvallis

Join local author Greg Paulson for a presentation based on his book, Insects Did it First (with co-author Eric Eaton).   The book is a fascinating account of more than eighty insect “firsts.” Velcro, bungee jumping, air-conditioning, and chemical warfare are a few of the firsts covered in this book authored by two professional entomologists. 
 
Dr. Paulson's career in entomology has been devoted to the applied side of the science. He is especially interested in developing alternatives to pesticides for insect control. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Western Samoa in a WHO filariasis research program and studied plant pathology in Hawaii. Most recently he studied ant population structure in the forests of Pennsylvania. Recently retired, he is a professor emeritus of biology at Shippensburg University (PA).

The event is free and open to the public. Grass Roots will have books available for purchase.

LaSells Stewart Center
875 SW 26th St, Corvallis

The Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement, created by a generous gift from Vicki and Patrick Stone '74, honors a major American author who has created a body of critically acclaimed literary work and has been - in the tradition of creative writing at OSU - a dedicated mentor to succeeding generations of young writers. The 2019 winner is Pulitzer Prize winning author, Colson Whitehead.

Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad (an Oprah’s Book Club selection and winner of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize), The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and one collection of essays, The Colossus of New York.

Colson Whitehead’s reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in a number of publications, such as the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper’s and Granta.
He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, A Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Dos Passos Prize, a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and W+riters, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for John Henry Days.He has taught at the University of Houston, Columbia University, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, New York University, Princeton University, Wesleyan University, and been a Writer-in-Residence at Vassar College, the University of Richmond, and the University of Wyoming. He lives in New York City.

The biennial Stone Award is one of the largest prizes of its kind given by an American university. Past recipients include Joyce Carol Oates, Tobias Wolff and Rita Dove.

The event is free and open to the public. Grass Roots will have books available for purchase.

Grass Roots Books
227 SW 2nd Street
 

Corvallis-Benton Public Library Main Meeting Room
645 NW Monroe Ave, Corvallis

From happy to sad, loved to frustrated, excited to discouraged - the many emotions children (and adults) experience day-to-day matter! Our emotions impact our ability to build positive relationships with others, to manage our behaviors and make good choices, to pay attention and learn, and to be the parents we want to be. Join Shauna Tominey (author of Creating Compassionate Kids: Essential Conversations to Have With Young Children) for this hands-on workshop to learn tools and strategies to help your children practice emotional intelligence at home, school, and in the community.
 

Shauna Tominey is an Assistant Professor of Practice and Parenting Education Specialist at Oregon State University. She serves as the Principal Investigator for the Oregon Parenting Education Collaborative. Dr. Tominey blends practical experience with research to develop programs aimed at promoting social-emotional skills for children and adults. Dr. Tominey regularly speaks at local and national conferences and is the author of, Creating Compassionate Kids: Essential Conversations to Have With Young Children.

 
The event is free and open to the public. Grass Roots will have books available for purchase.

Grass Roots Books
227 SW 2nd Street
 

Join Sophia Shalmiyev, and Liz Scott for “The Art of Memoirs and Family” as they share their journey, processes, and unique experiences writing and publishing riveting memoirs, with author, Margaret Malone facilitating the evening’s discussion. Sophia Shalmiyev and Liz Scott both use different methods of haunting vignettes, photographic investigations, and letters to express their stories and challenge the questions left unanswered.

 

Born to a Russian mother and an Azerbaijani father, Shalmiyev was raised in 1980s Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). An imbalance of power and the prevalence of antisemitism in her homeland led her father to steal Shalmiyev away, emigrating to America, abandoning her estranged mother, Elena. Now a mother herself, in Mother Winter Shalmiyev depicts in urgent vignettes her emotional journeys as an immigrant, an artist, and a woman raised without her mother. An MFA graduate of Portland State University, Sophia was the nonfiction editor for The Portland Review and is a recipient of the Laurel’s scholarship and numerous Kellogg’s fellowship awards. She has a second master’s degree in Creative Arts Therapy from The School of Visual Arts, where she worked with survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking. Her work has appeared in numerous journals; all of them with a feminist lens. She lives in Portland.

 

Like an archaeological dig, Liz Scott's memoir, This Never Happened, goes in search of the answers to the mysteries of her family. In her quest to uncover the truth, she mines photographs and letters, leaving no one, including herself, unexamined. This is a spare work, alternately heartbreaking and darkly comic. In the end, it's about the struggle to clear away pain to make room for compassion and the challenge of making peace with questions that will never be answered. Liz Scott has been a practicing psychologist for 40 years, helping clients to identify life themes and make sense of the puzzle in their lives. She has brought this focus to her writing in the last fifteen years, first as a short story writer and most recently in her memoir, This Never Happened. She has been published in numerous literary journals and served two terms on the board of Oregon Literary Arts. Originally from New York City, she currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Margaret Malone is the author of the story collection People Like You, Finalist for the 2016 PEN/Hemingway Award and Winner of the Balcones Fiction Prize. A co-host of the artist and literary gathering SHARE, Margaret lives in Portland, Oregon, and is the perfect author to facilitate for the event.
 

The event is free and open to the public. Grass Roots will have books available for purchase. 

Grass Roots Books
227 SW 2nd Street
 

The Long Honduran Night is the story of resistance, repression, and US involvement in Honduras after the violent military coup that deposed President Manuel Zelaya in 2009. This powerful narrative layers first person experiences and political analysis in two perspectives: the Honduran politics including two repressive regimes that followed the coup, and the evolution of Honduran resistance as well as a new solidarity movement in the United States. This narrative directly counters the mainstream media coverage that portrays Honduras as a violent, unrelenting power and instead focuses on the sobering challenges and inspiring collective strength with which people face them.

 

Dana Frank is a Professor of History Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Baneras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America. Since the 2009 military coup, Dana’s articles about human rights and U.S. policy in Honduras have appeared in The Nation, New York Times, Politico Magazine, Foreign Affairs.com, The Baffler, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and many other publications, and she has testified in both the US Congress and Canadian Parliament.

This event will be co-sponsored by the Corvallis Latin America Solidarity Committee.

The event is free and open to the public. Grass Roots will have books available for purchase. 

Grass Roots Books
227 SW 2nd Street

Wendell Newman, a young ranch hand in Montana, has recently lost his mother, leaving him an orphan, as his father met a violent end more than a decade earlier. His bank account holds less than a hundred dollars, and he owes back taxes on what remains of the land his parents owned, as well as money for the surgeries that failed to save his mother’s life. Into this situation comes seven-year-old Rowdy Burns, the illegitimate son of Wendell’s cousin, who is incarcerated after falling prey to addiction. Traumatized, Rowdy is mute and damaged. Caring for him will be a test of Wendell’s will and resolve, and yet he comes to love the boy more than he ever thought possible. That love will be stretched to the breaking point during the first legal wolf hunt in Montana in more than thirty years, when a murder results in a manhunt, and Wendell finds himself on the wrong side of a disaffected fringe group, hoping both to protect Rowdy and to avoid the same violent fate that claimed his father. This dark and haunting debut novel is an unforgettable tale of sacrificial love, with two characters who win the reader’s heart from the first page to the last.

Joe Wilkins grew up in eastern Montana, where he spent his summers working on a wheat and cattle ranch deep in the Bull Mountains. He is the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Father, winner of a 2014 GLCA New Writers Award—an honor that has previously recognized early work by the likes of Richard Ford, Louise Erdrich, and Alice Munro—and three collections of poetry, including, When We Were Birds, winner of the 2017 Oregon Book Award in Poetry. Fall Back Down When I Die is his first novel. He lives with his family in western Oregon, where he directs the creative writing program at Linfield College.

The event is free and open to the public. Grass Roots will have books available for purchase. 

Valley Library Rotunda
201 SW Waldo Pl, Corvallis

In his talk "Earth Verse: Writing for the Good Earth," Kim Stafford, Oregon's current poet laureate, will explore how we can tell stories through Earth verse. Spells, charms, poems, psalms, and songs have long provided solace, clarity, and a chance to make peace with ourselves, each other, and the Earth. Through poems, Stafford says, "Trees teach and rivers guide".

Stafford is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose and is the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, where he has taught since 1979. He has received creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Governor’s Arts Award, and the Stewart Holbrook Award from Literary Arts for his contributions to Oregon’s literary culture. His books include 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do, The Muses Among Us, Wind on the Waves: Stories from the Oregon Coast, A Gypsy's History of the World, and Wild Honey, Tough Salt.

"Poetry is our native language,” says Stafford. “We begin with imaginative experiments as children, and lyric language can be a realm of discovery and delight throughout life. For adults and communities, poetry can help us be more open to new ideas, emotionally informed, and buoyant in responding to challenges. In a society of diverse backgrounds and perspectives, poetry builds community." Sponsors include the Spring Creek Project, OSU Press, and OSU's School of Writing, Literature and Film.

The event is free and open to the public. Grass Roots will have books available for purchase. 
 

Valley Library Rotunda
201 SW Waldo Pl, Corvallis
 

George Estreich’s publications include a chapbook, Elegy for Dan Rabinowitz (Intertext, 1993) and a full-length poetry collection, Textbook Illustrations of the Human Body, which won the Gorsline Prize from Cloudbank Books (2003). The Shape of the Eye (SMU Press, 2011; Penguin, 2013), his memoir about raising a daughter with Down syndrome, received the 2012 Oregon Book Award in Creative Nonfiction.Estreich has published essays and articles in The New York Times, The Oregonian, Avidly, The American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, Salon, Tin House, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

His new book, Fables and Futures: Biotechnology, Disability, and the Stories we Tell Ourselves (MIT Press), explores the way we think and talk about human-directed biotechnology, from next-generation prenatal tests to CRISPR/Cas9, the genome-editing tool. Blending personal narrative and scholarship, Estreich argues that with biotech able to select and shape who we are, we need to imagine what it means to belong.

Erica Trabold is the author of Five Plots (Seneca Review Books, 2018), selected by John D'Agata as the inaugural winner of the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize. Five Plots delves into notions of how we are shaped by the land every bit as much as we shape it, eschewing easy ways of understanding and experiencing the world by investigating place as a malleable psychological and phenomenological force. "This is a pinprick of a book with a very generous heart," writes D'Agata.

Trabold's lyric essays appear in The Rumpus, Passages North, The Collagist, South Dakota Review, Seneca Review, Essay Daily, and elsewhere. A graduate of Oregon State University’s MFA program and the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Erica writes and teaches in Portland, Oregon. 

The event is free and open to the public. Grass Roots will have books available for purchase.

Grass Roots Books
227 SW 2nd Street
 

Metaphysics and social critiques clash and blend in John Sibley Williams As One Fire Consumes Another and A. Molotkov’s Synonyms for Silence. As One Fire Consumes Another transcends beyond the boundaries of family, history, country, and beyond the body’s tragedies. It is a collection of surrealist visions and social insights that meet, wrestle, and revitalize with each other in a way that challenges, changes, and impacts readers.

Synonyms for Silence, traverses a terrain of terror and wonder. These sharp, brief lyrics and prose poems subject the world to ethical and metaphysical scrutiny, examining the familiar as well as the unknowable aspects of human existence and contrasting our transient chemical reality with our ability to manifest meaning. Through his use of potent, sometimes perplexing metaphors and vivid, often surreal imagery, Molotkov places readers in the moment of choice, of truth, of suffering, and honors it with tenderness and care, offering solace through shared humanity.
 

John Sibley Williams is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another,  Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. He has also served as editor of two Northwest poetry anthologies, Alive at the Center and Motionless from the Iron Bridge. A nineteen-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Laux/Millar Prize, Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, The 46er Prize, Nancy D. Hargrove Editors' Prize, Confrontation Poetry Prize, and Vallum Award for Poetry. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a teacher and literary agent. John holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Rivier University and an MA in Book Publishing from Portland State University. He teaches literary arts at A Renaissance School of Art and Science and Book Publishing at Portland Community College. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his partner, twin toddlers, and a voracious Boston Terrier.
 

Anatoly Molotkov was born in Russia, moved to the US in 1990 and switched to writing in English in 1993. His poetry collections are The Catalog of Broken Things, Application of Shadows and Synonyms for Silence.  He has been published by Kenyon, Iowa, Antioch, Massachusetts, Atlanta, Bennington and Tampa Reviews, Pif, Volt, 2 River View and many more, Molotkov is winner of various fiction and poetry contests and an Oregon Literary Fellowship. His translation of a Chekhov story was included by Knopf in their Everyman Series. He co-edits The Inflectionist Review.

The event is free and open to the public. Grass Roots will have books available for purchase. 

Corvallis-Benton Public Library Main Meeting Room
645 NW Monroe Ave, Corvallis

Join Philomath resident Janice Stanger, Ph.D., author of The Perfect Formula Diet for a talk about protein. This talk will cover the basic facts about protein in language that everyone can understand. Once you know the basic facts about your body and nutrients, you can cut through current diet controversies, confidently making sound choices to reach your best health.

The event is free and open to the public. Grass Roots will have books available for purchase.

OSU Milam Auditorium
2520 SW Campus Way, Corvallis

Christopher Browning, an emeritus professor of history at the University of North Carolina and previously a member of the History Department at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, ranks among the most honored and respected of all Holocaust historians. He has authored more than a dozen books on the Holocaust, and several are classics. Widely known and admired for Ordinary Men, his study of an SS police battalion that was responsible for the killing or deportation of about 70,000 Polish Jews during 1942-43, he has also written extensively on the evolution of the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe, his book, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 being perhaps the best known and most cited studies of this crucial issue.

The event is free and open to the public. Grass Roots will have books available for purchase.

Valley Library Rotunda
201 SW Waldo Pl, Corvallis
 

John Larison was born in Oregon.  The son of National Geographic filmmakers, much of his childhood was spent traveling, often staying in remote tropical or mountainous regions. He attended the University of Oregon and studied philosophy and literature, and stayed to earn a Master’s of Education. For several years, he worked as a fly-fishing guide and high school English teacher, writing fiction in the evenings.  In 2005, he left both jobs to earn a MFA at Oregon State University.

To piece together a living in the years following, Larison worked as a freelance writer for outdoor magazines, an adjunct writing instructor, and a fly-fishing guide, specializing in running small boats through heavy whitewater. His first book was a how-to text on fly-fishing, The Complete Steelheader. He went on to publish two fishing related novels Northwest of Normal and Holding Lies; in late 2009, he began work on the novel that would become Whiskey When We’re Dry.

 

In the spring of 1885, seventeen-year-old Jessilyn Harney finds herself orphaned and alone on her family’s homestead. Desperate to fend off starvation and predatory neighbors, she cuts off her hair, binds her chest, saddles her beloved mare, and sets off across the mountains to find her outlaw brother Noah and bring him home.

Wrestling with her brother’s outlaw identity, and haunted by questions about her own, Jess must outmaneuver those who underestimate her, ultimately rising to become a hero in her own right. Told in Jess’s wholly original and unforgettable voice, Whiskey When We’re Dry is a stunning achievement, an epic as expansive as America itself–and a reckoning with the myths that are entwined with our history.

The event is free and open to the public. Grass Roots will have books available for purchase. 

Grass Roots Books
227 SW 2nd Street

In Ungovernable, Therese invites readers to “set yourselves free from the agonizing pressures of twenty-first-century parenting” and take a trip back in time to learn about the backwards, pseudoscientific, and downright bizarre childrearing fashions of the nineteenth century. Sourced from actual advice books of the era (mostly written by men) and over 170 photographs, Ungovernable advises on how to be sure you’re not too ugly, sickly, or stupid to breed; which positions and room decor will help you conceive a son; how much beer, wine, cyanide, and heroin to consume while pregnant; which foods won’t turn your children into sexual deviants; how to choose the best birching cane--and so much more! This book will make readers laugh, grimace, and be very thankful for modern childcare.

Therese Oneill is the New York Times bestselling author of Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage and Manners. She can be found online at www.writerthereseoneill.com.

The event is free and open to the public. Grass Roots will have books available for purchase.

Valley Library Rotunda
201 SW Waldo Pl, Corvallis

Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir, Whip Smart, and the essay collection, Abandon Me, which The New Yorker called, “mesmerizing.” Abandon Me was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, a Publishing Triangle Award finalist, an Indie Next Pick, and widely named a Best Book of 2017. Febos is the inaugural winner of the Jean Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary and the recipient of the 2017 Sarah Verdone Writing Award from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Her work has recently appeared in Tin House, Granta, The Believer, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Lenny Letter, The Guardian, and Vogue. Her essays have been anthologized widely, winning prizes from Prairie Schooner, Story Quarterly, and The Center for Women Writers at Salem College. She is a three-time MacDowell Colony fellow and has also received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation, The BAU Institute, Ragdale, and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Monmouth University and serves on the Board of Directors for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.

The event is free and open to the public. Grass Roots will have books available for purchase. 

Corvallis-Benton Public Library Main Meeting Room
645 NW Monroe Ave, Corvallis
 

A reading honoring past award-winning Oregon Poet Laureates, William Stafford (1990-1995) and Peter Sears (2014-2016), who are celebrated annually by the Willamette Writers on the River.

William Stafford was named Consultant to Poetry to the Library of Congress, the position now known as national Poet Laureate. He then served as Oregon's Poet Laureate from 1990 until 1995.  He taught at Lewis and Clark college for many years, and won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1963.

Peter Sears, Poet Laureate in 2014, helped co-found The Friends of William Stafford Literary Foundation. He also taught at Reed College, Bard and Pacific University, and he died on July of 2017 at his home in Corvallis.

The event is free and open to the public. Grass Roots will have books available for purchase.

Grass Roots Books
227 SW 2nd Street
 

Every January, Skye Clancy’s mother slips into despair on the anniversary of a devastating storm that claimed her sister. But no one is allowed to talk about it, or any of the other strange deaths that have haunted the family. This January, days before Skye’s 14th birthday, a new set of vicious storms are unleashed upon her small Oregon Coast town. Clues begin to appear, and Skye realizes that the weather is tormenting her family above all others, and has been for decades. As a family legacy of death and destruction by terrible weather is revealed, and in the face of nature’s fury, Skye embarks on a journey into the wild woods of Oregon—and into the past—to solve the mystery and reverse the curse. 

This mystery, inspired by the unpredictable Coastal Oregon weather, is the  first collaboration with Kim Cooper Findling and her daughter, Libby Findling. The story is riddled with Oregon-centric themes and familiar landscapes where the main character Skye takes readers on a thrilling journey.

 

Kim and Libby spent three years writing The Sixth Storm and pitching it to agents and publishers. In that process, the opportunity to purchase a small book publishing company came up and Kim could not refuse. So in addition to releasing this book, Kim will help hundreds of authors realize their dreams of publishing their own work through Dancing Moon Press, a 22-year-old Oregon independent book publishing company.

The event is free and open to the public. Grass Roots will have books available for purchase.

Grass Roots Books
227 SW 2nd Street
 

Travel the Cosmos with two very unique and wonderful space science-fiction writers Bridget Tyler and Francesca Varela. In Tyler’s The Pioneer, Jo steps onto her new planet for the first time, and she’s ready to put her tragic past behind her to begin again. But underneath the idyllic surface of the Watson family's new home, something is very wrong. And when Jo accidentally uncovers a devastating secret that could destroy everything her family has worked for she is faced with a terrible choice - do the right thing for her family...or do the right thing. With the fate of the pioneers in her hands, Jo must decide how far she’s willing to go to expose the truth—before the truth destroys them all.

Francesca Varela’s novel The Seas of Distant Stars takes place on the planet of Deeyae, following a girl named Agapanthus who was kidnapped when she was only two years old, but she doesn’t remember it. In fact, she doesn’t remember her home planet at all. All she knows is Deeyae, the land of two suns; the land of great, red waters. Her foster-family cares for her, and at first that’s enough. But, as she grows older, Agapanthus is bothered by the differences between them. As an Exchanger, she’s frail and tall, not short and strong. And, even though she was raised Deeyan, she certainly isn’t treated like one. One day, an Exchanger boy completes the Deeyan rite-of-passage, and Agapanthus is inspired to try the same. But, when she teams up with him, her quest to become Deeyan transforms into her quest to find the truth―of who she is, and of which star she belongs to.
 

Bridget Tyler spent her childhood pretending to live in strange and thrilling new worlds. Now that she's an adult...nothing has changed. Bridget writes stories set in all her favorite imaginary places for television, film, and now books. She lives in Corvallis with her husband, who is a robotics professor, and their toddler, who is not a robot. Probably.

Francesca Varela was raised in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. In 2015, she graduated from the University of Oregon with degrees in Environmental Studies and Creative Writing, and she then went on to receive her master’s degree in Environmental Humanities from the University of Utah. Francesca’s dream of becoming an author began in third grade, and her writing career had an early start; she wrote her award-winning first novel, Call of the Sun Child, when she was only 18 years old. When not writing or reading, Francesca enjoys playing piano, figure skating, hiking, identifying wild birds, plants, and constellations, and travelling to warm, sunny places whenever she can.

The event is free and open to the public. Grass Roots will have books available for purchase.