Month: February 2011

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Ferry Plaza Book Party: Diane LeBow, MJ Pramik and Travelers’ Tales

Linda Watanabe McFerrin

LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK PARTY: Diane LeBow, MJ Pramik & Kate Crawford

 

 

 

 

bestwtw2010_sMonday, March 14, 6pm
Book Passage || Ferry Plaza
San Francisco || www.bookpassage.com

Please join our Left Coast Writers Travelers’ Tales Solas Award winners and honorees and contributors to The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010 for an evening of wine and wonderful stories about travel. Diane LeBow will read from her Afghan story, “Tea in Kabul,” winner of the Solas Gold Award for Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010. MJ Pramik will read from her Solas Award winning tale about Running in Puglia. Kate Crawford will be reading from her Solas Award winning story, “Elephant Driving 101.”

Since the publication of A Woman’s World in 1995, Travelers’ Tales has been publishing award-winning books by and for women. They continue this tradition with The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010, the sixth collection in our annual series guaranteed to inspire women to take their first trip—or to continue exploring the world with wit, soul, and verve, as so many adventurous women do each and every day.

This best-selling, award-winning series presents the finest accounts of women who have traveled to the ends of the earth to discover new places, peoples — and themselves. The common threads connecting the stories are a woman’s perspective and lively storytelling to make the reader laugh, cry, wish she were there, or be glad she wasn’t. From climbing a volcano in Ecuador to running a kennel for pariah dogs in India to helping prepare meals in Iran, the points of view and perspectives are global and the themes eclectic, including stories that encompass spiritual growth, hilarity and misadventure, high adventure, romance, solo journeys, stories of service to humanity, family travel, and encounters with exotic cuisine.

In The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010:

  • A search for the perfect wave in New Zealand provides a lesson in love
  • Curiosity leads to an understanding of political activism and human rights in Burma
  • A childless American is adopted by a six-year-old and becomes part of the family in Italy
  • Cultural understanding deepens in surprising ways through language lessons in
    Vietnam
  • On a fact-finding mission in Afghanistan, a retired professor learns that peace is
    everything
  • A day on a nude beach in the Netherlands gives a self-described “prude” a new appreciation of body types, and comfort with her own
    …and much more.Travelers’ Tales books luxuriate in that complicated, beautiful, shadowy place where the best stories begin, and the most compelling characters roam free.”
    —ForeWord Magazine

Book Party: Joanna Biggar

Linda Watanabe McFerrin
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LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK PARTY:  Joanna Biggar, Author of That Paris Year

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Joanna Biggar

Saturday, March 12, 2011 || 7pm
Book Passage-Corte Madera || 51 Tamal Vista Dr.
Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

Spring travel is already in the air! Allow yourself to be carried away to Paris by Joanna Biggar. We’ll supply the wine and snacks.

Who has not dreamed of escaping to Paris? When wildfire ravished the landscape of Los Angeles, five young co-eds, house-mates in the rundown Maison Française, found the freedom to pursue that dream. They set sail on a rusty boat in the summer of 1962 determined to enroll in the Sorbonne. It was as if Mary McCarthy’s “Group” had landed on a mystifying Left Bank, exotic and compelling as Durrell’s Alexandria. What they lost was more than their virginity, their bad American accents, and their beloved clichés about “meaning”; what they gained, as they traded notes, clothes, dreams, loves and identities was the gift of geography — the tectonic shift that occurs upon discovering that place, native or adopted, is an integral part of who we are.

Joanna Biggar turned twenty in Paris, where she was a student at the Sorbonne, and went on to earn degrees in Chinese language and French literature. Since then she has chaired a school board in Ghana, traveled solo to remote regions of China, worked as a journalist in Washington, D.C., and taught inner-city school students in Oakland, California, where she lives. She is married, has five adult children and six grandchildren, who love books. A member of the Society of Woman Geographers, her special places of the heart remain France and the California coast.

Literary Salon: Faith Adiele

Linda Watanabe McFerrin
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LEFT COAST WRITERS LITERARY SALON: Faith Adiele, PEN Beyond Margins Award winner and Author of Meeting Faith

Faith Adiele

Faith Adiele

Monday, March 7, 2011 || 7pm
Book Passage || Corte Madera
51 Tamal Vista Drive, Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

Faith Adiele is the author of Meeting Faith (W.W. Norton), a travel memoir about becoming Thailand’s first black Buddhist nun, which received thePEN Beyond Margins Award for Best Memoir of 2004. A Publishers Weekly starred review credited it with “a comic’s timing, a novelist’s keen observations about human idiosyncrasies and an anthropologist’s sensitivity to race and culture.”

She is also lead editor of the international collection, Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology (The New Press, 2008), and writer/narrator/subject of the PBS documentary My Journey Home. The film documents Adiele’s experiences—similar to President Obama’s—growing up with a Nordic-American single mother and traveling to Nigeria as an adult to find her father and siblings.

Educated at Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Adiele has taught in the Creative Nonfiction MFAProgram at the University of Pittsburgh, held the Christa Corrigan McAuliffe Chair at Framingham State College, and served as Rachel B. Noel Distinguished Visiting Professor at Metropolitan State College; she is presently the DistinguishedVisiting Writer at Mills College in Oakland, California.

Adiele has published or been featured in such periodicals as O magazine, Ploughshares, Marie Claire, Creative Nonfiction, Essence, Transition, Pink magazine, Tricycle, The Root.com, and in numerous anthologies. The recipient of a UNESCO International Artists Bursary, two Best American Essays shortlists, and the Millennium Award from Creative Nonfiction, she is currently at work on Twins: Growing UpNigerian/Nordic/American, a social/cultural memoir that will complete the story begun in the PBS documentary. Her work is newly out in two great anthologies: The Word: Black Writers Talk about the Transformative Power of Reading and Writing and The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World.

Visit her at adiele.com.

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