The Power of Employee Resource Groups: Book Launch!
The Power of Employee Resource Groups: Book Launch!
Tue, Aug 23, 6:30 PM
1730 E Holly Ave • El Segundo, CA
$21 - $31
Book Launch! 2 Revere Place by Aruni Wijesinghe
Date and time
An evening to celebrate Aruni Wijesinghe's release of 2 Revere Place, with readings by David Rocklin & Natalie J. Graham
About this event
Masks Required.
ABOUT 2 Revere Place
In 2 Revere Place, Aruni Wijesinghe unfolds her family's first ten years in the United States through a gently curated collection of poems. The lush narrative moves from Sri Lankan beaches through apartment living in the Bronx to a quiet Rockland County suburb, leaving a trail of exquisite details charting the journey. Wijesinghe chronicles her family's evolution into Americans through the eyes of a child learning what it means to hold two countries inside herself. Her reflections on the past glimmer with firefly light while calling the immigrant experience of 1970's America into laser focus. Part memoir and part coming-of-age story, 2 Revere Place invites readers to live inside tender skin that tiptoes the line between cultures.
ABOUT Begin with a Failed Body: Poems
This collection of poems begins rooted in the landscape of the U.S. South as it voices singular lives carved out of immediate and historical trauma. While these poems dwell in the body, often meditating on its frailty and desire, they also question the weight that literary, historical, and religious icons are expected to bear. Within the vast scope of this volume, the poems arc from a pig farmer's funeral to Georges de la Tour's paintings and Toni Morrison's Beloved. With an ear tuned to the lift and lilt of speech, they wring song from sorrow and plant in every dirge a seed of jubilation. Rich in clarity and decisive in her attention to image, Natalie J. Graham writes resonant, lush poetry.
ABOUT The Night Language
Bronze medal winner for the Foreword INDIES Award for best LGBT FictionThe Night Language tells the story of a young man, Prince Alamayou of Abyssinia (present day Ethiopia), who is taken from his home and the Abyssinian war to the court of Queen Victoria--a world he knows nothing about. With him is Philip Layard, a young apprentice to one of the doctors on the battlefield in Abyssinia, who becomes Alamayou's guardian, only friend, and eventually, the love of his life. When Parliament accuses Alamayou of murder, the young prince is sentenced to return to Abyssinia where he will be executed. Alamayou's only hope comes from the very thing that cannot be uttered: the unexpected and forbidden love between him and Philip.
Inspired by true events, The Night Language is a unique novel of love, loss, and the consequences of repressive societies.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Aruni Wijesinghe is a project manager, ESL teacher, erstwhile belly dance instructor and occasional sous chef; she now, strangely, adds poet to this list. Her debut poetry collection, 2 Revere Place, is a love letter to her family and miraculous childhood in New York. You can follow her at www.aruniwrites.com
David Rocklin is a novelist living in Los Angeles. His previous two novels were The Luminist (published in the U.S with Hawthorne and in Italy with Neri Pozza) and Foreward LGBTQIA award-winning The Night Language(published with Rare Bird - https://www.newsweek.com/what-read-fall-new-books-brooklyn-book-festival-667803). He hosts and curates a popular monthly reading series based in Los Angeles, speaks on panels and at conferences, and is creating a writers retreat to be based in Idyllwild, CA.
Natalie J. Graham, a native of Gainesville, Florida, earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Florida and Ph.D. in American Studies at Michigan State University as a University Distinguished Fellow. She is a full professor in the Department of African American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, where she leads the Institute of Black Intellectual Innovation. Dr. Graham has also coordinated art-centered community events, workshops, and readings for hundreds of participants as the Production Director of KayJo Creatives. She is an award-winning author and performer who has toured nationally with her collection of poems, Begin with a Failed Body. Her poems and articles have been published in San Francisco Chronicle, Obsidian, New England Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Journal of Popular Culture, and Transition. In August 2021, Dr. Graham was appointed the inaugural Poet Laureate of Orange County. Find her on IG @NatalieJoGraham.
Notes on parking in Larchmont Village:
Chevalier's does not have any parking, but there is paid meter parking on the street, a paid lot next to the bank, and free street parking parallel the Larchmont Blvd. on Lucerne Blvd.