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  • Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

    The beloved classic that turned Carson McCullers into an overnight literary sensation and one of the Modern Library’s top 20 novels of the 20th century. In a Georgia Mill town during the 1930s, an enigmatic John Singer, draws out the haunted confessions of an itinerant worker, a doctor, a widowed café owner, and a young girl. Each yearns for escape from small town life, but the young girl, Mick Kelly, the book’s heroine (loosely based on McCullers), finds solace in her music.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. 


  • Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

    Awe and exhilaration–along with heartbreak and mordant wit–abound in Lolita, Nabokov’s most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is a meditation on love–love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.

    “The only convincing love story of our century.” —Vanity Fair

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. 


     

  • Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is Ford Madox Ford’ The Good Soldier.

    One of the most important works of twentieth-century British literature, The Good Soldier addresses the lives and interrelationships between two couples: one American, one British. A tragicomic novel of manners, in which John Dowell narrates the disintegration of both his own and another marriage, the work’s depiction of passion and intrigue offers an ironic reading of Edwardian-era values.

    “One of the finest novels of our century.” –Graham Greene

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. 


  • 3rd Annual Toni Morrison Day Celebration

  • Supporting Systems and Communities in Achieving Racial Equality: A Groundwater Analysis – presented by Joyce James

    Voices for Change: Voting, Advocacy, and Action

    In this presentation, Ms. James will share her journey in developing the Texas Model for addressing Disproportionality and Disparities and the Groundwater Analysis for Addressing Racial Inequities© as the foundation for creating antiracist organizational cultures for undoing institutional and structural racism and improving outcomes for all populations. Participants will gain an increased understanding of the importance of cross systems collaborations and building partnerships with poor communities of color to remove the barriers that contribute to racial inequities. The session will include discussion of the pitfalls of well-meaning and well-intentioned leaders, who in isolation of an analysis of institutional and structural racism, and a racial equity lens, continue to unconsciously contribute to sustaining and often perpetuating racial inequities in the design and delivery of programs and services.

  • The Strengths of Black Families, presented by Denise McLane-Davison

    Voices for Change: Voting, Advocacy, and Action

    The political era of the Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, Gay Rights, and The Black Power Movement demanded the inclusion of rigorous research that centered racial and gender identity as significant narratives. The emergence of Black Studies and Women’s Studies, along with student-led and national organizations incorporating the same identity politics also demanded inclusion in intellectual landscapes. During this era Black social scientists blanketed the scholarship, theory, and treatment research that anchored African cultural values, traditions, knowledge, and generational behaviors as disruptive characteristics of pathologized Black family rhetoric. Collectively, cultural scholarship named the impact of adapting Black life to oppression and anti-Blackness policy. They declared the Black family as the fundamental source of strength of the Black community and as the defense for Black life from external threats. This session provides a historical and contemporary alignment on the Black strength perspective through racial pride, resistance, and resilience.

  • Emma Copley Eisenberg

    The Visiting Writer’s series is thrilled to return for the 2021-22 season! The first event of the year will feature Monmouth University Adjunct Professor and Writer-In-Residence, Emma Copley Eisenberg.

    Emma Copley Eisenberg’s fiction and nonfiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Granta, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, Guernica, The Washington Post Magazine, and others. Her first book of nonfiction is The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia which was a NYTimes notable book of 2020 and nominated for an Edgar and Lambda Literary Award. Raised in New York City, she lives in Philadelphia, where she co-directs Blue Stoop, a hub for the literary arts. Her next two books, a novel and a collection of short stories, are forthcoming from Hogarth (Penguin Random House).

    Eisenberg will be reading from her book, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia and copies will be available for purchase through the University bookstore at the event.

  • Tuesday Night Book Club: Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.

    Freedom, by the New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Franzen, is a masterly novel of contemporary love and marriage, a brilliant charting of the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, and the heavy weight of empire.

    Patty and Walter Berglund were the pioneers of old St. Paul—the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant garde of the Whole Foods generation. But now, in the new millennium, they have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter, once an environmental lawyer, taken a job working with Big Coal? Most startling of all, why has Patty, the perfect neighbor, turned into the local Fury? Patty and Walter Berglund are indelible characters, and their mistakes and joys, as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, have become touchstones of contemporary American reality.

    We are still waiting for more information about whether we will be able to hold this event in person. However, we are also committed to continuing offering access virtually to Tuesday Night Book Club for all our new audiences! You can register now for Zoom access to the event. When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. 


    Please stay tuned for more details about an in-person location for this event when more information becomes available. 

  • Tuesday Night Book Club: Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet. On a summer’s day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a sudden fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home?

    Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London. Neither parent knows that Hamnet will not survive the week. Hamnet is a novel inspired by the son of a famous playwright: a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, but whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays ever written.

    We are still waiting for more information about whether we will be able to hold this event in person. However, we are also committed to continuing offering access virtually to Tuesday Night Book Club for all our new audiences! You can register now for Zoom access to the event. When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. 
 

    Please stay tuned for more details about an in-person location for this event when more information becomes available. 

  • Tuesday Night Book Club: Patti Smith, Just Kids

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is Patti Smith, Just Kids.

    Patti Smith’s definitive memoir: an evocative, honest and moving coming-of-age story of her extraordinary relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe. In 1967, a chance meeting between two young people led to a romance and a lifelong friendship that would carry each to international success never dreamed of. The backdrop is Brooklyn, Chelsea Hotel, Max’s Kansas City, Scribner’s Bookstore, Coney Island, Warhol’s Factory and the whole city resplendent. Among their friends, literary lights, musicians and artists such as Harry Smith, Bobby Neuwirth, Allen Ginsberg, Sandy Daley, Sam Shepherd, William Burroughs, etc. It was a heightened time politically and culturally; the art and music worlds exploding and colliding. In the midst of all this two kids made a pact to always care for one another. Scrappy, romantic, committed to making art, they prodded and provided each other with faith and confidence during the hungry years–the days of cous-cous and lettuce soup.

    Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. Beautifully written, this is a profound portrait of two young artists, often hungry, sated only by art and experience. And an unforgettable portrait of New York, her rich and poor, hustlers and hellions, those who made it and those whose memory lingers near.

    We are still waiting for more information about whether we will be able to hold this event in person. However, we are also committed to continuing offering access virtually to Tuesday Night Book Club for all our new audiences! You can register now for Zoom access to the event. When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. 


    Please stay tuned for more details about an in-person location for this event when more information becomes available.