This event will take place virtually on Zoom. Click the button above to register.

Join the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith for a virtual event with Dr. Ravi Shankar to discuss and celebrate the release of his new memoir Correctional. He will be in conversation with writer Linda Jaivin.

The first time Ravi Shankar was arrested, he spoke out against racist policing on National Public Radio and successfully sued the city of New York. The second time, he was incarcerated when his promotion to full professor was finalized. During his ninety-day pretrial confinement at the Hartford Correctional Center—a level 4, high-security urban jail in Connecticut—he met men who shared harrowing and heart-felt stories. The experience taught him about the persistence of structural racism, the limitations of mass media, and the pervasive traumas of twenty-first-century daily life.

Shankar’s bold and complex self-portrait—and portrait of America—challenges us to rethink our complicity in the criminal justice system and mental health policies that perpetuate inequity and harm. Correctional dives into the inner workings of his mind and heart, framing his unexpected encounters with law and order through the lenses of race, class, privilege, and his bicultural upbringing as the first and only son of South Indian immigrants. Vignettes from his early life set the scene for his spectacular fall and subsequent struggle to come to terms with his own demons. Many of them, it turns out, are also our own.

Dr. Ravi Shankar is a Pushcart prize-winning poet, translator and professor who has published fifteen books, including the Muse India award-winning translations Andal: The Autobiography of a Goddess and The Many Uses of Mint: New and Selected Poems 1997-2017. Along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he co-edited W.W. Norton’s Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond called “a beautiful achievement for world literature” by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer. He has taught and performed around the world and appeared in print, radio, and TV in such venues as The New York Times, NPR, BBC and the PBS Newshour. He has won awards to the Corporation of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, fellowships from the Rhode Island and Connecticut Council on the Arts, founded one of the oldest electronic journals of the arts Drunken Boat, is Chairman of the Asia Pacific Writers & Translators (APWT) and recently finished his PhD from the University of Sydney. He teaches creative writing at Tufts University.

Moderator Linda Jaivin is an American-born, internationally published Australian essayist, novelist, translator, cultural commentator, travel writer and specialist writer on China. Her books include The Shortest History of China as well as the memoir The Monkey and the Dragon, the long-form Quarterly Essay Found in Translation and seven novels including The Infernal Optimist, which is set in an Australian immigration detention centre. Her website is www.lindajaivin.com.au.

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Screenwriter and activist George M. Johnson’s 2020 book All Boys Aren’t Blue was a “memoir-manifesto,” offering young people, especially queer Black boys, a testimony of Johnson’s own adolescent experiences blended with reflections on gender identity, consent, toxic masculinity, and Black joy. Their new memoir, We Are Not Broken, is similarly both deeply personal and emphatically universal, as the author explores the close relationships between them, their brother, and their cousins, all growing up under the loving, wise, no-nonsense guidance of their grandmother, known as “Nanny.” Under Nanny’s eye, George and their cousins become aware of racial injustice, George embraces their queer identity . . . and they all grasp on to their abiding, fierce love for one another. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly calls We Are Not Broken “an intensely emotional, stunning read.” In this keynote session sponsored by Simmons University, Johnson will discuss their memoir with Nicholl Montgomery, a lecturer in children’s literature at Simmons.

Donations made during registration or during the session will go to support the Boston Book Festival’s Shelf Help Partnership, providing brand-new books and an author/illustrator visit to Boston-area public schools. This year’s recipient schools are Josiah Quincy Elementary School in Chinatown and Chelsea High School in Chelsea. Thank you for your support!

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Join three writers as they discuss their different, difficult, and fascinating paths. As one of the few Black women to obtain a PhD in physics in the United States, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein encountered more than a few bumps on the road to becoming a cosmologist. Her memoir, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, is described in a starred review in Publishers Weekly as “a resonant paean to the beauties of the cosmos and a persuasive appeal for solutions to injustices in science.” Brian Broometells a raw coming-of-age story in Punch Me Up to the Gods. Described in numerous glowing reviews as “electrifying,” “staggering,” and “brilliant,” it creatively employs Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool” as a framing device. Kim McLarin, in James Baldwin’s Another Country Bookmarked, uses the themes of Baldwin’s novel to mirror her own experiences with life, love, and creativity. As Shelf Awareness writes in its starred review, McLarin “seamlessly traverses the boundaries of literary criticism, personal essay and cultural critique.” Kelley Chunn, principal of cause marketing firm Kelley Chunn & Associates, will lead the conversation. Sponsored by Arbella Insurance Foundation.

The post Boston Book Festival: Memoir: Finding Your Way as a Black Person in a White World appeared first on Literary Massachusetts.

About the Book

A neurobiologist reexamines the personal nature of perception in this groundbreaking guide to a new model for our senses.

We think of perception as a passive, mechanical process, as if our eyes are cameras and our ears microphones. But as neurobiologist Susan R. Barry argues, perception is a deeply personal act. Our environments, our relationships, and our actions shape and reshape our senses throughout our lives. This idea is no more apparent than in the cases of people who gain senses as adults. Barry tells the stories of Liam McCoy, practically blind from birth, and Zohra Damji, born deaf, in the decade following surgeries that restored their senses. As Liam and Zohra learned entirely new ways of being, Barry discovered an entirely new model of the nature of perception. Coming to Our Senses is a celebration of human resilience and a powerful reminder that, before you can really understand other people, you must first recognize that their worlds are fundamentally different from your own.

About the Author

Susan R. Barry received her Ph.D. in biology from Princeton University and is Professor Emeritus of biology and neuroscience at Mount Holyoke College.  In 2009, she published her first book, Fixing My Gaze: A Scientist’s Journey into Seeing in Three Dimensions which has been translated into seven languages and was voted the fourth-best science book of 2009 by the editors of Amazon.com.  In Fixing My Gaze, Sue describes her experience of gaining 3D vision after a lifetime of being stereoblind.  This experience heightened her interest in sensory recovery which is further pursued in her latest book, Coming to Our Senses: A Boy Who Learned to See, A Girl Who Learned to Hear, and How We All Discover the World.

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