Time, again, for the holiday edition of Carol Connolly's Readings by Writers. Held in the graceful University Club in St. Paul, this month's event will include eight authors, with readings bookended by music from violinist Mary Scallen and flutist Jim Miller.

Featured writers include poets, novelists and memoirists -- Jill Breckenridge, N.M. Kelby and Sarah Stonich among them (full disclosure: I will be there, too), and books and holiday breads will be for sale.

The event is free, but Connolly will pass the hat in support of Public Art St. Paul's sidewalk poetry project. The sidewalks may be snow-covered now (or will be soon), but come spring you will want to look down and discover a poem at your feet.

It all begins at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at 420 Summit Av.

Meanwhile, the man himself, Garrison Keillor, will read from "A Christmas Blizzard" on Wednesday at the Virginia Swedenborgian Church near his bookstore in St. Paul. The book is Keillor's version of "A Christmas Carol," set in a raging blizzard in North Dakota on Christmas Eve. The free reading begins at 7:30 p.m. at 170 Virginia St.

Also ...

Dml -, Star Tribune
Garrison Keillor

• The winter/spring lineup of Talk of the Stacks, held at the Central Library on Nicollet Mall, has been announced. Gabrielle Hamilton, chef and author of the memoir "Blood, Bones and Butter," will be here Jan. 31; David Treuer, author of "Little" and the forthcoming "Rez Life," Feb. 21; and Benjamin Busch, actor from TV's "The Wire" and author of "Dust to Dust," March 27. All events are free. Doors open at 6:15 p.m. and talks begin at 7 p.m.

• "Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community," by Brenda J. Child, will be published in February by Viking Press. Child, a member of the Red Lake Ojibwe Nation, teaches at the University of Minnesota and is the author of "Boarding School Seasons."

• "Dorothy Molter: The Root Beer Lady," by Sara Guy-Levar and Terri Schocke, has been published by Adventure Publications. Molter lived in the BWCA for more than 50 years and grew famous for brewing her own root beer, which she gave to visitors at her wilderness cabin. Guy-Levar runs the Dorothy Molter Museum in Ely, where Schocke also works.

• "A Secret Keeps," a picture book by Marsha Wilson Chall, illustrated by Heather Solomon, will be published in the spring by Carolrhoda Books. Chall teaches at Hamline University in St. Paul.

• "Tallyrand and His World," a biography by Rosalynd Pflaum of Minneapolis, has been published by Afton Historical Society Press. Pflaum is the author of several other biographies, including one of Marie Curie.

• "What Boys Really Want," by Pete Hautman, will be published in January by Scholastic Books. Hautman, who lives in Minnesota, has won a National Book Award and several Minnesota Book Awards for his young-adult fiction.

• Sarah L. Sladek of Maple Grove has written "The End of Membership as We Know It: Building the Fortune-Flipping, Must-Have Association of the Next Century," published by the Center for Association Leadership.

• "Pitch," poems by Todd Boss, will be published in February by W.W. Norton. Boss lives in St. Paul. His previous book with Norton was "Yellowrocket."