The folks at Open Book -- home to the Loft Literary Center, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and Milkweed Editions -- are launching "Family Days," a series of events aimed at attracting a wider audience to all things literary. The first one, open to everyone but focusing on the American Indian community, will take place Saturday, Dec. 18, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m..
The performance hall will host readings from Little Earth youth and teen writers, presentations by poet Heid Erdrich and poet and playwright Marcie Rendon, a performance by Little Earth lyricist Stuart "Big S2" Perkins, and a reading by Drew Hayden Taylor, author of "The Night Wanderer." Taylor, an Ojibwe from the Curve Lake First Nation in Ontario, has been writer-in-residence at the University of Michigan, the University of Western Ontario and the University of Lüneburg in Germany.
All events are free and family-friendly. The next Family Day, planned for February, will focus on Hmong community writers.
Also ...
•"Sober Cannibals, Drunken Christians: Melville, Kierkegaard, and Tragic Optimism in Polarized Worlds" has been published by Mercer University Press. The book's author, Jamie Lorentzen, is chairman of the Friends of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College in Northfield.
•Pete Hautman's latest book for middle-school readers, "The Big Crunch," will be published in January by Scholastic Press. Hautman and his wife, Mary Logue, will be Club Book speakers next spring.
•The Minnesota Historical Society Press has published "Superheroes, Strip Artists, and Talking Animals," a compendium of Minnesota cartoonists compiled and edited by Britt Aamodt.
•"Keeping Score on Ballard Street," a collection of comic strips by Minnesota artist Jerry Van Amerongen, has been published by Syren Books. Van Amerongen's comic strip, "Ballard Street," was twice named Best Newspaper Cartoon Panel of the Year.
