Join us as we welcome author Tim Spofford for a conversation about his new book What The Children Told Us. Tim will discuss the lives and work of Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark, including Clark/Phipps genealogy (guided by vintage family photos), the Doctors’ famous Doll Test, and their roles as Black activists, humanitarians and intellectualists in Springfield, MA and nationally.
This event is drop-in and masks will be required.
Author Bio:
Tim Spofford’s writing career was inspired by the May 1970 slayings on the Kent and Jackson State campuses amid antiwar unrest. He wrote Lynch Street, the only book about the black students slain in Mississippi. A writing career focused on racial issues in education followed the completion of his first book.
For seven years, Spofford covered educational policymaking for the Albany Times Union, including at the NYS Education Department, the NYS Legislature and the 64-campus State University of New York system. He often interviewed Kenneth Clark, a policymaker on the NYS Board of Regents.
Spofford has taught writing and journalism in schools and colleges and has a Doctor of Arts in English degree from the State University at Albany. He’s published articles in the New York Times, Newsday, Mother Jones, Columbia Journalism Review and other publications. He also worked as a copy editor, most recently at the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, where he coached young editors. Spofford is an avid but unaccomplished hiker, swimmer and landscaper. He lives with his wife, Barbara, in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Lee, Massachusetts.
Join the Library and Meat for Tea in welcoming local authors Jane Yolen and Peter Tacy! Jane and Peter will read selections from “The Black Dog Poems” (pub. 2022), and other works, including pairs of poems written by them that they call “back and forth poetry”. Masks are required at this in-person program.
Author Bios:
Jane Yolen is best known as the author of many best-selling and award-winning children’s books. However, among her 400 published books are 14 books of adult poetry — many of which have recently won awards, including the Sophie Brody Medal and the Sydney Taylor Body of Work Award. Her husband Peter Tacy is a retired independent-school educator. He and Jane first met through their shared interest in poetry during the 1950’s, when they were at Smith and Williams Colleges; but then they went separate ways and into separate marriages — until, both widowed, they re-connected and began writing with and to each other in 2019. They divide their time between Jane’s home in Hatfield and Peter’s in Mystic, CT.
Pick up a copy of the book at the Library. Please RSVP at tinyurl.com/ewml-women-clothes
Join us for an informal discussion about how women use fashion/clothing as a means of self-expression, self-care, as armor or disguise, to reinvent themselves, to transform how others see them, to communicate, or to enhance confidence and individuality. Please book-mark your favorite sections of “Women in Clothes,” and share your thoughts about your relationship with clothing, shopping, and what influences your daily ritual of getting dressed.
“Women in Clothes,” the 2014 book edited by the novelist-critics Sheila Heti and Heidi Julavits and the artist Leanne Shapton, is a compilation of lessons, fears and wishes. It pushes against the prevailing rules that have governed women’s self-presentation for thousands of years.
As mentioned in this 2014 New York Times article, Sheila Weiss writes, “The book began as a survey consisting of an “ever-evolving” list of questions that the editors sent out to more than 600 women… The questions are provocative and psychological. They suggest that a closet is an archive of emotion. The questions also resist the idea, commonly held, that paying too much attention to dress is frivolous… Clothing is as much a means for defiance and privacy as it is a vehicle for pleasing self-presentation.”
Susan W. Berry MS, MFA, CHC, CIC is a Certified Holistic Health Coach and Certified Personal Style, Wardrobe and Image Consultant. She resides in Easthampton, MA.