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Authors and Artists
Greg Mortenson
Tuesday, February 19th 11:15-12:35 in the
Saville Theatre at City College:
One Book-One San Diego author Greg Mortenson
will discuss Three Cups of Tea: One Man's
Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time
In
1993 a mountaineer named Greg Mortenson drifted into an impoverished
Pakistan village in the Karakoram mountains after a failed attempt to
climb K2. Moved by the inhabitants' kindness, he promised to return and
build a school. Three Cups of Tea is the story of that promise
and its extraordinary outcome. Over the next decade Mortenson built not
just one but fifty-five schools--especially for girls--in the forbidding
terrain that gave birth to the Taliban. His story is at once a riveting
adventure and a testament to the power of the humanitarian spirit.
Dean Calbreath
Wednesday, March 12th 11:15-12:35 in the Saville
Theatre at City College:
San Diego Union-Tribune Reporter Dean Calbreath
will discuss The Wrong Stuff: The Extraordinary Saga of Randy "Duke"
Cunningham, the Most Corrupt Congressman Ever Caught
The Pulitzer Prize-winning team
that uncovered the biggest bribery scandal in congressional history
tells the colorfully sordid story of a scandal reaching into the highest
levels of the CIA, the Pentagon, and the Congress.
Duke Cunningham was an All-American success story. The
Midwestern boy who went off to war, became a hero and rode his fame into
Congress, he even bragged that Tom Cruise played him in a popular movie.
But the fall of this "Top Gun" was almost as epic and just as cinematic.
Today he sits in prison, branded as the most corrupt member of Congress
in U.S. history.
To the public, Cunningham was a heroic family man. In
reality, he was a hard-drinking, partisan bully with a lavish sense of
entitlement and feckless moral compass. In the end, he fed rogues like
Brent Wilkes and Mitch Wade millions of dollars in vital post-9/11
contracts in exchange for millions in bribes.
Now, the journalists who won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for
sending Cunningham to prison uncover new details in a story still
unfolding in Washington. The Wrong Stuff chronicles Cunningham's
rise and his ignominious fall. It is the saga of a man strong enough to
brave enemy fire but too weak to resist the corrupt contractors and
lobbyists in the nation's capitol. It is also the story of the dark side
of Washington today.
Susan Straight and Bill Luvaas
Tuesday, April 15 12:45-2:10 in D121 at City College:
Award-winning writers Susan Straight and Bill Luvaas
will read from
their works
Susan Straight was born and
raised in Riverside, Calif., which she claims was the methamphetamine
capital of the world. She earned a scholarship to the University of
Southern California, where she did not study with TC Boyle, and in 1984
received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where
she did study with James Baldwin. Her first short story for Zoetrope,
“Mines,” was included in Best American Short Stories 2003. She
has published six novels: I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out
All the Pots; Aquaboogie; Blacker Than a Thousand
Midnights, The Gettin Place; Highwire Moon (a finalist for
the 2002 National Book Award), and most recently, A Million
Nightingales. She has also written essays and articles for the
New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and
Harper’s Magazine. Straight is currently the director of the
creative writing department at University of California, Riverside, and
lives in Riverside with her three daughters. In November 2007, Straight
won the prestigious Lannan Award for literary excellence. Click
here for more
information.
William Luvaas's new collection of short stories, A
Working Man's Apocrypha, depicts the struggles of everyday people
facing situations far from the ordinary. Through tales set largely in
Souther California's Inland Empire, Luvaas weaves magic and absurdity
around characters caught between apocalypse and heartbreak. "In
these fierce and eloquent stories, William Luvaas ... turns ordinary
situations into extraordinary and haunting encounters that you won't
soon forget." --Alan Davis, author of Alone with the Owl
William Luvaas, who teaches creative writing and literature
at San Diego State University, is the author of The Seductions of
Natalie Bach and Going Under. His short fiction, reviews, and
essays have appeared in the American Literary Review, Antioch Review,
Cosmopolitan, The Village Voice, Harper's Weekly, and Glimmer
Train.
Jeannie Cheatham
Wednesday, April 23rd 7-9 pm in
the Saville Theatre at City College:
In Concert with Jazz 88, the Literary Center Presents the Legendary
Jeannie Cheatham who will play with her band and read from her new
memoir “Meet Me with Your Black Drawers On”: My Life in Music
Jeannie Cheatham is a living
legend in jazz and blues. A pianist, singer, songwriter, and co-leader
of the Sweet Baby Blues Band, she has played and sung with many of the
greats in blues and jazz—T-Bone Walker, Dinah Washington, Cab Callaway,
Joe Williams, Al Hibbler, Odetta, and Jimmy Witherspoon. Cheatham toured
with Big Mama Thornton off and on for ten years and was featured with
Thornton and Sippie Wallace in the award-winning PBS documentary
Three Generations of the Blues. Her music, which has garnered
national and international acclaim, has been described as unrestrained,
exuberant, soulful, rollicking, wicked, virtuous, wild, and truthful.
Cheatham's signature song, "Meet Me with Your Black Drawers On" is a
staple in jazz and blues clubs across America and in Europe, Africa, and
Japan.
In this delightfully frank autobiography, Jeannie Cheatham
recalls a life that has been as exuberant, virtuous, wild, and truthful
as her music. She begins in Akron, Ohio, where she grew up in a vibrant
multiethnic neighborhood surrounded by a family of strong women. From
those roots, she launched a musical career that took her from the
Midwest to California, doing time along the way everywhere from a jail
cell in Dayton, Ohio, where she was innocently caught in a police raid,
to the University of Wisconsin-Madison—where she and Jimmy Cheatham
taught music. Cheatham writes of a life spent fighting racism and
sexism, of rage and resolve, misery and miracles, betrayals and
triumphs, of faith almost lost in dark places, but mysteriously regained
in a flash of light. Cheatham's autobiography is also the story of her
fifty-years-and-counting love affair and musical collaboration with her
husband and band partner, Jimmy Cheatham.
City
Works 2008 Reading
Saturday, May 3rd 1-3 in B103 at City College:
City Works 2008 Reading Celebrating Student Fiction, Poetry,
Creative Non-Fiction Award Winners and the San Diego City Works Press
Student Chapbook Winner along with Featured Local Writer Aida Mendez,
Founder and Organizer of the Acanto Y Laurel Poetry Project in Tijuana
*Dates and times subject to
change*
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