Robin Maril — A Queer Guide to Saving American Democracy - with Charlotte Clymer — at Conn Ave
About This Event
Since the early 2000s, American courts and legislatures have delivered a series of generation-defining LGBTQ legal victories. Today, this progress and the very institutions that made it possible are under attack. A Queer Guide to Saving American Democracy is an introduction to this democratic crisis, speaking directly to the queer and transgender people navigating the intensifying political and cultural fault lines. It argues that the current denigration of queer and transgender lives in the US is a symptom of the broader degradation of American democracy, representing the newest threat of American fascism. By centering queer and trans identity in the larger history of authoritarianism, the book highlights the strategic villainization of nonconforming groups as a tool to consolidate power and political control. In response, this book empowers readers to adopt pro-democracy frameworks rooted in the defiant authenticity and stubborn joy of queer existence, forging pathways committed to transformative social change.Robin Maril is a writer and Constitutional Law professor based in Portland, Oregon. Her work engages questions of democratic integrity and the growing threat of fascism and authoritarian regimes within America. She also hosts the podcast A Queer Guide to Saving Democracy. She is a widely recognized scholar on LGBTQ rights and policy, Executive power, and the law of democracy. Before teaching, Robin worked in the LGBTQ civil rights movement at the Human Rights Campaign for nearly a decade. Robin began her legal career as a Presidential Management Fellow at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. She and her wife have two sons, two dogs, and an unknown number of snails. She is a proud graduate of the University of Oklahoma and Temple University Beasley School of Law.Maril will be in conversation with Charlotte Clymer, a writer and activist. She's the author of Charlotte's Web Thoughts, an award-winning Substack blog on politics, religion, and foreign policy.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.
About the Venue
Politics and Prose
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Claudia Rankine — Triage - with Sarah Blake and Kali Cyrus — at Conn Ave
A groundbreaking new direction for Claudia Rankine, the best-selling author of Citizen and Just UsClaudia Rankine has widened contemporary literature with her consciousness-raising, genre-defying works. In her first book after her celebrated American trilogy, presented with full-color visuals, Rankine shifts into sustained narrative, memory, criticism, and essay to offer her most personal and emotionally resonant writing yet.Triage follows the turbulent friendship between two composite characters, the narrator and the theorist, self-identified sisters struggling to define their wounded histories and their shared but separate lives. During college, they invent a game of collapse: Every time they see each other, they have to stop and fall to the ground. As their kinship continues off and on for decades, “collapse” takes on new meanings that are seen and felt in the violence of their pasts, artworks depicting couches where someone might ease their exhaustion, the ongoing devastation in Gaza, and the antagonism of their conversation and their love for each other.Triage is an argument for the necessity of grieving and the demand for action in our time of relentless loss. “No matter our posture,” Rankine writes, “we are all among the rubble.” This is a book for those complicated but beautiful friendships that we come to rely on to unsettle us, to make us better.Claudia Rankine is the author of Citizen: An American Lyric and four previous books, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Her work has appeared recently in the Guardian, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times Magazine, and the Washington Post. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, the winner of the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, and a contributing editor of Poets & Writers. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2016. Rankine is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.Rankine will be in conversation with Sarah Blake and Kali Cyrus.Sarah Blake is the author of Full Turn, a book of poems, and three novels: Grange House, and the New York Times bestsellers, The Postmistress and The Guest Book. She lives in Washington, DC.Kali D. Cyrus, MD, MPH is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins and practices in the DMV area. Known for her disarming sense of humor and grounded clinical, academic, and personal experience, she brings nuance to public conversations about race, identity, and conflict. She is also featured on Showtime’s hit series Couples Therapy as an on-screen consultant.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.
Raj Haldar - What Rhymes with Pterodactyl?: The Worst Rhyming Book Ever - in Conn Ave
About the Book: Ptolemy the Pterodactyl loves to write rhyming poetry and rap. He’s discovered that there are lots of tricky words in the English language like orange, gulf, and circus that don’t rhyme with anything. But, using slant rhyme and internal rhyme, Ptolemy and his crew of hip-hop word nerds have figured out how to make the most unrhymable words rhyme. When you read this book, be sure to make up some zany rhymes of your own, and you’ll be a rapper too! About the Author: Raj Haldar is an American rapper, composer, and producer, and best selling children's author. His first book book was P Is for Pterodactyl. bAlso known by his stage name Lushlife, Haldar is from Philadelphia, PA.Ages 3 - 7
Claudia Castro Luna — The Flowers Along the Way: A Memoir — at Conn Ave
This event will be in partnership with Salvadoran Cultural Institute.Passionately demonstrating the dormant trauma of political violence and the redemption waiting beyond itFrom El Salvador’s lush countryside to the streets of Oakland, California, a young mother wrestles with the intersecting forces of memory, history, and language in order to chart a new path for herself and her growing family. Fleeing political unrest and civil war violence in El Salvador, fourteen-year-old Claudia Castro Luna arrived in the United States with her family in 1981. Two decades later, holding her two-year-old and pregnant with her second child, she survives a public shooting by hiding behind shrubs in front of her house in Oakland. This event unleashes disorienting and traumatic memories, plunging her into a journey of discovery as she grapples with PTSD, recovers family stories, and begins to make sense of all that was torn asunder within her by the experiences of war and emigration. Beauty, longing, fear, and joy entwine in this powerful story of love, self-determination, and the search for home.CLAUDIA CASTRO LUNA is a 2019 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, a former Washington State Poet Laureate, and Seattle’s inaugural Civic Poet. She is the author of the poetry collections Green, the World; Cipota Under the Moon; Killing Marías; One River, A Thousand Voices; and This City, a chapbook. Her nonfiction has appeared in anthologies, journals, and newspapers. Born in El Salvador, Castro Luna lives and dreams in English and Spanish.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.