Upcoming Author Events
THURSDAY, MARCH 20, 2025
Let’s Get Rootbound: Grace Nosek on the Power of Climate Fiction and Art
In-Person and online | 12:00PM – 2:00PM PST | REGISTER HERE
BC Hydro Theatre, CIRS | 2260 West Mall
About the book
Rootbound is a gripping young adult climate fantasy novel bursting with hope, heart, adventure, and mystery (think Greta Thunberg x Percy Jackson + heaps of swoony, slowburn romance).
After her beloved sister Aspen disappears during a climate protest, seventeen-year-old Mira Bracken refuses to accept that she’s gone. Mira spends her days combing an uncaring world for any trace of Aspen, driven forward by a blistering pain in her limbs and the voice of her missing-probably-dead sister in her mind.
When a shocking act lands Mira in the hospital, a mysterious stranger insists that she’s a “treetalker,” a powerful one, and that an ancient evil is hunting her. She laughs it off, until the stranger adds one last thing—this underworld group has been kidnapping youth climate strikers.
Desperate to learn more, Mira throws her lot in with the mysterious stranger and the other treetalkers, who call themselves rootbound. Soon she’s swept into a secret magical war that spans centuries, inching closer to discovering the fate of her sister.
This is an in-person and online event. For more event registration details, please click here.
Book Talk: Language City: Dr. Perlin’s Insights on Preserving Endangered other Tongues
In-Person Event | 12:30PM – 1:30PM PST | RSVP HERE
302 Dodson Room | Irving K. Barber Learning Centre
About the book
From the co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, a captivating portrait of contemporary New York City through six speakers of little-known and overlooked languages, diving into the incredible history of the most linguistically diverse place ever to have existed on the planet.
Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and—because many have never been recorded—when they’re gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the Manhattan-based non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York. In Language City, Perlin recounts the unique history of immigration that shaped the city, and follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds. Perlin also dives deep into their languages, taking us on a fascinating tour of unusual grammars, rare sounds, and powerful cultural histories from all around the world.
Seke is spoken by 700 people from five ancestral villages in Nepal, a hundred of whom have lived in a single Brooklyn apartment building. N’ko is a radical new West African writing system now going global in Harlem and the Bronx. After centuries of colonization and displacement, Lenape, the city’s original Indigenous language and the source of the name Manhattan (“the place where we get bows”), has just one fluent native speaker, bolstered by a small band of revivalists. Also profiled in the book are speakers of the Indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl, the Central Asian minority language Wakhi, and the former lingua franca of the Lower East Side, Yiddish.
A century after the anti-immigration Johnson-Reed Act closed America’s doors for decades and on the 400th anniversary of New York’s colonial founding, Perlin raises the alarm about growing political threats and the onslaught of “killer languages” like English and Spanish. Both remarkable social history and testament to the importance of linguistic diversity, Language City is a joyful and illuminating exploration of a city and the world that made it.
This talk is hybrid. More information about event registration details here.
Book Launch | Perseverance: Life and Death in the Subarctic by Stephan Kesting
In-Person Event | 1:00pm PST | FREE TO ATTEND
UBC Bookstore | 6200 University Blvd
About the Author
My name is Stephan Kesting, and I'm a firefighter and an adventurer. I have spent much of my life learning how to perform in high-pressure and high-risk situations. In this book, I also share how to be more effective in high-stress situations, hold onto hope in the darkest moments, and overcome any obstacle.
About the Book
An adventurer, firefighter, and jiu-jitsu practitioner embarks on a journey of a lifetime—a 1,000 mile voyage through the Canadian sub-arctic—after recovering from a life-threatening illness.
The Canadian North is a vast and lonely land where bears roam free, fires rage unchecked, and storms blast every living thing on the tundra. When Stephan Kesting, already no stranger to pushing his own physical limits, was faced with a rare illness, he knew the only way for him to recover in both body and mind was to dig even deeper. Despite the dangers inherent in the sub-arctic, Kesting sets out on an unimaginably difficult journey. Completely alone in the wilderness for six weeks, where a single mistake could cost his life, Kesting followed in the footsteps of the native peoples and earliest explorers. In this deepest solitude and wracked with self-doubt, he found the strength to endure.
Perseverance is the moving and nail-biting account of his journey from near-death to a raw embrace of adventure and life. Inspirational, vulnerable and honest, Kesting shares the lessons he learned in the wilderness that will help us hold onto hope in our darkest moments and show how we can find the strength to overcome any obstacle.
This is an in-person event and free to attend.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 26, 2025
Book Launch: “We, the Kindling” by Otoniya J. Okot Bitek
In-Person Event | 5:00PM – 7:00PM PST | REGISTER HERE
Liu Institute for Global Issues - (Place of Many Trees) | 6476 NW Marine Drive, Vancouver
About the book
As this spare and luminous novel begins, we meet Miriam, Helen and Maggie—three friends who, years ago when they were school children, survived capture by the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda. Now, as the women go about their new lives in the city, shopping, caring for their children, planning and thinking about what the future might hold, we come to understand how deeply their past haunts the present.
In graceful yet unflinching prose, Otoniya Okot Bitek weaves vivid folk tales with taut realism, revealing flashes of life before the war that ravaged Uganda, unspooling the terrible events that led to abductions of children from supposedly safe schools, and tracing perilous journeys home again. Facing endless treks across the ravaged countryside and through narrow mountain passes, gun battles and constant brutality, many girls did not survive. Those who did make it back home, some carrying small children of their own, bore the unspoken weight of their experiences within families and communities that often wished to forget and move on.
In We, the Kindling, Okot Bitek insistently refuses to turn away or to spectacularize tragedy, shaping a chorus of women's voices into a hauntingly beautiful novel, suffused with care and humanity.
This is an in-person event. For more event registration details, please click here.
What it means to be “American”: Raven Chacon
In-Person Event | 6:30PM PST | MORE INFO HERE
Chan Centre, Chan Shun Concert Hall | 6265 Crescent Road, Vancouver
About the book
The first ever monograph on the groundbreaking work of artist and composer Raven Chacon.
A career-spanning catalogue featuring excerpts from Raven Chacon’s scores, musical prompts, and drawings interspersed with full-color documentation and descriptive texts of installations, sculptures, and performances.
Raven Chacon is a composer and artist creating musical experiences that explore relationships among land, space, and people. In an experimental practice that cuts across the boundaries of visual art, performance, and music, Chacon breaks open musical traditions and activates spaces of performance where the histories of the lands the United States has encroached upon can be contemplated, questioned, and reimagined. In 2022, Raven Chacon became the first Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, and was awarded a prestigious MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2023.
The publication features newly commissioned texts including three long-form essays by Aruna D’Souza, Anthony Huberman, and Dylan Robinson/Patrick Nickleson; experimental short-form writing by Raven Chacon, Lou Cornum, Ingir Bål Nango, Marja Bål Nango, Eric-Paul Riege, Ánde Somby, and Sigbjørn Skåden; an introduction by Katya García-Antón and Stefanie Hessler; and a conclusion by Candice Hopkins.
This is an in-person event. For more information, please click here.