Jewell Parker Rhodes signs Ninth Ward.

Twelve-year-old Lanesha lives in a tight-knit community in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. She doesn’t have a fancy house like her uptown family or lots of friends like the other kids on her street. But what she does have is Mama Ya-Ya, her fiercely loving caretaker, wise in the ways of the world and able to predict the future. So when Mama Ya-Ya’s visions show a powerful hurricane—Katrina—fast approaching, it’s up to Lanesha to call upon the hope and strength Mama Ya-Ya has given her to help them both survive the storm.

Dave Isay will be on Thacker Mountain Radio reading from his book Listening is an Act of Love.

From the Gertrude C. Ford Center for the Performing Arts:

Meet Dave Isay, StoryCorps Founder, legendary radio producer, and editor of the 2010 One Book One Community read: Listening is an Act of Love. Please bring a copy of the book for Dave to sign after the lecture. This event is free and open to the public. For more information, please email mdennis@olemiss.edu.

Brought to you by the University of Mississippi Lecture Series, the Office of the Provost, the College of Liberal Arts, the Meek School of Journalism and New Media, the University Libraries, and the McDonnell Barksdale Honors College, in partnership with the Mississippi Humanities Council, Thacker Mountain Radio Show, Square Books, and Ajax Diner.

T.R. Pearson and photographer, Langdon Clay, will be on Thacker Mountain Radio October 14th in support of their book, The Year of Our Lord: Faith, Hope, and Harmony in the Mississippi Delta (Mockingbird Publishe, hd. 19.95). 

Lisa's review from Dear Reader: 

Come to Off Square Books for a live telecast of Jay-Z in conversation with Cornell West at New York's Public Library. 

A LIMITED NUMBER OF SIGNED COPIES OF DECODED WILL BE AVAILABLE at this event. 

“When I first started working on this book, I told my editor that I wanted it to do three important things. The first was to make the case that hip-hop lyrics—not just my lyrics, but those of every great MC—are poetry if you look at them closely enough. The second was I wanted the book to tell a little bit of the story of my generation, to show the context for the choices we made at a violent and chaotic crossroads in recent history.  And the third piece was that I wanted the book to show how hip-hop created a way to take a very specific and powerful experience and turn it into a story that everyone in the world could feel and relate to.”—JAY-Z, from DECODED

Georgia Bottoms is known in her small
community of Six Points, Alabama, as a beautiful, well-to-do, and
devoutly Baptist Southern belle.

Nobody realizes that the family fortune has long since disappeared,
and a determinedly single woman like Georgia needs an alternative, and
discreet, means of income. In Georgia's case it is six well-heeled
lovers-one for each day of the week, with Mondays off-none of whom knows
about the others.

But when the married preacher who has been coming to call (Saturdays)
decides to confess their affair in front of the whole congregation,
Georgia must take drastic measures to stop him. In GEORGIA BOTTOMS, Mark
Childress proves once again his unmistakable skill for combining the
hilarious and the absurd to reveal the inner workings of the rebellious
human heart.

Mark Childress was born in Monroeville, Alabama. He is the author of six
previous novels and three books for children. He has lived in Ohio,
Indiana, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, California, Costa Rica, and
currently lives in Key West, Florida.