The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Haystack Book Talks Festival set to return Sept. 30-Oct. 2
NORFOLK — Haystack Book Talks Festival has announced the lineup of speakers and events for Sept. 30-Oct. 2 at the Norfolk Library.
This year’s festival is presented in person with 80 seats available in the library’s Great Hall. The program will also be shown live online. Haystack Book Festival is free and open to the public.
In-person registration is required in advance for all events at www.norfolk foundation.net/book-talks Live streaming registration is required in advance at www.norfolkfoundation. net/book-talks
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Sept. 30, 6 p.m.: The Brendan Gill Lecture. Tomi Obaro, author of the acclaimed debut novel Dele Weds Destiny, will deliver the Brendan Gill Lecture. Obaro is a writer from New York City and an editor at BuzzFeed News. Dele Weds Destiny is her debut novel.
About the Brendan Gill Lecture: Longtime Norfolk resident Brendan Gill died in 1997. In 1998 the Brendan Gill Lecture was established by the Norfolk Library Associates to honor Gill’s generous contributions to the library. Gill wrote various pieces for The New Yorker magazine for over fifty years and was in successive decades the magazine’s the movie, theater, and architectural critic. In his New York City life, Gill was president of the Board of Directors of the Whitney Museum of American Art and of the Municipal Arts Society, where he guided the effort to preserve Grand Central Station.
Oct. 1, 10:30 a.m. “Fierce Enough to Be Free: Five 19th-Century Women Who Helped Spark the First American Civil Rights Movement” with Janice P. Nimura, author of The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women – and Women to Medicine. She will be in conversation with Dorothy Wickenden, author of The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women’s Rights
Nimura received a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of her work on The Doctors Blackwell, which was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in biography. Her previous book, Daughters
of the Samurai, was a NYT notable book in 2015. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian, and Lit Hub.
Wickenden is the author of Nothing Daunted and The Agitators. Since 1996 she has been the executive editor of The New Yorker; she also writes for the magazine and is the moderator of its weekly podcast “The Political Scene.” A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, Wickenden was the national affairs editor at Newsweek from 1993 to 1995 and previously was the longtime executive editor of the New Republic.
Oct. 1, 1 p.m.: “Nijinska, Ballet, Modernism”, Lynn Garafola, author of La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern, in conversation with Marina Harss, author of a forthcoming biography on Alexi Ratmansky.
Garafola is a professor emerita of dance at Barnard College, Columbia University. A historian and critic, she is the author of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Legacies of Twentieth Century Dance, and most recently La Nijinska. She has also curated three major New York centered exhibitions – on New York City Ballet, Jerome Robbins, and Arthur Mitchell. A former Getty Scholar, she is a recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
Harss is a writer, journalist, and critic based in New York City, writing on all aspects of dance and occasionally on opera. Her writing appears regularly in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Fjord Review, Dance Magazine, Pointe Magazine, and elsewhere. She has also written for the Nation, the Guardian, the Threepenny Opera Review,
the Boston Globe, Ballet Review, and other publications. She is the author of an upcoming book about the choreographer Alexi Ratmansky, to be published in 2023.
Oct. 1, 2:30 p.m. “Russia and Ukraine at War”, with Brigid O’Keeffe, author of The Multi-Ethnic Soviet Union and Its Demise, in conversation with Victoria Smolkin, author of A Sacred Place Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism.
O’Keeffe is professor of history at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. In addition to The Multi-Ethnic Soviet Union and Its Demise, she is also the author of Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia (winner of the Ab Imperio Prize) and New Soviet Gypsies: Nationality, Performance, and Selfhood in the Early Soviet Union. O’Keeffe is at work on her next book, “The Family Litvinov: A History of the Twentieth Century.”
Smolkin is associate professor of history at Wesleyan University. A Sacred Place Is Never Empty was awarded Honorable Mention for the 2019 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, and the Russian translation was longlisted for the Alexander Patigosky Literary Prize. She is currently at work on two projects: “The Wall of Memory: Ukraine and the Impossibility of History,” and “The World of Tomorrow: Communism, Cosmism, and the Fate of Utopia.”
Oct. 1, 5 p.m. “Kitchen Confidential: Inside the World of New York Times Cooking” Sam Sifton, author of The New York Times No Recipe Recipe Cookbook, in conversation with Melissa Clark, author of Dinner in One. Note: This is a ticketed Event at Husky Meadows Farm, 30
Doolittle Drive, Norfolk. *Seating is limited and tickets must be purchased in advance.
Sifton is an assistant managing editor at the New York Times and the founding editor of New York Times Cooking, for which he writes newsletters. He previously served as the newspaper’s food editor, its national news editor, its restaurant critic, and its culture editor. Sifton is the author of several cookbooks, most recently See You on Sunday and The New York Times No Recipe Recipe Cookbook.
Clark is a food columnist for the New York Times/ New York Times Cooking, where she writes the popular column “A Good Appetite” and has starred in over 100 cooking videos. She’s written 45 cookbooks, the latest of which, Dinner in One focuses on one-pot, one-pan, one-skillet meals. She’s the recipient of two James Beard Awards and two IACP Awards, and her work has been selected for the Best American Food Writing series.
Oct. 2. 9:30 a.m. “A Walk Through City Meadow – Insects in Our Village” with Dr. Kimberly Stoner, Agricultural Entomologist Emeritus at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, to catch a glimpse of the insects that live here in the Norfolk village center. This event is limited to 20 people. Meet at Robertson Plaza, Station Place, Norfolk, CT
Oct. 2, 11 a.m. “Collapsing Populations and the Fight for Life” with Oliver Milman, author of The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Rule the World, in conversation with Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in the Age of Extinction.
Milman is a British journalist and the environmental correspondent at the Guardian US. He has reported from such places as the Great Barrier Reef and the Artic and once surveyed an underwater volcano in a mini submarine. The Insect Crisis is his first book
Nijhuis is a project editor at the Atlantic, a longtime contributing editor of High Country News and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. Beloved Beasts was named one of the best books of 2021 by the Chicago Tribune, Smithsonian Magazine, Booklist, and other publications.
Learn more at www.norfolkfoundation. net/book-talks