October 3, 2012, Wednesday - Anya Achtenberg's Blue Earth with Special Guests at The Loft

Tme: 7:00pm

Location: The Loft, Performance Hall, 1011 Washington Avenue South

Anya Achtenberg's Blue Earth with Special Guests
 
Anya Achtenberg will read from her new book Blue Earth and then Christine Stark and Gretchen Brown Wright will present essays from The Chalk Circle: International Prize Winning Essays.

Blue Earth is a novel set in Minnesota where Carver Heinz loses both farm and family in the farm crisis of the 1980s. Displaced into urban Minneapolis, he becomes obsessed with Angie, a beautiful child he rescues from a tornado in an encounter he insists they keep silent. Her close friendship with a Dakota Indian boy fuels Carver’s rage and unleashes a series of events that reveal the haunting power of each character’s past and of their intertwined histories.

Anya Achtenberg is an award-winning fiction writer and poet. Her publications include Blue Earth, with an excerpt in the Harvard Review, the autobiographical novella The Stories of Devil-Girl, both with Modern History Press, and The Stone of Language (poetry), published by West End Press. She received a grant from the MN State Arts Board.  Her short fiction has received awards from Coppola's Zoetrope: All-Story, New Letters, the Raymond Carver Story Contest, and others. Anya is a teacher, manuscript consultant and coach for fiction writers and poets. She developed and teaches a series of multi-genre workshops on Writing for Social Change (Re-Dream a Just World; Place and Exile/Borders and Crossings; and Yearning and Justice: Writing the Unlived Life.)  She lives in St Paul.

About The Chalk Circle: Award-winning editor Tara L. Masih put out a call in 2007 for Intercultural Essays dealing with the subjects of “culture, race, and a sense of place.”  The prizewinners are gathered for the first time in a ground-breaking anthology that explores many facets of culture not previously found under one cover.  The powerful, honest, thoughtful voices—Native American, African American, Asian, European, Jewish, White—speak daringly on topics not often discussed in the open, on subjects such as racism, anti-Semitism, war, self-identity, gender, societal expectations.  Their words will entertain, illuminate, take you to distant lands, and spark important discussions about our humanity, our culture, and our place within society and the natural world.

Christine Stark is an author and artist of American Indian and European heritage. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, including The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prize-Winning Essays, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Poetry Motel, and When We Become Weavers: Queer Female Poets on the Midwest Experience. Her novel, Nickels: A Tale of Dissociation was a 2011 Lambda Literary finalist. She is a co-editor of Not For Sale, an international anthology about sexual violence. Her poem “Momma's Song” was released as a double CD manga by Fred Ho and the Afro Asian Music Ensemble. She was selected as an emerging creative non-fiction writer by the Loft Mentor Series and she has won McKnight Awards for both her writing and visual art. She teaches writing part-time at Metropolitan State University and lives in Minneapolis with her partner, April.

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC