SMC Presents Free Live Literary Talks & Readings this Spring

SMC Presents Free Live Literary Talks & Readings this Spring

Literary Series Resumes Online February 24

SANTA MONICA, CA — Santa Monica College (SMC) is pleased to continue its Literary Talks & Readings series featuring a noteworthy spectrum of writers reading from and discussing their works. The ongoing series opens its 2022 spring season on February 24.

All presentations in the series are free, and will be held online as live virtual events. A Zoom link to each talk will be posted with the listing on the SMC Events calendar at smc.edu/calendar. To attend the events, the Zoom software must be installed on the viewer’s computer. A free download is available at zoom.com.

The spring 2022 series lineup is:

• Thursday, February 24: Attica Locke: "Bluebird, Bluebird and How Setting Can Shape Plot in Crime Fiction" at 11:30 a.m. Award-winning author and screenwriter Attica Locke’s latest novel, Heaven, My Home, is a New York Times bestseller. A former fellow at the Sundance Institute’s Feature Filmmaker’s Lab, she was a producer on the Fox series "Empire," the Netflix series "When They See Us," and the Emmy-nominated "Little Fires Everywhere," for which she won an NAACP Image award for television writing. She is currently writing and producing an adaptation of her sister Tembi Locke’s memoir, From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home, for Netflix. Sponsored by the SMC Associates and SMC English Department. Zoom link on February 24 listing at smc.edu/calendar.

• Tuesday, March 8: Xiaowei R. Wang: "Blockchain Chicken Farms and Taobao Villages" at 11:15 a.m. Artist, technologist, writer, coder, and activist Xiaowei R. Wang recently published Blockchain Chicken Farm and Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside, a firsthand account of life in today's rural China, a vast, dynamic area largely unknown outside China. They work in a variety of media and across disciplines, with projects that include FLOAT Beijing — an Index Design Awards finalist that used air quality-sensing kites to challenge censorship — and The Future of Memory, the Mozilla Creative Media Award–winning website offering an ongoing collection of ways to bypass automated censorship. Sponsored by the SMC Associates and SMC English Department. Zoom link on March 8 listing at smc.edu/calendar.

• Tuesday, March 29: Kali Fajardo-Anstine: "Sabrina & Corina, A Reading with Kali Fajardo-Anstine" at 11:15 a.m. Kali Fajardo-Anstine is the author of Sabrina & Corina: Stories, a 2019 finalist for the National Book Award and 2020 winner of an American Book Award. She is the 2021 recipient of the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her work has been honored with the Denver Mayor’s Award for Global Impact in the Arts, and with the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association Reading the West Award. Fajardo-Anstine has also written for publications that include The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, ELLE, O: the Oprah Magazine, The American Scholar, and Boston Review. Sponsored by the SMC Associates and SMC English Department. Zoom link on March 29 listing at smc.edu/calendar.

• Tuesday, May 3: Theresa Brown: "Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient" at 11:15 a.m. Theresa Brown, PhD, RN, is the author of the forthcoming Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient (Algonquin Books, 2022). She also wrote the New York Times bestseller The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients’ Lives, which portrays one real shift worked by a hospital nurse. Brown is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, where she writes about nursing and health care. Her Opinion series, “Bedside,” examined health care from a nurse’s point of view. She has also written for CNN.com, The Journal of the American Medical Association, Slate.com, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Sponsored by the SMC Associates and SMC English Department. Zoom link on May 3 listing at smc.edu/calendar.

For more than two decades, the SMC Literary Series has brought to campus such acclaimed writers as Khaled Hosseini (author of the bestselling The Kite Runner), Steph Cha (writer of the popular ‘Juniper Song’ novels), Audrey Niffenegger (author of the bestselling Time Traveler’s Wife), Edward J. Larson (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion), and Viet Thanh Nguyen (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer).

Additional information is available by calling SMC’s Office of Public Programs at (310) 434-4100.

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