JOANNE FLUKE

Monday, March 9, 7:00 p.m.

Readers keep coming back for another helping of Joanne Fluke's cozy mysteries, starring Minnesota bake shop owner Hannah Swensen and her delicious original recipes. Fluke's latest installment, Double Fudge Brownie Murder, features more than 20 recipes interspersed throughout, including Maple Fudge Sandwich Cookies, Chocolate Baked Doughnuts, Tangerine Dream Cake and, of course, Double Fudge Brownies. Joanne Fluke never fails to cook up culinary mysteries that are just as famous for their scrumptious excess of calories as for their eccentric characters and unexpected endings. Here, Fluke serves fans her most deliciously shocking series installment yet as Hannah works to clear her name, follow her heart, and find a killer more elusive than the perfect brownie... which Fluke will be providing for the audience!

 

GRETCHEN WING

Tuesday, March 10, 7:00 p.m.

Gretchen Wing returns to her hometown to read from Headwinds, the sequel to her young adult novel The Flying Burgowski. Set on an island in Washington State, Headwinds picks up the story of fourteen-year-old Jocelyn Burgowski, an otherwise normal girl who just happens to be a Flyer. But now, someone wants to bring the Flyer down. Where The Flying Burgowski focused on Jocelyn's discovery of her powers of flight, and her struggle to redeem her troubled mother, Headwinds sets Jocelyn on a darker course. In a race to discover her antagonist before she can be disempowered, Jocelyn must confront the questions all people face: Why is it so hard to be a good person? And how do you know when love is real?

 

CHRISTINE JERNIGAN

Wednesday, March 11, 7:00 p.m.

Family Language Learning: Learn Another Language, Raise Bilingual Children is a practical guide designed to support, advise and encourage any parents who are hoping to raise their children bilingually. It is unique in that it focuses on parents who are not native speakers of a foreign language. It gives parents the tools they need to cultivate and nurture their own language skills while giving their children an opportunity to learn another language. The book combines cutting-edge research on language exposure with honest and often humorous stories from personal interviews with families speaking a foreign language at home. By dispelling long-held myths about how language is learned, it provides hope to parents who want to give their children bilingual childhoods, but feel they don't know where to start with learning foreign languages. Jernigan teaches at North Carolina State and lives in Chapel Hill.

 

DAVID JOY

Thursday, March 12, 7:00 p.m.

NC author David Joy's debut novel, Where All Light Tends to Go, deals with eighteen-year-old Jacob McNeely whose father runs a local meth ring. When Jacob botches a murder, he is torn between appeasing his kingpin father and leaving the mountains with the girl he loves. The area surrounding Cashiers, North Carolina is home to people of all kinds, but the world that Jacob lives in is crueler than most. Having dropped out of high school, subsequently cutting himself off from his peers, Jacob has been working for his father for years, all on the promise that his payday will come eventually. The only joy he finds comes from reuniting with Maggie, his first love, and a girl clearly bound for bigger and better things than their hardscrabble town. The world that Jacob inhabits is bleak and unrelenting in its violence and disregard for human life, and having known nothing more, Jacob wonders if he can muster the strength to rise above it. This novel is already drawing comparisons to Winter's Bone, "Breaking Bad," "Sons of Anarchy" and "Justified. "Joy's moments of poetic cognizance are the stuff of fine fiction, lyrical sweets that will keep readers turning pages...Where All Light Tends To Go is a book that discloses itself gradually, like a sunrise peeking over a distant mountain range"-Atlanta Journal-Constitution    

 

JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN YOUNG SCHOLARS

Tuesday, March 17, 7:00 p.m.

In Running for Hope, Kendrick Parker isn't quite sure what's going on with his life. He doesn't know if the girl he is interested in really likes him back and his best friend is having troubles of her own. More importantly, his parents are keeping him up at night with their yelling. It's getting harder and harder to get to school on time, something his history and track coach, Mr. Douglass notices. Hoping to inspire Kendrick, Mr. Douglass hands him a copy of the graphic novel version of Mirror to America, renowned historian John Hope Franklin's autobiography. Little does he realize how much it will encourage him to take action.  Durham teenagers from The John Hope Franklin Young Scholars program will be in the store to read and discuss the hybrid story with graphic autobiographical sketches, the result of their 18-month collaboration.  

 

CAT WARREN

Wednesday, March 18, 7:00 p.m.

In What the Dog Knows: The Science and Wonder of Working Dogs, Durham resident and North Carolina State professor Cat Warren uses her odyssey with her dog Solo to enter the broader world of scent-detection dogs, revealing the remarkable capabilities of working dogs, their handlers, and their trainers. Taking the reader from crime scenes to training sites and science labs, talking and working with other handlers and trainers, and interviewing animal psychologists, forensic anthropologists, breeders, and scent researchers, Warren explains how working dogs can capture the hidden worlds their noses know and translate that arcane knowledge for humans.  The fascinating concepts behind the complex capabilities of working dogs emerge as Warren weaves the world of science and dog cognition with her own experiences in the field-all with an unsentimental yet sensitive touch.

 

LESLIE JAMISON

Wednesday, March 18, 7:00 p.m

OFFSITE Duke's Nelson Music Room

New York Times bestselling author Leslie Jamison will give a public reading from her recent essay collection, The Empathy Exams, as part of the inaugural Kenan-CDS Visiting Writers Series. In The Empathy Exams, Jamison begins with her experience as a medical actor, paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose. Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about one another? How can we feel another's pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other?    

 

SCOTT ELLSWORTH

Thursday, March 19, 7:00 p.m.

at Motorco Music Hall, 723 Rigsbee Ave, Durham

This is the remarkable story of a secret basketball game played in a locked gym in Durham, at what is now North Carolina Central University, in the heart of 1944 Jim Crow North Carolina. Scott Ellsworth's The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change and Basketball's Lost Triumph brilliantly explores both the history of basketball and, a full decade before the birth of the Civil Rights Movement, the bravery of African Americans and whites in the South who were already fighting back against segregation. In the 1940s at all-white Duke University, a group of former college players had formed a top-notch team at the medical school, defeating not only the Duke varsity, but also any team that came their way-all except for one. Standing in the way was nothing less than segregation itself. But in the spring of 1944, two remarkable teams-one black, and one white-risked their futures, their jobs, and even their freedom to play a game the likes of which the South had ever seen before. A full decade before the Brown decision and the Montgomery bus boycott, and three years before Jackie Robinson desegregated major league baseball, these long forgotten basketball players made some remarkable history of their own. The Secret Game tells an extraordinary story--an extraordinary Durham story that everyone who lives here will want to read.

 

YA BOOK CLUB

Friday, March 20, 7:00 p.m.

Come one, come all to the greatest book club of all! Do you love YA? Are you interested in discussing or starting to read YA? The we'd love to have you! This is a book club for all ages, the only requirement is that you are interested in the young adult genre. (This is to discuss the book alone, not a writer's group). Hosted by Isabel of Tween 2 Teen Book Reviews. Snacks will be provided.  This month we'll be reading Everything Leads to You by Nina LaCour, a YA mystery with a little bit of romance.

   

Learn more about these and all of our upcoming events by visiting    the events calendar on our web site.