Join us for a free virtual event, moderated by Amy Miller of Louisville Literary Arts and hosted by Erin Keane of the Louisville Anthology. 

Register for the event in advance here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/louisville-anthology-w

What is Louisville's identity in the twenty-first century? Is it the Southernmost Midwestern city, the Midwestiest Southern town, or somewhere in between? Living on the border of two regions creates a hybrid sensibility full of contradictions that can be difficult to articulate beyond "from Louisville, not Kentucky." In this collection of evocative essays and poems by natives and transplants, The Louisville Anthology offers locals and visitors a closer look at compelling private and public spaces in an attempt to articulate what defines Louisville beyond--but also inclusive of--its most recognized cultural exports.

Erin Keane has lived in Louisville, where she currently teaches in Spalding University's School of Creative and Professional Writing and works as editor in chief at Salon.com, for more than twenty years. The author of three collections of poems, Keane has also served as an arts reporter and critic for the Courier Journal, Louisville's daily newspaper, and WFPL, Louisville's NPR news station.

Register for this event here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/fenton-johnson-and-julie

Join us for a free virtual event with Robert Fieseler and Sheri L. Wright. Register for the event ahead of time here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/robert-fieseler-w-dr--2

An essential work of American civil rights history, Tinderbox mesmerizingly reconstructs the 1973 fire that devastated New Orleans’ subterranean gay community.

Buried for decades, the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy has only recently emerged as a catalyzing event of the gay liberation movement. In revelatory detail, Robert W. Fieseler chronicles the tragic event that claimed the lives of thirty-one men and one woman on June 24, 1973, at a New Orleans bar, the largest mass murder of gays until 2016. Relying on unprecedented access to survivors and archives, Fieseler creates an indelible portrait of a closeted, blue- collar gay world that flourished before an arsonist ignited an inferno that destroyed an entire community. The aftermath was no less traumatic—families ashamed to claim loved ones, the Catholic Church refusing proper burial rights, the city impervious to the survivors’ needs—revealing a world of toxic prejudice that thrived well past Stonewall. Yet the impassioned activism that followed proved essential to the emergence of a fledgling gay movement. Tinderbox restores honor to a forgotten generation of civil-rights martyrs.

Robert W. Fieseler is the 2019 National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association "Journalist of the Year" and the acclaimed debut author of Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation, winner of the 2019 Edgar Award in Best Fact Crime as well as the 2020 Louisiana Literary Award. Queer literary icon Andrew Holleran reviewed the book as "far more than just a history of gay rights," and Michael Cunningham praised it as "essential reading at any time." Fieseler graduated co-valedictorian from the Columbia Journalism School and is a recipient of the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship. He lives with his husband and dog (a senior Cairn Terrier named Chompers) in New Orleans.

Kentucky Poet Laureate and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Sheri L. Wright, is the author of seven books of poetry. Her award-winning visual work has been shown throughout the Ohio River Valley. Wright is the producer/director of the documentary Tracking Fire, which chronicles the Up Stairs Lounge fire/Pulse Nightclub shootings - the deadliest mass killings in LGBTQ history in the US.

Join us for a free virtual in-conversation with authors Nancy Jensen and Sena Jeter Naslund! Click here to register for this event. 

About IN OUR MIDST: Drawing upon a long-suppressed episode in American history, when thousands of German immigrants were rounded up and interned following the attack on Pearl Harbor, In Our Midst tells the story of one family's fight to cling to the ideals of freedom and opportunity that brought them to America.

ABOUT NANCY JENSEN: Nancy Jensen’s bestselling novel The Sisters was selected by the Independent Booksellers Association as a #1 Indie Next Pick, and included by Kirkus Reviews on its list for Best Fiction of 2011.  She has been awarded an Artist Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council.  Her first book, Window: Stories and Essays, was published by Fluer-de-Lis Press in 2009.  She teaches in the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University, where she also edits The Chaffin Journal.  She shares her home with five rescued cats: Jack, Butch, Sundance, Cache, and Joey.

ABOUT SENA JETER NASLUND: Sena Jeter Naslund, MA, Ph.D., U of Iowa; fiction writer, author of critically-acclaimed, national-bestselling novels Ahab’s Wife; Four Spirits; Abundance, a Novel of Marie-Antoinette, and six others. Naslund served as the first director of creative writing at UofL, where, in 1976, she and students launched The Louisville Review (TLR); she also served as founding Program Director of the Spalding MFA in Writing, 2001-2017. She continues as editor of the independent TLR and its book press, Fleur-de-Lis.

Last of four talks about anti-fascist movements and street-level organizing, with Hilary Moore, James Tracy, and Shane Burley.

Event is free, but reservations are required.

You can reserve a spot HERE

All registered attendees will receive a Zoom link on the day of the event. Tune in right at 12PM/9AM PST

City Lights LIVE presents the four talks about anti-fascist movements, past and present, and street-level organizing, hosted by Hilary Moore and James Tracy, author of No Fascist USA!: The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today's Movements.

This event is co-sponsored by Carmichael's Bookstore in Louisville, KY and Louisville Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ). Please consider supporting Carmichael's Bookstore by purchasing a copy of No Fascist USA! from them.

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ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Hilary Moore is an anti-racist political educator and teaches with generative somatics. She works on the Leadership Team of Showing Up for Racial Justice, and is the co-author of No Fascist USA! The John Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today's Movements (City Lights, 2020) and Organizing Cools the Planet: Tools and Reflections to Navigate the Climate Crisis (PM Press, 2011). Her newest book is Burning Earth, Changing Europe: How the Racist Right Exploits the Climate Crisis—And What We Can Do About It (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung- Brussels, 2020).

James Tracy is an author, organizer, and an Instructor of Labor and Community Studies at City College of San Francisco. He is the co-author of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times and the author of Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes From San Francisco's Housing Wars.

Shane Burley is a filmmaker and author of Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It. His work is featured at Jacobin, In These Times, Salon, Truthout, etc.