CALS Blogs

Friends of the Library Week is October 16 – 22. “Friends of the Library” are individuals who purchase annual memberships and those dues go toward funding some important programming, like the book festival, book club kits and some of the Arkansas Sounds Concerts. At the Central Arkansas Library System, we call them Friends of CALS.

CALS has added a new streaming service! Kanopy is a video-streaming platform dedicated to thoughtful and thought-provoking films

Tell us briefly about your book.
A Lush and Seething Hell is a duology of short novels. It was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy Awards, and it’s an exploration of art and to a certain extent the sort of madness that trauma can bring to artistic pursuits.

Tell us briefly about your book.
What Follows Is True: Crescent Hotel is a graphic nonfiction book that explores the stories surrounding the Crescent Hotel’s strange and tragic two years as the Baker Hospital, a Depression-era cancer hospital. The 240-page, fully painted graphic narrative blends oral histories, newspaper articles,

Tell us briefly about your book.
My book is nonfiction and chronicles the 59-year journey of America’s foremost Queen of Gospel, Mahalia Jackson. It takes the reader from her childhood home of New Orleans’s “N***** Town” to Chicago, Illinois—the city that became home to hundreds of thousands of African Americans who joined the Great Migration from the South in search of a better life.

If you haven’t already cleared your schedule for the end of October, you’ll want to make room before you finish planning those Halloween parties. On October 20, 7-8:30 p.m., we’re lighting up the bridges with CALS orange and enjoying live music from the Big John Miller Band, refreshments, and a special Six Bridges beverage provided by Rock Town Distillery.

Tell us briefly about your book.
Why did Winthrop Rockefeller, scion of one of the most powerful families in American history, leave New York for an Arkansas mountaintop in the 1950s? My book seeks to fully unravel that mystery for the first time. It traces Rockefeller’s life from childhood to adolescence,

Tell us briefly about your book.
Holly Street tells the story of life growing up in the Arkansas Delta in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly in Helena. As a youngster, I learned how to work early by helping my father on his bread route.