Journalist and author Andrea Bartz has written for Marie Claire, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and more and has held editorial positions at magazines such as Glamour and Psychology Today. In the thriller We Were Never Here, two globe-trotting best friends kill a backpacker in self-defense during a trip through Chile – and it’s not the first time their travels have ended in bloodshed.

Jake Owensby is the bishop of the Episcopal Church in Western Louisiana. His fifth book about the spirituality of everyday life, Looking for God in Messy Places: A Book About Hope, shows how love gives us an inextinguishable hope despite the worry, busyness, and setbacks we all experience in the messiness of life. Sponsored in part by Betty Rowland Wittenberg Foundation and Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church.

This event will take place on the Zoom platform.

The graphic novel Ballad for Sophie is a sweeping tale that spans the twentieth century, packed with all the drama of a rock & roll biopic and more twists than a night at the opera. The new, expanded edition of Beta Testing the Ongoing Apocalypse—whose graphic short stories trace a complex space-time trajectory from the smallest corporate cubicle out to farthest fathoms of the multiverse—resonates more than ever with our contemporary times.

This event will take place on the Zoom platform.

Lisa Wells is a nonfiction writer and poet from Portland, Oregon. Her debut collection of poetry, The Fix, won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her essays and poems have appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s, Granta, The Believer, n+1, and other publications. Believers introduces trailblazers and outliers from across the globe who have found radically new ways to live and reconnect to the Earth in the face of climate change.

Sharon G. Flake, author of the groundbreaking novel The Skin I’m In, has authored over a dozen books, winning multiple Coretta Scott King Honor Awards, ALA Notable and Top Ten Recommended Books citations, and an NAACP Image Award Nomination. In The Life I’m In, Charlese Jones, who is turned out of the only home she has known, must find her way back to the light after she is lured into the dangerous web of human trafficking.

Carolyn Ferrell is an award-winning author who teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York. In the fictional Dear Miss Metropolitan, Boss Man is a monster who abducts three high school students, Fern, Gwin, and Jesenia, and holds them captive in a dilapidated house on Amity Lane in Queens. Lauren Oyler‘s essays and criticism appear regularly in the New Yorker, the New York Times,

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, educated at Harvard and Yale, writes about immigration, music, beauty, and mental illness. Part memoir, part journalism, part testimonio, The Undocumented Americans looks well beyond the flashpoints of the border or the activism of the Dreamers to allow the individuals profiled to be seen more fully as vibrant, complex, and dignified human beings. In her relentlessly probing voice, the author combines sensitive reporting with her own experiences as an undocumented writer. CALS Speaker Series: J.

Katherine Angel directs the MA in Creative and Critical Writing program at Birkbeck, University of London, and has a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Her elegant, searching book Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again spans science and popular culture, pornography and literature, debates on #MeToo, and consent and feminism, challenging our assumptions about female desire.

This event will take place on the Zoom platform. Free registration is required.

Lawyer Marie Benedict is the bestselling author of The Only Woman in the Room, Lady Clementine, and other novels. Victoria Christopher Murray is an acclaimed author who has written more than twenty novels. The Personal Librarian is a remarkable historical novel about a Black American woman who hid her true identity to become J. P. Morgan’s librarian. Made possible in part by the Arkansas State Library and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Ethan Nichtern is an author, educator, and podcaster who founded the Interdependence Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to secular Buddhist practice and transformational activism and arts. He is also an avid yoga practitioner and has been featured on CNN, NPR, ABC/Yahoo News, and elsewhere to discuss Buddhism and meditation. Humorous yet spiritually rigorous in the tradition of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The Tao of Pooh, The Dharma of “The Princess Bride” teaches us how to understand and navigate our most important personal relationships from a twenty-first-century Buddhist perspective.

Author and educator Kyle Beachy’s short fiction and writing on skateboarding has appeared in many magazines, and his first novel, The Slide, won the Chicago Reader‘s Best Book reader’s choice award. The Most Fun Thing, his memoir in essays, explores the hidden meaning of skateboarding, leading to insights on marriage, love, loss, and American invention.

This event will take place on the Zoom platform. Free registration is required.

Rabbi Rachel Mikva is a professor of Jewish studies at Chicago Theological Seminary and senior faculty fellow of its InterReligious Institute. Dangerous Religious Ideas: The Deep Roots of Self-Critical Faith in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam argues that all religious ideas are dangerous, even those that stand at the heart of faith. Sabeeha Rehman is the author of the award-winning memoir Threading My Prayer Rug. Journalist Walter Ruby is an activist in Muslim-Jewish relations who has organized hundreds of twinning events bringing together thousands of Jews and Muslims in countries around the world.

Herman Pontzer, professor at Duke University, investigates how our evolutionary past shapes our lives today, conducting the first measurements of daily energy expenditure in hunter-gatherers and in non-human apes. Burn examines groundbreaking work with hunter-gatherers, with our great ape cousins, and with populations around the globe to explore the way our bodies use energy.

This event will take place on the Zoom platform. Free registration is required.

Zeba Blay is a film and culture critic who explores pop culture at the intersection of race, gender, and identity. Born in Accra, Ghana, she lives in the New York City area. This collection of essays, Carefree Black Girls, delves into the work and lasting achievements of influential Black women in American culture – writers, artists, actresses, dancers, hip-hop stars – whose contributions often come in the face of bigotry, misogyny, and stereotypes. Nichole Perkins is a writer and podcast host from Nashville,

Rev. Christoph Keller III, a graduate of Little Rock Central High School, went on to serve as dean and rector of Little Rock’s Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. Getting On Toward Home: And Other Sermons by the River offers twelve homilies that provide insights on grief, faith, and hope in face of death. Sponsored in part by Trinity Episcopal Cathedral.

Award-winning author and journalist Dean Jobb, who is a professor at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, delivers the Victorian true-crime tale The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer, revealing the blind trust given to medical practitioners at the time, as well as the flawed detection methods, bungled investigations, corrupt officials, and stifling morality that allowed the serial killer Dr. Cream to prey on vulnerable and desperate women.

Ross King is the award-winning author of books on Italian and French art. The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance profiles Vespasiano da Bisticci, a manuscript dealer in fifteenth-century Florence who had become Europe’s most prolific merchant of knowledge when a new invention appeared: the printed book.

This event will take place on the Zoom platform. Free registration is required.

Jean Hanff Korelitz is the author of several acclaimed novels that have been made into films, as well as The Devil and Webster, The White Rose, The Sabbath Day River, A Jury of Her Peers, and children’s novel Interference Powder. Her company BOOKTHEWRITER hosts pop-up book groups. She lives in New York City with her husband, Irish poet Paul Muldoon. The Plot,

Jacob M. Appel, associate professor of psychiatry and medical education at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine in New York City and director of ethics education in psychiatry, has written several novels as well as various collections, including a compendium of medical dilemmas, Who Says You’re Dead?

This event will take place on the Zoom platform. Free registration is required.

Sandra Cisneros is a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico and makes her living by her pen. Internationally acclaimed for her poetry and fiction, she is the recipient of numerous awards. In Martita, I Remember You / Martita, te recuerdo, a young woman leaves her Mexican family in Chicago to pursue her dream of becoming a writer in the cafés of Paris. Instead, Corina spends her brief time in the City of Light running out of money and lining up with other immigrants to call home –

Jennifer Ogle, the collections manager at the University of Arkansas Herbarium, has worked as a contract botanist and consultant and volunteers her time with organizations focused on urban land conservation and the protection of native plants. Trees, Shrubs, and Woody Vines of Arkansas, a field guide designed for outdoor use co-authored by Ogle, is an encyclopedic resource for identification and appreciation that will appeal to educators, scientists, conservation professionals, and outdoor enthusiasts. Theo Witsell is the ecologist and chief of research for the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission.

Join Abby Turner, author of The Living Table, as she invites you to her table, giving tips and tricks for hosting your friends and family this holiday season while showcasing three easy apps in 30 minutes. She will demonstrate pear, prosciutto, and honey bites; a Boursin asparagus tartlet; and pomegranate and horseradish flatbread with an apple cider spritzer. Scrumptious!

This event will take place on the Zoom platform. Free registration is required.

Jacqueline Woodson is the author of more than two dozen award-winning books for young adults, middle graders, and children; among her many accolades, she is a four-time Newbery Honor winner, a three-time National Book Award finalist, and a two-time Coretta Scott King Award winner. She was named Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation in 2015 and was also named the 2018 Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress. Her two most recent books are Red at the Bone,

Paige Bowers has had writing featured in TIME, USA Today, the New York Times, and more, and authored The General’s Niece: The Little-Known de Gaulle Who Fought to Free Occupied France. Overnight Code: The Life of Raye Montague, The Woman Who Revolutionized Naval Engineering was co-written with “Hidden Figure” Raye Montague’s son, David, whose trailblazing mother engineered her way out of the Jim Crow South.

The Final Revival of Opal & Nev is a fictional oral history about an interracial rock & roll duo on the early 1970s New York scene. The novel follows their rise, their fall, and the dark secret that comes to light when they consider reuniting for a tour. Sponsored in part by Meadors, Adams & Lee.

This event will take place on the Zoom platform. Free registration is required.

The second installment of our panels on the status of housing in Arkansas. This forum will discuss some of the greatest barriers Arkansans face to securing stable, affordable housing and what resources exist to help those most in need of shelter in the Natural State.

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This event will be hosted virtually on the Zoom platform. Free registration is required. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.