The first of two forums that will delve into the status of housing in Arkansas. Some topics of discussion will include the quality of rental properties and how the state of Arkansas supports or doesn’t support its residential renters.

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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. You can also join us live via Facebook Live or YouTube.

Come join us! Sign up to participate in the next event in Macmillan’s Book + Author series: a virtual book club event with Kristin Hannah for her #1 bestseller The Four Winds. We’ve partnered with Macmillan to bring this opportunity to book club members across the country, who can tune in to hear a discussion with fellow author Christina Baker Kline and participate in the live Q&A.

This event will be hosted on the Zoom platform. Free registration is required.

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.

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.

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.

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.