Bookworks Announces April Highlights

Bookworks hosts many stellar events for reading fans in April, ranging from literary fiction, to mystery, to new nonfiction.

On April 3, at 7 pm, Bookworks and the UNM Department of English co-sponsor a free event with award winning Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid at UNM's Woodward Hall. Hamid will speak about his new literary novel, Exit West, characters Saeed and Nadia try to escape a city under siege in a work that takes on the realities and fantasies about immigration. Hamid's other novels include The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Moth Smoke, and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. He also writes non fiction essays that have appeared in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and in his book, Discontent and its Civilizations.

On April 10, Anne Hillerman presents her new Leaphorn, Chee and Manuelito mystery, Cave of Bones, at a free event at the South Broadway Cultural Center, cosponsored by the Public Library of Albuquerque and Bernalillo County. Fans will get a chance to meet the author and have books signed following the reading.

Two science oriented events offer up new knowledge for buffs this month. On April 18, Jonathan Thompson, author of River of Lost Souls, presents his findings on the 2015 King Mine Disaster and uranium spill that affected the Animas and San Juan Rivers of the Four Corners. Then on April 20, at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, Christian Davenport talks about his new book, Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos. Entry to the book talk and museum exhibits is $5 and tickets are available at bkwrks.com/space-barons. Doors will open at 6 pm with the talk starting at 7 pm.

Two literary holidays come in April: National Poetry Month is all month, and Independent Bookstore Day is April 28. Poetry month features at Bookworks include a group reading from Swimming with Elephants April 21, Jordan Bubin April 22, Mercedez Holtry April 26, and Carol McDuffie April 29.

On Independent Bookstore Day, Bookworks will host a tarot demo at 1 pm with authors Veronica Iglesias, Anne Key, and Ramona Teo for their new Jade Oracle Card Deck, a poetry reading from Larry Goodell from his new book, Nothing to Laugh About, at 3 pm, and a group reading at 5 pm with contributors to the new art and commentary anthology, O! Relentless Death! spearheaded by Andrew Fearnside.

Other authors of note reading at Bookworks in April include Tim Z. Hernandez, author of All They Will Call You, on April 7; Anne Raeff, Winter Kept us Warm, and Minrose Gwin, The Promise, on April 12; and on April 14, Isabel Quintero, author of the new graphic biography, Photographic: The Life of Graciela Iturbide.

Two events will get folks ready to hit the road this spring: on April 15, Tamara Massong talks about her new book, 60 Short Hikes in the Sandia Foothills, and on April 17, Rick Quinn visits with Road Trip America Arizona and New Mexico: 25 Scenic Side Trips.

For kids, Bookworks continues to host its free weekly award-winning story time for kids on Thursdays at 10:30.

Book club meetings this month include the Bookworks Book Club April 11 at 6:30, discussing Weekends with O'Keeffe, and the Tea Time Book Club April 30, at 2 pm. The free, monthly Wingbeats Poetry Workshop is April 10.

Music at Bookworks continues this month with an opening act by Sage Harrington and Jared Putnam, known as The Happy Gland Band, on April 1. The duo will be featuring a free set at the bookstore once a month throughout the spring and summer.

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MEDIA NOTE: If you are interested in interviewing an author or covering an event, please contact Amanda Sutton, Bookworks Events & Marketing at 505-344-8139 or events@bkwrks.com.

MARCH RECAP

March 30, 7 pm: Kristina Jacobsen, CD Release Party, for Elemental. CD Release Show with Meredith Wilder for new album, Elemental, with Meredith Wilder & Camille Grey.

March 31, 3 pm: We Rise to Resist: Voices from a New Era in Women's Political Action with Jennie Lusk, Rebecca Roth, and Alice Thieman. This collection of essays and interviews presents 36 contributors to this emerging movement discussing a broad range of topics--activism, healthcare, education, LGBT issues, the environment, to name a few--affecting the political and cultural environment of future generations. Albuquerque contributors talk about the book.

ALL APRIL EVENTS

April 1, 3 pm: Sage and Jared's Happy Gland Band. Sage Harrington and Jared Putnam, AKA The Happy Gland Band, play a free set at Bookworks. Come enjoy their fun and quirky music in our relaxed environment. Donations welcome. Follow the Happy Gland Band and their music on Facebook at facebook.com/SageAndJaredsHappyGlandBand.

April 3, 6 pm: Mohsin Hamid, Exit West, in collaboration with the University of New Mexico English Department, at Woodward Hall. Exit West follows the characters of lovers Saeed and Nadia as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, and their identities as they migrate away from a city under siege.

FREE EVENT

April 5, 10:30 am: Story Time! Our award-winning, free weekly storytime with books, songs, and an occasional snack.

April 5, 6 pm: Pasha Hogan, The Joy of Creative Discovery. Designed to help adults manage the uncertainties of life and move forward, this book sets the stage to explore the timeless questions: Who am I? and Why am I here? with curiosity and wonder, instead of fear and overwhelm. The reader is guided on this journey with ten practices from the author's much-loved Creative Discovery workshops.

April 7, 3 pm: Tim Z. Hernandez, All They Will Call You. Combining years of painstaking investigative research and masterful storytelling, Tim Z. Hernandez reconstructs the harrowing account of "the worst airplane disaster in California's history," which claimed the lives of thirty-two passengers, including at least twenty-eight Mexican citizens--farmworkers who were being deported by the U.S. government. Pushing narrative boundaries, while challenging perceptions of what it means to be an immigrant in America, Hernandez renders intimate portraits of the individual souls who, despite social status, race, or nationality, shared a common fate one frigid morning in January 1948.

April 8, 3 pm: Debra Denker, Weather Menders.Time travelers from 2050 and 2350 reverse climate change by going back to change the outcome of rigged elections in the 20th century, aided by a telepathic time-traveling cat.

April 10, 6 pm: Wingbeats Poetry Workshop. Dos Gatos Press presents a free poetry workshop open to all interested writers. Each month features a writing prompt from the Wingbeats Anthology.

April 10, 6 pm: Anne Hillerman, Cave of Bones, in collaboration with the Public Library Bernalillo & Albuquerque, at South Broadway Cultural Center. Anne Hillerman takes us deep into the heart of the deserts, mountains, and forests of New Mexico and once again explores the lore and rituals of Navajo culture in this gripping entry in her atmospheric crime series.

April 11, 6:30 pm: Bookworks Book Club. This month's book club selection is Weekends with O'Keeffe by Carol Merrill. Bookworks Book Club is free and open to all members. The reading list can be found at the book club's page at bkwrks.com/bookworks-book-club

April 12, 10:30 am: Story Time! Our award-winning, free weekly storytime with books, songs, and an occasional snack.

April 12, 6 pm: Anne Raeff, Winter Kept us Warm, and Minrose Gwin, Promise. Two acclaimed writers--Anne Raeff and Minrose Gwin--talk about their new novels in conversation with one another.

April 14, 3 pm: Isabel Quintero & Zeke Peña, Photographic: The Life of Graciela Iturbide. Photographic is a symbolic, poetic, and deeply personal graphic biography of this iconic photographer. Iturbide's journey will excite readers of all ages as well as budding photographers, who will be inspired by her resolve, talent, and curiosity.

April 15, 3 pm: Tamara Massong, 60 Short Hikes in the Sandia Foothills. This new book introduces sixty short hikes in the public lands on the eastern edge of Albuquerque. Some of the hikes are in the foothills and some are in the lower slopes of the mountains. Most are less than four miles long, and all are easy to access. They range in difficulty from easy to very hard. Included are useful tips for how to reach the trails, where to park, and how to stay safe and avoid trespassing on private property. Each hike also features downloadable digital route data that can be easily used with smartphones or GPS units.

April 17, 6 pm: Rick Quinn, Road Trip America Arizona and New Mexico: 25 Scenic Trips. Discover 25 scenic alternatives to interstates that take only a few hours to enjoy. Stunning photography, detailed maps, and easy-to-follow narrative guide the way through breathtaking landscapes and iconic western towns in Arizona and New Mexico. Each of the book's twenty-five scenic side trips begins and ends at an Interstate highway and drivable within a day. Full-color maps and photographs illustrate easy-to-follow scenic routes through breathtaking landscapes and iconic towns in Arizona and New Mexico.

April 18, 6 pm: Jonathan P. Thompson, River of Lost Souls: The Science, Politics, and Greed Behind the Gold King Mine Disaster. Award-winning investigative environmental journalist Jonathan P. Thompson digs into the science, politics, and greed behind the 2015 Gold King Mine disaster, and unearths a litany of impacts wrought by a century and a half of mining, energy development, and fracking in southwestern Colorado. Amid these harsh realities, Thompson explores how a new generation is setting out to make amends.

April 19, 10:30 am: Story Time! Our award-winning, free weekly storytime with books, songs, and an occasional snack.

April 19, 6 pm: Michelle Kells, Vicente Ximenes & Mexican American Civil Rights. Beginning as a grassroots organizer in the 1950s, Vicente Ximenes was at the forefront of the movement for Mexican American civil rights through three presidential administrations, joining Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society and later emerging as one of the highest-ranking appointees in Johnson's administration. UNM professor Michelle Hall Kells elucidates Ximenes's achievements through a rhetorical history of his career as an activist.

April 20, 7 pm: Christian Davenport, The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos, at the Nuclear Museum. $5 online at bkwrks.com/space-barons or at the door. The Space Barons is the story of a group of billionaire entrepreneurs who are pouring their fortunes into the epic resurrection of the American space program. Nearly a half-century after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, these Space Barons-most notably Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, along with Richard Branson and Paul Allen-are using Silicon Valley-style innovation to dramatically lower the cost of space travel, and send humans even further than NASA has gone. These entrepreneurs have founded some of the biggest brands in the world-Amazon, Microsoft, Virgin, Tesla, PayPal-and upended industry after industry. Now they are pursuing the biggest disruption of all: space.

April 21, 3 pm: Swimming With Elephants Publications poetry reading. A celebration of Swimming With Elephants publications and National Poetry Month with readings by poets Jessica Helen Lopez, Bill Nevins, Courtney Butler, Kat Heatherington, Kristin Macron, Gina Marselle, and others.

April 22, 3 pm: Jordan Bubin, Naughty Mouse Slam Poetry Show. Jordan Bubin reads poetry from his new chapbook, Naughty Mouse.

April 26, 10:30 am: Story Time! Our award-winning, free weekly storytime with books, songs, and an occasional snack.

April 26, 6 pm: Mercedez Holtry, I Bloomed a Resistance from My Mouth. Mercedez Holtry's newest publication from Swimming with Elephants Publications is a resistance of performance, that takes on the national political climate, local change, gentrification, the Albuquerque Rapid Transit (ART) construction, self and community-love.

April 28: Independent Bookstore Day features all day.

April 28, 1 pm: Jade Oracle Tarot Deck Demo. Learn more about the Jade Oracle Card Deck: Deities and Symbols of Ancient Mexico. Join Veronica Iglesias, Anne Key and Ramona Teo; local creators of this beautiful divination deck to learn how the cards were developed and how to use this powerful divination tool. Card decks available for purchase.

April 28, 3 pm: Larry Goodell, Nothing to Laugh About. Placitas poet Larry Goodell presents his new book, Nothing to Laugh About(Beatlick Press), in celebration of Independent Bookstore Day at Bookworks.

April 28, 5 pm: Andrew Fearnside, O! Relentless Death! Editor and illustrator Andrew Fearnside presents a collaboration between writers and himself expressing loss over the death of celebrities in 2016 including Muhammed Ali, Prince, David Bowie, and others, vis a vis the shifting tide of our country under the election of Donald Trump. Readers include Andrew Fearnside, Hakim Bellamy, Kristin Knauss Satterlee, Don McIver, and Michelle Otero.

April 29, 3 pm: Carol McDuffie, Green on Snow.

April 30, 2 pm: Tea Time Book Club. Free afternoon book club. Check bkwrks.com/event for this month's reading selection.

MAY PREVIEW

May 1, 6 pm: V.B. Price, Memoirs of the World in Ten Fragments. We live in an improbable world; an often inexplicable world; a world literally beyond belief. V.B. Price does not pretend to explain or impose a narrative or find meaning. A "memoir of the world" must, therefore, be random, occasional, infinitesimal, so incomplete as to be virtually nonexistent--and absolutely fascinating. Albuquerque author Price delivers on all fronts.

May 10, 6 pm: Craig Childs, Atlas of a Lost World. From the author of Apocalyptic Planet comes a vivid travelogue through prehistory, tracing the arrival of the First People in North America at least twenty thousand years ago and the artifacts that tell of their lives and fates. Atlas of a Lost World chronicles the last millennia of the Ice Age, the violent oscillations and retreat of glaciers, the clues and traces that document the first encounters of early humans, and the animals whose presence governed the humans' chances for survival. A blend of science and personal narrative reveals how much has changed since the time of mammoth hunters, and how little so that readers will see the Ice Age, and their own age, in a whole new light.

May 17, 6 pm: T.J. English, The Corporation. An epic story of the Cuban mob's gangsters, drugs, violence, sex, and murder rooted in the streets, The Corporation reveals how an entire generation of political exiles, refugees, racketeers, corrupt cops, hitmen, and their wives and girlfriends became caught up in an American saga of desperation and empire building. English interweaves the voices of insiders speaking openly for the first time with a trove of investigative material he has gathered over many decades to tell the story of this successful criminal enterprise, setting it against the larger backdrop of revolution, exile, and ethnicity that makes it one of the great American gangster stories that has been overlooked--until now.

May 30, 7 pm: Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us about Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, at UNM Continuing Education. Tickets include a signed hardcover and are available at bkwrks.com/michael-pollan. When Pollan set out to research how LSD and psilocybin are being used to provide relief to people suffering from difficult-to-treat conditions such as depression, addiction and anxiety, he did not intend to write what is undoubtedly his most personal book. A unique and elegant blend of science, memoir, travel writing, history, and medicine, How to Change Your Mind is a triumph of participatory journalism. By turns dazzling and edifying, it is the gripping account of a journey to an exciting and unexpected new frontier in our understanding of the mind, the self, and our place in the world. The true subject of Pollan's "mental travelogue" is not just psychedelic drugs but also the eternal puzzle of human consciousness and how, in a world that offers us both struggle and beauty, we can do our best to be fully present and find meaning in our lives.

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