Bookworks Announces February Lineup and March Preview

February at Bookworks is replete with events that tackle modern politics and current events as well as history.

To open the month, on February 1, former New Mexico senator Dede Feldman talks about her new book, Another Way Forward, which looks at grassroots examples of successful projects and nonprofits that have made positive progress.

On February 23, national magazine writer and first time author, Francisco Cantu, talks about his new acclaimed book, The Line Becomes a River, from Riverhead Books. The book covers Cantu's time as a border patrol agent in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. He brings to light the stories of everyday immigrants by providing a well rounded look at the nuances of immigration in the American Southwest.

Another look at crime in the Southwest, Pure Land, Annette McGivney visits on February 5 with her true crime chronicle of a hiker's death in the Grand Canyon.

Southwest historical topics get covered on February 17 when R.D. Saunders talks about his memoir, Underground and Radioactive, on his time as a uranium miner in the Grant mineral belt of the San Juan Basin.

Then on February 24, William Matson and members of Crazy Horse's family visit Bookworks for a talk about their book, Crazy Horse: The Lakota Warrior's Life and Legacy.

Other fun local features include Francelle Alexander talking about her two volume set on the North Valley on February 15 and the annual Dime Stories anniversary reading of 3-minute prose pieces on February 18.

Bookworks continues to host its weekly free story time for kids on Thursdays at 10:30.

Book club meetings this month include the Bookworks Book Club February 14, at 6:30, discussing Hillbilly Elegy, and the Tea Time Book Club February 26, at 2 pm, discussing The Warden.

FEBRUARY EVENTS

February 1, 10:30 am: Story Time! Every week, Bookworks hosts a free weekly story time at 10:30 am. Story time is geared toward toddlers and pre-schoolers, but all ages are welcome. Each week features stories and occasional songs and special guests.

February 1, 6 pm: Dede Feldman, Another Way Forward. Another Way Forward profiles innovative organizations and inspiring local leaders who are changing the world in New Mexico, one neighborhood, one clinic, one classroom at a time. Award winning author and former senator shows what they have in common and how we can make a difference from the bottom up. Contains 248 pages, 63 color photos, resources, and tips.

February 2, 3 pm: Linda Niemann, Cosas Folk Art Travels in Mexico. Love and friendship, art and craft, language and culture are the subjects of this look back at one woman's experiences in Mexico over a period of twenty years.

February 2, 5 pm: Mary Maurice, Burtrum Lee: A Scientific Mystery. Burtrum Lee Conner scrambles to her feet, sweat drizzling from her brow. She needs to escape, her captor is becoming frazzled, disoriented, scary. Is it true what Calvin Kramer said? Has her whole life been a farce? A deviant lie that her mom and dad, even her grandmother, have been telling her for the past forty years? If she's not the woman she believed she was, then who is she?

February 4, 3 pm: Rae Paris, The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory. Rae Paris began writing The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory in 2010, while traveling the United States, visiting sites of racial trauma, horror, and resistance. Paris is driven by the familial and historical spaces and by what happens when we remember seemingly disparate images and moments. A blending of prose, poetry, and images, The Forgetting Tree is a necessary collection that argues for a deeper understanding of past and present so we might imagine a more hopeful, sustaining, and loving future for Black lives.

February 5, 6 pm: Annette McGivney, Pure Land. Pure Land is the story of the most brutal murder in the history of the Grand Canyon and how McGivney's quest to investigate the victim's life and death wound up guiding the author through her own life-threatening crisis. On this journey stretching from the southern tip of Japan to the bottom of Grand Canyon, and into the ugliest aspects of human behavior, Pure Land offers proof of the healing power of nature and of the resiliency of the human spirit.

February 8, 10:30 am: Story Time! Every week, Bookworks hosts a free weekly story time at 10:30 am. Story time is geared toward toddlers and pre-schoolers, but all ages are welcome. Each week features stories and occasional songs and special guests.

February 11, 3 pm: Diana Silva, Mole Mama. In this heartfelt love story, Diana shares the intimate journey of her mother's final thirteen months. She cooks her mother's heirloom Mexican recipes every weekend while Rose presides from her nearby hospice bed and completes taste tests to ensure that Diana has perfected her favorite dishes. Rose also uses this precious time to help Diana understand the secrets to a good life: forgiveness, love, faith, and gratitude for every moment. Diana hopes that her story will inspire you to be courageous, present, authentic and vulnerable during your farewell journeys. The book includes some of Rose's most cherished recipes, Chicken mole, Spanish rice, chili beans, enchiladas, guacamole and others.

February 13, 6:30 pm: Wingbeats Poetry Workshop. Join Dos Gatos Press for their monthly Wingbeats Poetry Workshop. Event is free and open to all writers. Each session features a writing prompt and writing time.

February 14, 6 pm: Bookworks Book Club. Free and open to all readers each month on the second Wednesday. The reading selection for February is Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance.

February 15, 10:30 am: Story Time! Every week, Bookworks hosts a free weekly story time at 10:30 am. Story time is geared toward toddlers and pre-schoolers, but all ages are welcome. Each week features stories and occasional songs and special guests.

February 16, 6 pm: Francelle Alexander, Albuquerque's North Valley: Los Griegos and Los Candelarias and Alameda and Los Ranchos. The first volume presents an overview of the North Valley through the centuries, beginning with the traditional life of the Hispanic villages established in the 1700s and continue today as both cultural and geographical locations.The second volume chronicles the history of the village of Alameda and the villages of the Elena Gallegos Land Grant, including Los Ranchos.

February 17, 1 pm: R.D. Saunders, Underground and Radioactive. Capturing for posterity the vanishing world of uranium mining, this candid memoir recounts the author's adventures and misadventures working underground in 1970s New Mexico, "The Uranium Capital of the World." Detailed descriptions of the tools, methods and hazards of uranium mining, along with character sketches and entertaining anecdotes, provide a colorful glimpse of a bygone way of life--drilling, blasting and mucking the sandstone of the Grants mineral belt in the San Juan Basin.

February 17, 3 pm: Annie Mattingley, The After Death Chronicles: True Stories of Comfort, Guidance, and Wisdom from Beyond the Veil. This is a book about ordinary people--plumbers, artists and accountants, bakers and beauticians, teachers and lawyers--who have been able to receive communication from loved ones who have died. Included here are accounts from over 80 people across the country who have had contact with the dead through the diaphanous veil that separates them from the living.

February 18, 3 pm: Dime Stories Anniversary Reading. 3-minute prose readings from Albuquerque's best of Dime Stories for the year.

February 22, 10:30 am: Story Time! Every week, Bookworks hosts a free weekly story time at 10:30 am. Story time is geared toward toddlers and pre-schoolers, but all ages are welcome. Each week features stories and occasional songs and special guests.

February 22, 6 pm: David Daley, Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count. The explosive account of how Republican legislators and political operatives fundamentally rigged our American democracy through redistricting. The way dark money was translated into congressional majorities is one of the great, sinister stories of our time. But in David Daley the shadow figures have finally met their match.--Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas. Daley is the editor in chief of Salon and the Digital Media Fellow for the Wilson Center for Humanities and the Arts and the Grady School of Journalism at the University of Georgia. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

February 23, 6 pm: Francisco Cantu, The Line Becomes a River. For Francisco Cantu, the border is in the blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Haunted by the landscape of his youth, Cantu joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners are posted to remote regions crisscrossed by drug routes and smuggling corridors, where they learn to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive. Cantu tries not to think where the stories go from there. Plagued by nightmares, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. But when an immigrant friend travels to Mexico to visit his dying mother and does not return, Cantu discovers that the border has migrated with him, and now he must know the whole story. Searing and unforgettable, The Line Becomes a River makes urgent and personal the violence our border wreaks on both sides of the line. Cantu served as an agent for the United States Border Patrol from 2008 to 2012, working in the deserts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. A former Fulbright fellow, he is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a 2017 Whiting Award. His writing and translations have been featured in Best American Essays, Harper's, n+1, Orion, and Guernica, as well as on This American Life. He lives in Tucson.

February 24, 3 pm: William Matson, Crazy Horse: The Lakota Warrior's Life and Legacy. This book is a compelling addition to the body of works about Crazy Horse and the complicated and often conflicting events of that time period in American History.

February 25, 1 pm: Monessa Reads Tarot. $10 for a 10-15 minute session with Monessa, an intuitive guide who reads Soul Cards. Sign up at 1 pm.

February 25, 3 pm: Johnna Studebaker, Walking West on the Camino. This tale of faith and triumph spans a period of six years. The author persuades her reluctant twin sister to accompany her on the Camino for a spiritual quest and the adventure of a lifetime. Beginning in the spring of 2011, they backpack in yearly segments for almost a thousand miles from Le Puy-en-Velay in France, crossing the Pyrenees, and eventually reaching Santiago de Compostela on the northwestern coast of Spain. Slogging through rain and mud, climbing in and out of medieval mountainous villages, sojourning in the midst of vineyards and fields of sunflowers and red poppies, they press on. Written with humor and humility, the author details their heroine's journey and pilgrimage as they come face to face with their greatest fears. The Way of Saint James beckons them to return again and again--it calls them still. 22 full-color oil paintings by the author as well as photos and a map illustrate the book. Come join them in their leap of faith--you will see.

February 26, 2 pm: Tea Time Book Club.

February 27, 6 pm: Victoria Price, The Way of Being Lost, with Barrett Price. After a tumultuous period of crisis, Victoria Price rebuilt her life by embracing a daily practice of joy, healing childhood wounds and reconnecting to the example set by her father Vincent, the famed actor. Her journey involved stepping away from externalities and into her father's legacy -- his love for people and compassion for others, his generosity of spirit and simple kindnesses, his enthusiasm for new experiences, and his love of life.

MARCH PREVIEW

March 14, 6pm:. Luis Urrea, The House of Broken Angels, A Word with Writers, with Santiago Vaquera-Vasquez. GENERAL ADMISSION $35. PREFERRED SEATING $45. Each ticket will admit one and include a signed hardcover. The definitive Mexican-American immigrant story, at once intimate and epic, from an acclaimed storyteller.

http://www.bkwrks.com/luis-urrea

March 19, 6pm:. Willy Vlautin, Don't Skip Out on Me. From Willy Vlautin, award-winning author of Lean on Pete and The Motel Life, comes a powerful exploration of identity and loneliness pulled from deep within America's soul.

March 20, 6pm:. Daniel Pena, Bang! Vividly portraying the impact of international drug smuggling, Pena's debut novel also probes the loss of talented individuals and the black market machines fed with the people removed and shut out of America. Ultimately, Bang is a riveting tale about ordinary people forced to do dangerous, unimaginable things.

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