Authors: Dr. Tyra Manning and Karen Keilt

Titles: Your Turn: Ways to Celebrate Life Through Storytelling (Manning)

           The Parrot's Perch: A Memoir (Keilt)

Date: October 22, 2019

Day: Tuesday

Time: 7:00 to 9:00 PM

Author

Former River Forest, Illinois resident, Dr. Tyra Manning earned her doctoral degree in education from the University of Kansas and went on to become one of the nation’s top school superintendents. Since her retirement, her mission has been to share her compelling life’s story of hope and redemption by encouraging readers to tell their own life stories through writing. Her first book, Where the Water Meets the Sand, is an IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards Gold winner in the Autobiography & Memoir category.

Description

Creative expression through writing helps us uncover gems of hope and serenity, enabling us to navigate difficult times. Sharing stories with one another fills the space between us, inspires us, helps us forge stronger relationships, and teaches us that we're more alike than different. In Your Turn, renowned educator Dr. Tyra Manning offers examples of stories from her own life, followed by an invitation for readers to delve onto their own emotional histories, with plenty of room to explore on the page with writing prompts and tools.

A guidebook for transformation through self-expression, Your Turn will spark readers' creative thought and offers them a space to document their own self-reflection--helping them overcome challenges and move forward

Author

Karen Keilt, is the author of a memoir, The Parrot’s Perch. Keilt, a native of Brazil,” tells the story of her imprisonment and torture while a captive of the country’s military dictatorship regime. In this emotional and courageous memoir, Keilt outlines her life’s journey to find true happiness after years of clinging to survival.

Description

The Parrot's Perch opens in 2013, when Karen Keilt, age sixty, receives an invitation to testify at the Brazilian National Truth Commission at the UN in New York. The email sparks memories of her "previous life"--the one she has kept safely bottled up for more than thirty-seven years. Hopeful of helping to raise awareness about ongoing human rights violations in Brazil, she wants to testify, but she anguishes over reliving the horrific events of her youth. In the pages that follow, Keilt tells the story of her life in Brazil--from her exclusive, upper-class lifestyle and dreams of Olympic medals to her turmoil-filled youth. Full of hints of a dark oligarchy in Brazil, corruption, crime, and military interference, The Parrot's Perch is a searing, sometimes shocking true tale of suffering, struggle--and survival. Karen Keilt lived through the darkest days of Brazil's military dictatorship. In her courageous and compelling memoir, Keilt narrates an emotionally honest reckoning of her desire to find true happiness. Forbidden by her wealthy family to even mention her imprisonment, torture, and rape, Keilt is forced to make a change that will affect the rest of her life. Seen through her testimony to the Brazilian National Truth Commission at the UN, readers become witnesses to both her vulnerability and her quiet strength.

Title: This Tender Land: A Novel

From the author of Ordinary Grace, a magnificent novel about four orphans on a life-changing odyssey during the early years of the Great Depression—a book that shines new light on a pivotal time in American history.
1932, Minnesota—the Lincoln School is a pitiless place where hundreds of Native American children, forcibly separated from their parents, are sent to be educated. It is also home to an orphan named Odie O’Banion, a lively boy whose exploits earn him the superintendent’s wrath. Forced to flee, he and his brother Albert, their best friend Mose, and a brokenhearted little girl named Emmy steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi and a place to call their own.
Over the course of one unforgettable summer, these four orphans will journey into the unknown and cross paths with others who are adrift, from struggling farmers and traveling faith healers to displaced families and lost souls of all kinds. With the feel of a modern classic, This Tender Land is an en­thralling, big-hearted epic that shows how the magnificent American landscape connects us all, haunts our dreams, and makes us whole.

Author: William Kent Krueger

Raised in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon, William Kent Krueger briefly attended Stanford University—before being kicked out for radical activities. After that, he logged timber, worked construction, tried his hand at freelance journalism, and eventually ended up researching child development at the University of Minnesota. He currently makes his living as a full-time author. He’s been married for over 40 years to a marvelous woman who is a retired attorney. He makes his home in St. Paul, a city he dearly loves.

Krueger writes a mystery series set in the north woods of Minnesota. His protagonist is Cork O’Connor, the former sheriff of Tamarack County and a man of mixed heritage—part Irish and part Ojibwe. His work has received a number of awards, including the Minnesota Book Award, the Loft-McKnight Fiction Award, the Anthony Award, the Barry Award, the Dilys Award, and the Friends of American Writers Prize. His last nine novels were all New York Times bestsellers.

Ordinary Grace, his stand-alone novel published in 2013, received the Edgar Award, given by the Mystery Writers of America in recognition for the best novel published in that year. The companion novel, This Tender Land, is scheduled for publication in September 2019.

Date: October 24, 2019

Day: Thursday

Time: 7:00 PM