Happy Pride Month! This week on Pratt Chat, we are spotlighting some of our favorite YA books featuring characters or authors from the LGBTQIA+ community.
June is a month of celebrations so we didn’t want to forget spotlighting some of our favorite authors for Caribbean Heritage Month. Add these authors to your reading list this month!
Author Spotlight on Marlon James
This notable author was born in Jamaica in 1970. James has won numerous awards including a Man Booker Prize, OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, and NAACP Image Award. Currently Marlon James lives in Minnesota and New York.
Author Spotlight on Nicole Dennis-Benn
Dennis-Benn was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. Her writing has received critical acclaim including winning two Lambda Literary Awards. Dennis-Benn is the founder of the Stuyvesant Writing Workshop and lives with her wife in Brooklyn, New York.
Here are some more books you will enjoy this Caribbean Heritage Month.
It’s African American Music Appreciation Month! Each June, we celebrate the talent and accomplishments of African American music artists. From pop and rock, to soul and rap, their impact on the music industry and pop culture are undeniable. Take a listen to a few artists featured on Hoopla. Don’t forget, you can check out up to 10 e-materials each month.
In honor of Pride Month, we’re spotlighting our favorite books featuring characters or written by members of the LGBTQIA+ community. Take a look at some of our favorite fiction books to read this June. Happy reading! You can also find out more of the activities the Pratt Library is doing to celebrate Pride Month here.
by Tom Warner Best & Next Department
Nomadland swept the Oscars this year, winning awards for Best Picture, Best Director (Chloe Zhao – the first woman of color and of Asian descent and only the second woman ever to win the award) and Best Actress (Frances McDormand). Loosely adapted from journalist Jessica Bruder’s 2017 nonfiction book – which documented how a devastating global recession transformed old-fashioned “company towns” into ghost towns and created a new class of elderly transient workers – director Chloe Zhao’s film version uses the fictional character “Fern” to represent this real-life diaspora. Shortly after the death of her husband, with whom she lived in the now-shut-down mining town of Empire, NV, Fern loads up a van that is now her home and hits what Robert Frost famously called “the road less traveled,” taking an itinerant journey of healing across the American West. Along the way she encounters many of the real nomads who first appeared in Bruder’s book, here playing themselves. Their appearance is important because, though Fern’s journey is financially-driven, not everybody hits the road for economic reasons. For many, the challenging lifestyle is a choice and their road leads to a place where they can enjoy both solitude and community.
Nomadland is currently streaming only on Hulu and Disney+, so unless you have a subscription you’ll just have to wait until the DVD eventually comes out to see it. In the meantime, you can use your Pratt library card to check out two rare documentaries in the Best & Next Department’s video collection (yes, we still have video tapes!), Loners on Wheels and Roam Sweet Home, which complement the subject matter of Nomadland as they chronicle the lives of non-conventional seniors choosing to spend their golden years living on the road. While Zhao’s docudrama utilized the star power of Frances McDormand (and co-star David Straithorn) to tell a compelling story about societal drop-outs surviving economic and emotional hardship, the offbeat characters inhabiting these two small-budget films from the ‘90s are even more fascinating and their personalities and stories will hold your attention every bit as much as Hollywood stars like McDormand and Straithorn.
