Organizing a Literary Reading

Tuesday, October 18: Sharon Bridgforth Event at BookWoman

love conjure/blues
is performance literature/a novel that is constructed
for telling.

- Sharon Bridgforth, love conjure/blues

Everyone in the class will take part in organizing, attending, and actively engaging with a reading by local author Sharon Bridgforth from her book love conjure/blues , which we will read in this course.

If you have ever been to a lively author reading and signing at a bookstore, you know that it can be an exciting encounter between a text's author and her reading audience. We'll be reading books for class, discussing them, and sometimes reading them aloud to each other, and in this literary reading we'll add another kind of reading to that list: hearing an author read from her own work. We'll explore lots of questions, including: what changes about a work when the author reads it? how do we interact with a text read to us? what's it like to meet the author of a book you've read?

This event will also revise our ideas about where authors live. It might seem like authors live in other parts of the country, in other countries, in other time periods, or even in some parallel universe that doesn't quite involve us. But we are surrounded by authors - which means we have a rich local literature and you could be an author, too (we knew you when).

Each of our authors has a community connected with but not exclusive to her writing. An author's involvement with her community shapes her writing: she often writes to interact with a community, writes something that a particular community needs or wants, writes something that she wants to tell someone, writes to change the way people think about something, writes to see her history in writing, or writes for lots of other reasons. We'll get to find out who the local audience for this book is, and how to find them so that we can tell them about this reading.

Finally, writing and reading are public activities taking place around us all the time. After organizing this reading, you may be inspired to attend other readings, to organize other readings, or even to hold your own readings in order to find a public of readers that you can talk and share ideas with. Perhaps reading can change the world...

To organize the reading, you'll sign up for one of four groups responsible for different parts of the planning process:

(1) Event: food, set up, BookWoman liaison

(2) Author: Sharon Bridgforth liaison, research her for the class, get her what she needs, find someone to introduce her or prepare to introduce her

(3) Publicity: community outreach, fliers, emails

(4) Class: coordinate questions for the event, lead discussion on event's relationship to the class & the book; take pictures at the event