Folkland Book Club: Amy Sayre Baptista’s Primitivity | Oakland

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Join us for a monthly book club featuring titles from Small Press Distribution. Pick up a free copy of our February book at the January Book Club meeting (1/30), or at the Main Library Reference desk starting on January 31 while supplies last.

FEBRUARY’S BOOK CLUB PICK: PRIMITIVITY: STORIES BY AMY SAYRE BAPTISTA

The landscape of Amy Sayre Baptista’s PRIMITIVITY is mapped by cracked asphalt and dark woods, by broken bridges spanning greedy rivers, sunbaked dirt and ghost roads, séances held in gun repair shops, and retribution exacted in long grasses and hog pits and Segway tracks. These nine stories weave together a community borrowed from history and spanning centuries in a re-imagined Pike County, a geographical conundrum found in three different states yet joined by the same hungry river. From strangers to spiritualists to families bound by love and blood, the characters who populate Sayre Baptista’s stories tell tall tales of survivorship in the American south. To enter PRIMITIVITY’s pages is to arrive in a harsh yet beguiling topography of ghosts, thieves, and a hangman’s lament.

Amy Sayre Baptista’s writing has appeared in The Best Small Fictions (2017), Corium, SmokeLong Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Butter, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other journals. She was a SAFTA fellow (2015), a CantoMundo Poetry fellow (2013), and a scholarship recipient to the Disquiet Literary Festival in Lisbon, Portugal (2011). She performs with Kale Soup for the Soul, a Portuguese-American artist’s collective, and Poetry While You Wait (Chicago). She is a co-founder of Plates&Poetry, a community arts program focused on food and writing. She has an MFA in Fiction from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and teaches Humanities at Western Gov-ernors University. She lives in Illinois.

Our Book Club moderator, Nirvana Shahriar is a senior undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. A lover of language and literature, she studies English and Linguistics. Her love for language, and interest in both the written and spoken word has led her to fa-cilitate classes at UC Berkeley that are structured around liter-ature, like book clubs. Experienced in facilitating and leading discussion, Nirvana is looking forward to more literary reads with new folks and faces.

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