Proud to be an Indie Champion honoree
Congratulations to John Green, whose remarkable novel “The Fault in Our Stars” kept me reading when I should have been writing. Green has been chosen by the American Bookselllers Association as the writer who best represents commitment to independent book stores and their role in our communities. I’m proud to be an honoree in the category and am looking forward to the ABA Awards lunch in New York next Thursday. For more information on the awards, click here.
Iceland Writers Retreat next April…
Delighted to be invited to the first Iceland Writers Retreat.
From 9-13 April 2014, the retreat will bring published and aspiring fiction and non-fiction writers to Reykjavík. I’m looking forward to visiting the wild land of the sagas (ideally from the saddle of an Icelandic pony), learning about Iceland’s rich literary tradition and meeting contemporary Icelandic writers. I’ll be there with, among others, New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean, Ryerson University professor and author Randy Boyagoda, and memoirist Iain Reid.
Berry College chooses Caleb’s Crossing for its First Year Experience
So pleased to learn that incoming freshmen at Berry College will be reading my novel Caleb’s Crossing. Looking forward to meeting the students in Georgia September 19th. For more information click here.
University of Rhode Island selects Caleb’s Crossing as 2013 Common Read
Wonderful to learn that the University of Rhode Island students will be coming together around the story of Caleb and his college experience at Harvard in 1665. Click here for more information. I will be visiting the campus to speak about the novel September 24.
Caleb’s Crossing is San Diego One Book pick for 2013
Thank you San Diego for selecting my novel Caleb’s Crossing for One Book, One San Diego all-city reads this fall. The kick off events Sept 30, Oct 1st and Oct 2nd were wonderful. I wanted especially to thank Dr Patricia Dixon, Dr Joely Proudfit and Michael Murphy for bringing the Luiseno perspective to our discussions at the remarkable new Central Library and the beautiful library at Encinitas. I wish I could be there for some of the great programs still to come…
Geraldine Brooks Delivers 2011 Boyer Lectures: “The Idea of Home”
Every year, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation airs a series of talks by a prominent Australian. Geraldine’s first lecture explores our duty to our only home, this planet. The second and third examine how Brooks’s ideas were shaped by the progressive ethos of her Australian childhood and her years abroad as a foreign correspondent. In the final lecture, she reflects on her ultimate home in literature as a writer of historical fiction.
Listen to the first lecture www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/boyer-lecture-one-our-only-home/3680774
First Wampanoag degree from Harvard College in over 300 years
Last May, Tiffany Smalley of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head/Aquinnah became the first Martha’s Vineyard Wampanoag since Caleb to receive an undergraduate degree from Harvard College. In recent years, two other Vineyard Wampanoag, Tobias Vanderhoop and Carrie Anne Vanderhoop, have earned degrees from Harvard University’s graduate schools of government and education.
New York Times book review of Caleb’s Crossing
Jane Smiley reviews Caleb’s Crossing for the New York Times books review. The full review will appear on May 15th.
“…The triumph of Caleb’s Crossing is that Bethia succeeds as a convincing woman of her time, and also in communicating across centuries of change in circumstance, custom and language. She tells a story that is suspenseful and involving. It is also a story that is tragically recognizable and deeply sad….
…Caleb’s Crossing could not be more enlightening and involving. Beautifully written from beginning to end, it reconfirms Geraldine Brooks’s reputation as one of our most supple and insightful novelists…”
Interview in The Australian
Below is a short excerpt from Geraldine’s interview. You can read the full article here.
When Brooks, who had been living in Virginia, moved to Martha’s Vineyard in 2006, she started reading about the island’s history. She learned that the first Native American graduate of Harvard University, across the Nantucket Sound in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a local: Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, class of 65.
“My mind jumped to what I knew, the civil rights era, the 1960s, and I wondered if I would bump into this Caleb at the local market,” she says. She missed him by three centuries: Caleb graduated in 1665, just three decades after Harvard was established, when Cambridge was, as Brooks puts it in the novel, “an unlovely town” where “the air reeks” and the ground was covered in “steaming piles of clutter and muck”. The settlers may have been Puritans, but they weren’t clean.”
