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LCAD Library Distinguished Author Lecture Series with Patty Seyburn + Andrew Tonkovich
September 30, 2019 @ 6:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Laguna College of Art + Design’s (LCAD) Dennis and Leslie Power Library Presents: Distinguished Author Lecture Series with Patty Seyburn + Andrew Tonkovich
Monday, September 30, 2019
6:30–9:00 p.m.
Laguna College of Art + Design
Dennis and Leslie Power Library
Laguna Beach, California 92651
FREE ADMISSION | PUBLIC INVITED
Join distinguished authors, Patty Seyburnand Andrew Tonkovichin LCAD’s Dennis and Leslie Power Libraryfor a meet & greet, reading, and sales/signing of their books, including their latest releases, Seyburn’s Threshold Deliveryand Tonkovich’s The Dairy of Anne Frank and More Wish Fulfillment in the Noughties: (Three Novellas).
About the Authors and their two new releases:
PATTY SEYBURN has previously published five collections of poems: Threshold Delivery(Finishing Line Press, 2019); Perfecta(What Books Press, Glass Table Collective, 2014); Hilarity, (New Issues Press, 2009), Mechanical Cluster(Ohio State University Press, 2002) and Diasporadic(Helicon Nine Editions, 1998). She earned a BS and an MS in Journalism from Northwestern University, an MFA in Poetry from University of California, Irvine, and a Ph.D. in Poetry and Literature from the University of Houston. She is a proud Professor at California State University, Long Beach. Threshold Deliverytakes a lyrical look at mortality through the lens of ritual and Jewish mystical traditions, exploring, with pathos and humor, the connection between generations and social dynamics – including, at the Mah Jongg table.
ANDREW TONKOVICH edits the West Coast literary magazine, Santa Monica Review, and hosts Bibliocracy, a weekly books show on listener-supported Pacifica Radio’s KPFK (90.7) in Southern California. His fiction, nonfiction, reviews and commentary have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Ecotone, Best American Non-Required Reading, Jukedand Faultline. Tonkovich is also a regular contributor to the OC Weekly. With Lisa Alvarez, he is the co-editor of the first-ever historic survey of literary Orange County, a collection of prose and poetry from Heyday titled Orange County: A Literary Field Guide(2017). He teaches composition at UC Irvine and works with the labor union representing librarians and lecturers.
THE DAIRY OF ANNE FRANK AND MORE WISH FULFILLMENT IN THE NOUGHTIES: In three comic novellas, three unlikely hero-narrators insist their respective ways into revisionist stories — imagined or real — of rescue, resistance and ironic retribution. Darkly funny and politically urgent, their clumsy, self-conscious if sincere attempts answer our absurdly sadistic recent civic despair with complex if almost, if not quite imaginable, empathy. In The Dairy of Anne Frank, a community college student’s spelling error inspires his adjunct writing instructor to stage an alternative theatrical pageant rehabilitating grammar and syntax, love and brain injury, biography and history. In Not Enemies, But Friends, another teacher simultaneously takes on liberal fatalism and the organized complacency which enables both the virtual and actual kidnapping of public education by right-wing fundamentalists. Finally, in Going Clearer, accidental exposure to a single if singular book on Scientology transforms an otherwise illiterate and uninitiated nobody into an avenging disciple of reason and humanity against coercion, hucksterism, superstition and the limits of his and perhaps our own collective imagination.