2017 Kids' Lit Fest Author C. Alex London

Meet Alex London

C. Alexander London (Alex) has written books for children, teens, even a few for grown-ups. He’s the author of The Wild Ones series, Dog Tags and Tides of War series, as well as the Accidental Adventures and two titles in The 39 Clues series for young readers.

His young adult debut, Proxy, was an American Library Association Top Ten Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Readers and included on their 2014 Best Fiction For Young Adults list. Proxy is a 2015 Texas Lone Star Reading List and TAYSHAS Reading List selection, a 2016 Intermediate Sequoyah Masterlist selection in Oklahoma, and has been on many state reading lists including Colorado, Arkansas, Missouri. The sequel, Guardian, is available now.

His books for adults include One Day The Soldiers Came: Voices of Children in War and National Jewish Book Award finalist Far From Zion.

Alex was born in Baltimore, Maryland and moved to New York to attend Columbia University. He graduated with a degree in philosophy and earned his Masters Degree in Library Science from Pratt Institute.

At one time a journalist reporting from conflict zones and refugee camps, he has recently moved from Brooklyn, NY, to Philadelphia, PA where he can be found wandering the streets talking to his dog, who is the real brains of the operation.

5 Fun Facts About Alex, From Alex

1. I spent a month as the Maryland State Jr. Skeet Shooting Champion because I was the only one entered in the “Junior” Category. It might actually have been in Delaware. My triumph didn’t last.
2. My full name is Charles Alexander London because my parents saw the monogram “CAL” on a towel in Macy’s and liked how it looked. They did not buy the towel that I am named after.
3. I was born three months premature and lived in an incubator for quite a while. I weighed less than two pounds and slept on a Ziploc bag filled with water that the nurses could jiggle when I forgot to breathe. I think I’ve been drawn to those breathless moments in life ever since. Also, I still love Ziploc bags.
4. I don’t remember how to write cursive.
5. I quit my job as an assistant to a movie agent in order to get a Master’s in Library Science because of a speech Chris Crutcher gave. At the time, I hadn’t read a single one of his books.

  Meet Alex's Books

 

Proxy

“Put down what you’re doing and read this book. Right now. The complex characters, intricate world, and blistering pace are off-the-charts amazing.” —Marie Lu, author of the Legend trilogy
Marie Lu and Alex discuss debt and dystopias

Syd’s life is not his own. As a proxy he must to pay for someone else's crimes. When his patron Knox crashes a car and kills someone, Syd is branded and sentenced to death. The boys realize the only way to beat the system is to save each other so they flee. The ensuing cross-country chase will uncover a secret society of rebels, test the boys' resolve, and shine a blinding light onto a world of those who owe and those who pay.

This fast-paced thrill ride of a novel is full of breakneck action, shocking twists and heart-hammering suspense that will have readers gasping until the very last page.

“Whipping Boy + Blade Runner with a sprinkling of The Hunger Games (plus, of course, a dash of A Tale of Two Cities) = a treat for teen SF fans.” —Kirkus Reviews

The Wild Ones 
“Raccoon hero Kit and his ragtag community of creatures will sneak their way into your imagination and steal your heart. They may pick your pocket, too, but they’ll take you on an adventure you won’t soon forget. This is a fantasy that kids will adore (and quick-of-paw parents will steal). A wild ride from a wildly imaginative author.”–Katherine Applegate, Newbery Medal-winning author of The One and Only Ivan and the bestselling Animorphs series

Kit is a young raccoon who has lived his whole life under the Big Sky. But when a pack of hunting dogs destroy his home and kill his parents, Kit needs to escape.

He finds himself in Ankle Snap Alley, a city in the midst of a turf war between the Wild Ones and the people’s pets who call themselves The Flealess. There he uncovers the secret that they died for–an ancient truce that gives Ankle Snap Alley to the Wild Ones. But the Flealess will stop at nothing to keep that secret buried forever, and Kit is in serious danger. Only the brave of heart and quick of paw can save the Wild Ones now.

Perfect for fans of the Warriors, Spirit Animals, or Redwall series, this first book in the Wild Ones epic is sure capture young readers’ imaginations and take them on a great adventure.

Poetry Is Not a Luxury: Natalie Diaz, When My Brother Was an Aztec

Poetry is Not a Luxury April 2017

 Natalie Diaz, When My Brother was an Aztec

NATALIE DIAZ’s poetry is raw, rhythmic, and tender. The New York Times called her debut, When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012), an “ambitious… beautiful book.” Pima and Mojave, and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian community, Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She earned her BA from Old Dominion University, where she received a full athletic scholarship and majored in English and Women’s Studies. She went on to play basketball professionally in Europe and Asia before returning to Old Dominion to earn an MFA in Creative Writing.

Poems from the Collection

My Brother at 3 a.m.

 Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation

 No More Cake Here

My Brother My Wound


Natalie Diaz reading selections from the book 

Adrian Matejka on the work of Natalie Diaz

It's tempting to get caught up in the biographical elements of Natalie Diaz's writing. The poems, as well as her author bio and interviews, invite the reader to draw direct connections between her varied identities—Mojave, a former pro-basketball player, an MFA-holder, and an archivist of Indigenous languages—and those of the speaker in her first collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec. Diaz has done so many different kinds of things that her stories have stories, but what she does on the page is much more dexterous and surprising than confessionalism or any of its variant offshoots. When My Brother Was an Aztec is a spacious, sophisticated collection, one that puts in work addressing the author's divergent experiences—whether it be family, skin politics, hoops, code switching, or government commodities.

From a review in The Rumpus

Fortunately for us, the poems in Diaz’s commanding debut poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, don’t rely on the angels. They embrace what Lorca called the duende: the kind of force and struggle that—unlike the angel and the muse— “surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.” They aren’t the kind of perfect, crystalline poems that seem to have fallen from the heavens. These are rangy, muscled works that have both a dancer’s grace and a mechanic’s oil-stained hands.

Interviews with Natalie Diaz

The Poetry Foundation

ND: Sometimes people are overwhelmed by the violence in my poems. I guess, when we see someone’s heart ripped out, we tend to look away—we question why we had to see it. I do not deny that violence, not in real life or in my work. I cannot unsee what I’ve seen. But I hope my poems also remind people of the humanity that exists in the midst of it.

Kenyon Review 

ND: The body is urgent. The neuropathy in my mother’s feet, the press of my lover’s hips, the ache in my jaw after my root canal this morning, the flinch in my student’s mouth when he said his grandmother passed. The urgency is that we are all connected. Our desires to survive. The urgency is that we are all of the same energy, connected. There is a light in me that is a light in you that is the light in a deer or a jaguar—the energy of life. The beautiful urgency of light, like a thread tethered around all of our wrists, making us touch one another, hit one another, beckon one another.

PBS Newshour conversation with Natalie Diaz on video (4+ minutes)



Natalie Diaz on the physicality of writing

I believe I came to poetry from around the corner. From a cul-de-sac really. On a rez far from where poetry ever visited. The cavalry visited. The ARMY. The railroad. They all visited. Not poetry.

Maybe what I mean is that I need the rigor and radicalism of friendship to be a poet, to be anything, really. I have found those friendships in poetry, but I found them by letting poetry be a small part of them. Language is why I am at poetry. Anger is why I am at poetry. Architecture is why I am at poetry. Haptics is why I am at poetry. My brother is why I am at poetry. The field or cave beyond myself where I go when I touch my lover is why I am at poetry.

Poetry is a thing I do with the love and chaos I feel for my beloveds and this land and the energy in every living being. It is a room to enter. There are a thousands ways to enter that room. I want to try them all.

 

National Poetry Month at Big Blue Marble

While we ALWAYS have poetry happening at Big Blue Marble, we have plenty of special guests coming up for National Poetry Month.

 

Join us to hear old favorites and fresh new voices all month long!

 

April 1st - 9th     
Canterbury Challenge

Recite the first 10 (or more) lines of the Prologue from memory and receive 10% off any one item. Give us your best Middle English - no one will critique the accent, we promise!

 

Thursday, April 6 @ 7:00pm      
We are not maps, nothing leads us to each other: 3 Poets

Big Blue Marble is proud to welcome back three of Philly's best poets: Alison Hicks, Amy Small-McKinney, and Catherine Bancroft. Alison and Amy both have new books to celebrate - Alison's You Who Took the Boat Out, coming in March 2017 from Unsolicited Press, and Amy's Walking Toward Cranes, winner of the Kithara book Prize from Glass Lyre Press. All 3 poets prove that lyric poetry is the most powerful way to bring to light the hardest emotional journeys - while not all great truths are conveyed as great art, all great art conveys great truths.

Saturday, April 8 @   7:00pm      
Recognition is something very like godliness: 4 writers

Big Blue is happy to welcome two of our own, one returning guest, and one poet new to our store: Hal Sirowitz, Minter Krotzer, Philip Fried, and Ethel Rackin. Through lyric, pastiche, history, humor, essays, and memoir, all four writers engage in "elegant quarrels with the cruelty and ignorance of the world or, more precisely, its inhabitants." (as one reviewer describes Fried's work). If you love words that make you think with your head, heart, and gut, there is no other place to be.

Thursday 4/13 @ 7pm

Thrumming just beneath the surface: 3 Poets

Big Blue Marble is thrilled to welcome 3 Philly poets as they read at the store for the first time! Shy Watson, Amy Saul-Zerby, and Alina Pleskova describe their work as modern, feminist, zany, dark, casual, lyrical, angry, and direct, with erotic undertones. Amy Saul-Zerby is the managing editor of the spoken word-based publication Voicemail Poems & lives in Philadelphia.
Alina Pleskova is the coeditor of bedfellows, a literary magazine focused on narratives of sex/desire/intimacy, & cohost of Poetry Jawns, a podcast. Shy Watson is a poet & painter living in Philadelphia. She has two chapbooks, AWAY STATUS & my parents were going to give me your name if i was born a boy (Bottlecap Press 2016, 2017). She is the poetry editor for fields magazine.

Saturday, April 15  @ 7:00pm      
The Body and the Machine

Poets Leah Falk and Lee Nussbaum Fogel present an evening of words exploring bodies and visions. Leah Falk is a poet whose work has appeared in Kenyon Review, FIELD, Blackbird, and many other journals. She runs programming at the Writers House at Rutgers University-Camden. Lee Nussbaum Fogel is a Somatic Movement Educator, Reiki practitioner, and Interdisciplinary Artist who helps people live out their callings in accordance with their wellbeing and bodies' wisdom. She is the director and founder of The Visioning Body and teaches and performs throughout and beyond Philadelphia.

Thursday April 20 @ 7pm

The Poetry in Numbers: Mathematics and Optometry

Most poets have a day job - but not every poet is a professor of mathematics or 4th year student in Optometry. The poems in Marion Deutsche Cohen's latest book Truth and Beauty continue the conversations she held with her students in her literature and mathematics course ‘Truth and Beauty.’ Jonathan Jacesko is a 4th year student at the Pennsylvania College of Optometry at Salus University. In his spare time he began writing eye care-related poems in the styles of Dr. Suess and Shel Silverstein, and from those created a book illustrated by other optometry students While these works started out as a way to get a laugh out of classmates, a first place finish in the school talent show led to many suggestions that the poems become a book. To make these poems come to life in pictures he worked with talented optometry students from across the country. They created black-and-white line drawings as well as eye-care related coloring pages and mazes. In every way the book is intended to be a fun and interactive celebration of eye care.

Friday April 21^st   @ 7pm

Writing for the Sake of the World: Women Poets

 

Join us for an evening of poetry on behalf of our world – urban and wild communities, endangered species, the rights and lives of those whose voices are censored and muffled. Line up to be announced.

Wednesday, April 26 @ 7:00pm      

Poetry Is Not a Luxury Book Club: When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz

A monthly book club led by Elliott batTzedek, MFA, where we'll use the best contemporary poets to explore the most urgent social issues. Each month we'll focus on a different book, along with individual poems from other poets addressing similar issues.

 

 

Thursday April 27     
Poem in Your Pocket Day

 

It's national Poem in Your Pocket Day! To celebrate, we invite you to come read us a poem from your pocket (or recite a poem from your head) and get 10% off an item. Don't have a poem? Pick one up from us!

 

 

Friday, April 28 @ 7:15pm     
Poetry Aloud & Alive with  Featured reader: Victoria Peurifoy

 

Everyone's favorite neighborhood poetry gathering. Hosted by Mike Cohen and Dave Worrell, with a featured reader followed by an open mic. 

Bookstore Lost and Found

Are you missing Various and Sundry Items?

Many many things get left behind at the store by happy shoppers! To make it easier to reunite Various and Sundry Items with Their People, we'll now be posting pictures here.

Missing something? Check here first. Except credit cards - we won't post pictures of those. You'll have call us. Like, you know, on an actual phone.

If one of these items is yours, stop in to claim it. We'll be more than happy to see it go back out of the store. Once something has been here a few months, we'll donate it.

In our stewardship as of 03/19/2017, all of which will be donated April 30th if not claimed, are: