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Red cover shows the silhouetted back of a woman with her hair up, her shirt and hair are covered in squares of textures and patterns.

Bauder Lecture Series: Nadia Owusu

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Red cover shows the silhouetted back of a woman with her hair up, her shirt and hair are covered in squares of textures and patterns.

For adults. Registration required.

Thu, Sep 21 | 6 – 7 pm
Howard Community College
Monteabaro Recital Hall (free parking available)
10901 Little Patuxent Pkwy, Columbia

Join us for the annual Bauder Lecture at Howard Community College, featuring acclaimed author Nadia Owusu.

Nadia Owusu is a Brooklyn-based writer and urbanist. Her memoir, Aftershocks, was selected as a best book of 2021 by more than a dozen publications, including Time, Vogue, Esquire, and the BBC, and has been translated into five languages. It was a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick, named one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year, and selected by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai for her Literati book club.

From the Publishers Weekly review:
The biracial daughter of an Armenian mother and Ghanaian father, Owusu’s early life was fractured by her parents’ divorce and multiple moves necessitated by her father’s U.N. career. Living in Rome at age seven, she was visited by her long-absent mother on the day a catastrophic quake hit Armenia, seeding an obsession with earthquakes “and the ways we try to understand the size and scale of impending disaster.”

Nadia Owusu is the winner of a Whiting Award in nonfiction and has received fellowships from Yaddo and Art Omi. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, Granta, The Paris Review Daily, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Bon Appétit, and Travel + Leisure. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University and at the Mountainview MFA program at Southern New Hampshire University, and she is the Director of Storytelling at Frontline Solutions, a consulting firm supporting social-change organizations.

Tope Folarin, a Nigerian-American writer based in Washington, D.C., will be introducing Ms. Owusu and moderating the discussion. He serves as Director of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Lannan Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Georgetown University. He is the recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Whiting Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other awards. He was educated at Morehouse College and the University of Oxford, where he earned two master’s degrees as a Rhodes Scholar. His debut novel, A Particular Kind of Black Man, was published by Simon & Schuster.

The Bauder Lecture by Howard Community College is made possible by a generous grant from Dr. Lillian Bauder, a community leader and Columbia resident. Howard Community College will present an annual endowed author lecture known as The Bauder Lecture, and the chosen book will be celebrated with two student awards. Known as the Don Bauder Awards, any Howard Community College student who has read the featured book is eligible to respond and reflect on the book in an essay or other creative format. The awards honor the memory of Don Bauder, late husband of Dr. Lillian Bauder and a champion of civil rights and social justice causes.  

Aftershocks was selected by the Howard County Book Connection committee as its choice for the 2023–2024 academic year. The Howard County Book Connection is a partnership of Howard Community College and the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society (HoCoPoLitSo). Visit the Howard County Book Connection web page for additional information.

Aftershocks is available from HCLS in print, large print, e-book, and e-audiobook formats. HoCoPoLitSo will also have copies available for purchase at the event.

In partnership with Howard Community College and HoCoPoLitSo.

The illustration shows a futuristic scene of a woman walking through a green wood; she wears boots and has a long blonde braid down her back. Various creatures in the darkened wood are illuminated as if they were made up of stars from the sky, and there are background stars above as well.

Climate Change Short Stories: An Inconvenient Book Club

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The illustration shows a futuristic scene of a woman walking through a green wood; she wears boots and has a long blonde braid down her back. Various creatures in the darkened wood are illuminated as if they were made up of stars from the sky, and there are background stars above as well.
Illustration by Rebekka Dunlap, from the short story “The Tree in the Back Yard” by Michelle Yoon

By Susan Thornton Hobby

Climate change is scary, and cli-fi short stories are here to help.

“Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming whether you like it or not.” – Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, age 18

Change is coming, both in the climate, and with luck, in human behavior. Reading about climate change is frightening, and sometimes shuts people down. But as many climate activists have explained, there is hope.

Environmental and animal activist Jane Goodall said it well: “I do have reasons for hope: our clever brains, the resilience of nature, the indomitable human spirit, and above all, the commitment of young people when they’re empowered to take action.”

But reading alarmist nonfiction doesn’t always reach the heart. Story, however, seems to sneak through our defenses and climb straight into our souls. Climate fiction, a genre of literature sometimes shortened to “cli-fi,” pioneered with J. G. Ballard’s novels of climate change (especially the 1962 classic The Drowned World) and Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune (see the review).

Since March 2019, HoCoPoLitSo recording secretary Susan Thornton Hobby and climate educator Julie Dunlap have led a climate fiction book club at Howard County Library System. Attendees are interested in literature that explores the facts and mysteries of Earth’s changing climate, and we have read and discussed eight incredible novels to date.

We’re mixing things up in January, and have chosen to read the award winners of a climate fiction short story contest sponsored by Grist Magazine’s Fix Solutions Lab. Organizers of the contest, Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, urged writers to envision the next 180 years of equitable climate progress.

Sponsored by the National Resources Defense Council, the contest is “an uprising of imagination,” as Fix describes it. The winning stories, a dozen pieces of short fiction by authors including Black, Indigenous, disabled, and queer authors, conjure hope, anger, frustration, joy, and contemplation about the future of our planet in the impending climate crisis.

“Whether built on abundance or adaptation, reform or a new understanding of survival, these stories provide flickers of hope, even joy, and serve as a springboard for exploring how fiction can help create a better reality,” writes Tory Stephens, who works at Fix and spearheaded the contest. Join us in reading and discussing these stories on Thursday, Jan. 6, from 7 to 8 pm, at HCLS Miller Branch. Register here. The stories, and a terrific glossary of cli-fi terms, including afrofuturism (looking at you Octavia Butler), solar punk, and ecotopia, are available here.

Susan Thornton Hobby is the HoCoPoLitSo recording secretary as well as co-leader of the Inconvenient Book Club at HCLS Miller Branch.