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The Cleveland Public Library's Writers & Readers series showcases the Library's role in promoting books and reading to the Greater Cleveland Community. All Cleveland Public Library Writers & Readers events are FREE and open to the public.
Interested in shuttle service from East or West side? Call 216-623-2869.
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Jimmy Santiago Baca
Saturday, September 24, 2011 – 2:00 p.m.
Louis Stokes Wing Auditorium • Main Library
 Jimmy Santiago Baca is an award-winning poet and author who learned to read and write while incarcerated in the Arizona prison system on drug charges from 1973-1978.
Born in New Mexico of Indio-Mexican descent, Baca had a troubled childhood and was a runaway at the age of thirteen. He eventually found himself serving time in a maximum security prison and it was there, he says, that he "was shaken by the voices of Neruda and Lorca."
He has since gone on to publish ten volumes of poetry, a collection of short stories and a novel, a memoir, a children’s book and two collections of stories for adolescents. He has devoted his postprison life to writing and teaching others to overcome conflict in their lives. Baca has conducted hundreds of writing workshops in prisons, schools, community centers, libraries and universities throughout the country.
A "poet of the people," Baca’s dynamic poetry turns the personal into the universal. His semi-autobiographical novel-in-verse, Martin and Meditations on the South Valley, won the 1988 American Book Award for Poetry. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Baca has also won a Pushcart Prize, the International Hispanic Heritage Award, the Southwest Book Award, and the Cornelius P. Turner GED Award, given annually to a graduate who has made significant contributions to society.
His collection, Stories from the Edge (2010) and its companion volume, Adolescents on the Edge, offers a new approach to reaching at-risk teenagers by illustrating life-altering conflicts and the power of their own decision-making.
Other recent books by Jimmy Santiago Baca include the novel A Glass of Water (2009) and a collection of poems, Breaking Bread with the Darkness (2011).
Ruth Reichl
Saturday, October 29, 2011 – 2:00 p.m.
Louis Stokes Wing Auditorium • Main Library
 Author and food critic Ruth Reichl has been a respected voice on the culinary arts scene since the early 1970s when she published Mmmmm: A Feastiary. The winner of six James Beard Awards, she served as restaurant critic for the New York Times during the 1990s and as editor-in-chief at Gourmet magazine beginning in 1999. A major force in the culinary revolution that took place in California in the 1980s, she was also the restaurant critic for New West and California, as well as the Los Angeles Times.
Her critically acclaimed and highly popular memoirs, Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table (1998), Comfort Me with Apples (2001) and Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise (2005), have been translated into 16 languages. Her most recent book is For You, Mom, Finally (2009).
The New York Times calls her work "riotously, effortlessly entertaining" and Newsday noted how "lucky we are that she had the courage to follow her appetite." The Washington Post said reading Ruth Reichl "on food is almost as good as eating it." She has edited several books for Gourmet including Endless Feasts: Sixty Years of Writing from Gourmet (2002), The Gourmet Cookbook (2004), Gourmet Today (2009), and History in a Glass: Sixty Years of Wine Writing from Gourmet (2006).
Ruth Reichl has been seen on television as a judge on Bravo's "Top Chef Masters," on the Food Network's "Eating Out Loud" specials, and on public television's "Gourmet Adventures with Ruth" and "Diary of a Foodie."
She currently serves as the editorial advisor to Gilt Taste, an online site which she says is "a great marriage of content and commerce." She is at work on a novel and a memoir of her years at Gourmet.
Eugene Robinson
Saturday, February 4, 2012 - 2:00 p.m.
Louis Stokes Wing Auditorium • Main Library
 Since joining The Washington Post in 1980, Eugene Robinson has served as city hall reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires and London, foreign editor, columnist, and assistant managing editor in charge of the paper's Style section.
His storytelling ability, experience and finely-tuned reporting skills led to his winning the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for his commentary on the 2008 presidential race.
Born and raised in Orangeburg, South Carolina, he attended the University of Michigan where he became the first black student to be named editor of the school's award-winning newspaper, The Michigan Daily. He began his professional career as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, where he covered the Patty Hearst trial. He joined The Washington Post in 1980 as a city hall reporter, and by 1981 was promoted to assistant city editor.
In 1984 Robinson was named city editor of the Post, a position he remained in until he took a leave in 1987-88 to accept a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University. He returned to the paper as the South American correspondent and ultimately became the foreign editor.
It was during this period that he published his first book, Coal to Cream: A Black Man's Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race (1999). Robinson's second book, Last Dance in Havana (2004) appeared during his tenure as the Post's editor of the Style section.
Eugene Robinson's latest book, Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America, was published in 2010. He was appointed associate editor and columnist for The Washington Post in 2005 and still holds that position. He lives in Arlington, Virginia, with his wife Avis and their two sons.
Rick Moody
Saturday, March 3, 2012 – 2:00 p.m.
Louis Stokes Wing Auditorium • Main Library
 Called by The Wall Street Journal "one of the most prodigiously talented writers in America," Rick Moody is the author of five novels, three collections of short fiction, and a memoir. His debut novel, Garden State (1992), was the winner of the Pushcart Press Editor's Choice Award. The Ice Storm (1994), his highly praised look at the 1970s, was published in twenty countries and made into a film directed by Ang Lee. His other novels include The Four Fingers of Death (2011), The Diviners (2005), and Purple America (1997).
His collections of short fiction are The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven (1995), Demonology (2001), and Right Livelihoods, a book of three novellas, published in 2007. His short stories and nonfiction writings have been anthologized in Best American Stories, Best American Essays and The Year's Best Science Fiction, as well as in several editions of the Pushcart Prize anthology.
The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions (2001), winner of the PEN Martha Albrand prize for excellence in the memoir, is a heady mix of family history, literary criticism and recovery chronicle.
Rick Moody has been the recipient of the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim fellowship. He was a member of the board of directors of the Corporation of Yaddo from 1999 to 2004, and is a past secretary of the PEN American Center. Moody co-founded the Young Lions Book Award at the New York Public Library and has taught at the State University of New York at Purchase, the Bennington College Writing Seminars, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the New School for Social Research.
A native New Yorker, he attended Brown and Columbia Universities and currently lives in Brooklyn.
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