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Book Club Mon Mar 04 2013
Book Club Hosts! Activist Authors Read for Social Justice
Activist authors Dan P. Moore and Becky Dernbach will read at No Nation Gallery (formerly Happy Dog Gallery) at 1542 N. Milwaukee Ave. on Sunday, March 10, at 2pm hosted by Book Club.
We're thrilled to have the opportunity to showcase Moore's graphic novel, Mark Twain Was Right, which describes the author's experience living through the Cincinnati riots as a high school student and blossoming activist in 2001.
Mark Twain Was Right is both intimate and educational, capturing the rise and climax of racial tensions in Cincinnati following the police murder of an unarmed 19-year-old black man. Moore presents the story as literary journalism, interweaving retrospective interviews with prominent locals with his experience.
"I know I am not alone in saying that the week of the riots had a profound impact on how I see the world around me," Moore said. "It's always been my dream to retell the stories of that week, because they are stories that could easily be told in communities all over America."
Moore is now a social justice activist based in Minneapolis.
Becky Dernbach will also read and project images from her rhyming picture book, Fannie and Freddie, about the housing crisis. Dernbach works with Occupy Homes, a movement focused on preventing foreclosures widely hailed as one of the most successful offshoots of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
"People get bogged down in the details and jargon of the housing crisis," she said. "But it's a really simple narrative. I can tell it so a child can understand it. I can make it rhyme."
She wrote the book, in part, to dismantle the myth that individual homeowners are to blame for their foreclosures, and to furnish the American public with a simple narrative of the corruption central to this moment in history.
We hope you'll join us to celebrate some of the writing and artwork giving voice to some of our generation's most profound catastrophes.
RSVP on Facebook for this free event, and we'll see you there!