The By the Book author talk series brings big ideas and smart conversation directly to you.
Join these book events via Zoom from the comfort of your favorite chair and engage with authors and experts
on a variety of topics. Keep checking back for announcements of future events.
April 20 / 4:00 PM CT
Join us for a poetry reading and conversation celebrating our spring 2022 Phoenix Poets books with Peter Balakian, author of No Sign; Alan Shapiro, author of Proceed to Check Out; and Stuart Dischell, author of The Lookout Man.
About the Speakers
Peter Balakian is the author of eight books of poems including Ozone Journal, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and Ziggurat, both published by the University of Chicago Press. His memoir Black Dog of Fate won the PEN/Albrand Award and was a New York Times notable book, and The Burning Tigris won the Raphael Lemkin Prize and was a New York Times bestseller and New York Times notable book. He is Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English at Colgate University. In No Sign, Balakian wrestles with national and global cultural and political realities, including challenges for the human species amid planetary transmutation and the impact of mass violence on the self and culture.
Alan Shapiro has written many books of poetry and prose, most recently Against Translation, That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration, and Reel to Reel, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Shapiro has won the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters literature award, among others, and has received fellowships from both the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He currently lives in Durham, North Carolina, with his dog, Sammy. His collection of new poems, Proceed to Checkout, is a kind of summing up, or stock-taking, by an aging poet, of his precarious place in a world dominated by the ever-accelerating pace of technological innovation, political disruption, personal loss, and racial strife.
Stuart Dischell is the author of six collections of poetry, including Dig Safe, Backwards Days, and Children with Enemies, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press. His first collection, Good Hope Road, was selected for the National Poetry Series, and he has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation. Dischell teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The Lookout Man—sometimes elegiac, sometimes deadly comic, and always transformative—embodies the energy, spirit, and craft that we have come to depend upon in Dischell’s poetry.
May 3 / 1:00 PM ET
Join economist Tara Watson and journalist Kalee Thompson as they discuss their new book The Border Within: The Economics of Immigration in an Age of Fear with Leah Boustan, professor of economics at Princeton University.
About the Book
For decades, immigration has been one of the most divisive, contentious topics in American politics. And for decades, urgent calls for its policy reform have gone mostly unanswered. As the discord surrounding the modern immigration debate has intensified, border enforcement has tightened. Harsher, less porous borders make unauthorized entry to the United States a permanent, costly undertaking—and the challenges to undocumented immigrants don’t end at the border.
Tara Watson and Kalee Thompson pair rigorous analysis with deeply personal stories from immigrants and their families to assess immigration’s effects on every aspect of American life, from the labor force to social welfare programs to tax revenue. What emerges is a critical, utterly complete examination of what nonnative Americans bring to the country, including immigration’s tendency to elevate the wages and skills of those who are native born.
About the Speakers
Tara Watson is professor of economics at Williams College and a coeditor of the Journal of Human Resources, the leading academic journal in labor economics.
Kalee Thompson is a journalist and senior editor at Wirecutter. She is the author of Deadliest Sea: The Untold Story Behind the Greatest Rescue in Coast Guard History.
Leah Boustan is professor of economics and a faculty associate of the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton University. She is codirector of the Development of the American Economy Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, coeditor at the Journal of Urban Economics, and serves on the editorial board of the American Economic Review. Her latest book, forthcoming in May 2022, is Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success.
May 19 / 1:00 PM CT
Join us for a conversation with Claudio Benzecry about his new book The Perfect Fit: Creative Work in the Global Shoe Industry. Benzecry will be joined in dialogue with Harvey Molotch, Fiona Greenland, and Fernando Domínguez Rubio.
About the Book
In The Perfect Fit, Claudio E. Benzecry looks at the craft that goes into designing shoes for women in the US market, revealing that this creative process takes place on a global scale. Based on unprecedented behind-the-scenes access, The Perfect Fit offers an ethnographic window into the day-to-day life of designers, fit models, and technicians as they put together samples and prototypes, showing how expert work is a complement to and a necessary condition for factory exploitation.
About the Speakers
Claudio E. Benzecry is associate professor of communication studies and sociology (by courtesy) at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession and the coeditor of Social Theory Now, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Harvey Molotch is emeritus professor of social & cultural analysis and sociology at New York University.
Fiona Greenland is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. She was a classical archaeologist for ten years, and her current project, Insurgent Artifacts, examines how satellite images are produced and interpreted to generate cultural knowledge and political insight about archaeological looting.
Fernando Domínguez Rubio is assistant professor of communication at the University of California, San Diego. He is coeditor of The Politics of Knowledge.
Produced in partnership with the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, By the Book: Smart Talk with Chicago Authors brings big ideas and smart conversation directly to you. Join these book events via Zoom from the comfort of your favorite chair and engage with authors and experts on a variety of topics.
To find out more about previous events in the series, visit our YouTube channel, where you can watch earlier By the Book talks and other author videos.
