Main Library

OUTDOORS: Writer-in-Residence Sarah Springer and “How Media Trains Our Brains to Think About Minorities”

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WATCH THE RECORDING

The Library’s Hemingway Writer-in-Residence, Sarah Springer, Emmy-nominated producer, documentary filmmaker, and creative, will be in conversation with Diana Muñoz, the Library’s communications intern who is working on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and community conversations.Writer-In-Residence 2021

Expanding on Springer’s 2020 TEDx presentation, “How to Become a True Agent of Change,” co-presented with women-in-film activist Naomi McDougall Jones, Springer and Muñoz will discuss the ways popular media trains our brains to think about minorities, how this conditioning affects our perceptions and treatment of each other, and what it will take to change that.

Bring a low-back lawn chair or blanket and join us for their conversation on the Library’s Donaldson Robb Family Lawn on 4th Street.

Sarah Springer began her career at CNN where she reported and wrote stories about race and identity for Soledad O’Brien’s In America series, then later worked as a producer for ABC’s Good Morning America, Nike, CBS News/60 Minutes, BET, and VICE Media. She began working in immersive storytelling at RYOT Media where she oversaw creative direction and production for immersive, branded, and linear series before becoming an independent consultant and producer/director. Sarah was voted one of the top 28 most powerful black people in media by Blavity and is the Co-creator of STILL HERE, an immersive experience that premiered at the Sundance Festival and was created in partnership with Al Jazeera Contrast that focuses on Black women and their triumph over generational trauma, mass incarceration, gentrification and abuse. She is an activist and advocate for intersectional parity, inclusion and accurate representation in media and teaches about such topics at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She is also Co-founder of Advocates for Inclusion in Media, an organization that works to create safe environments and a sense of community for underrepresented people in the industry. [Read more…] about OUTDOORS: Writer-in-Residence Sarah Springer and “How Media Trains Our Brains to Think About Minorities”

Writer-In-Residence Jared Farmer and “How (Not) to Write a Book about Trees and Climate Change”

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The Community Library’s Hemingway Writer-In-Residence, Jared Farmer, will discuss the book project he is working on while in residency–Survival of the Oldest: Ancient Trees in Modern Times–his project’s local connection to the Wood River Valley, and about the craft and process of nonfiction writing.

Join us outside on the Library’s Donaldson Robb Family Green, and bring your low-back chairs and blankets.

Jared Farmer is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His temporal expertise is the long nineteenth century; his regional expertise is the North American West. His recent work has turned to global environmental history across the modern period. Originally from Provo, Utah, Farmer earned his degrees from Utah State University, the University of Montana, and Stanford. His book On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Harvard, 2008) won the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians for the best-written non-fiction book on an American theme, a literary award that honors the “union of the historian and the artist.” His subsequent book, Trees in Paradise: A California History (Norton, 2013), won the Ray Allen Billington Prize from the Organization of American Historians for the best book on the history of Native and/or settler peoples in frontier, border, and borderland zones of intercultural contact in any century to the present. In 2014, the Dallas Institute presented Farmer the Hiett Prize in the Humanities; in 2017, the Carnegie Corporation of New York named him an Andrew Carnegie Fellow; and in 2018, the American Academy in Berlin awarded him a Berlin Prize. His forthcoming book is Survival of the Oldest: Ancient Trees in Modern Times (Basic Books). For previews, see his op-eds in the Los Angeles Times from 2017 and 2020, and a recent interview in Humanities. In collaboration with Penn students, Farmer has begun a new research project called “Petrosylvania.” On Instagram, he posts @geohumanist.

Photo credit: Eric Sucar, UPenn.

LIVESTREAM: “From Rags to Riches – Will China be Able to Sustain its Economic Expansion?” with Weijian Shan

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The first 50 registrants will receive a free copy of Shan’s Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America.

Join us for the annual Judith and Marshall Meyer Lecture on China with Weijian Shan.

The Chinese economy grew 36 times in 30 years. How has it achieved it? What are its economic realities? Will it be able to sustain its growth? Weijian Shan, the author of two bestselling books, Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America, and Money Games, will explain.

Weijian Shan is chairman and CEO of PAG, a leading Asia-focused private equity firm. Prior to PAG, he was a partner of the private equity firm TPG, and co-managing partner of TPG Asia (formerly known as Newbridge Capital). Over two decades, Weijian Shan has led a number of landmark transactions that have returned billions of dollars in profit to his firms’ investors. Previously, Shan was a managing director of JP Morgan, and an assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In his youth, he spent several years working as a laborer in the Gobi Desert of China. He holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.B.A. from the University of San Francisco. Shan is the author of Money Games: The Inside Story of How American Dealmakers Saved Korea’s Most Iconic Bank (2020) and Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America (2019). His articles and commentary have been published in the Financial Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, The Economist and many other publications.

VIRTUAL: Visit Sun Valley Community Meeting

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Join us for the semi-annual Visit Sun Valley Community Meeting on Wednesday, May 12th 10:00am – 12:00pm, streaming from the Library’s Livestream.  

What to expect
– What Just Happened: A look back on the year
– Facts & Myths: Insights and data presented by Sun Valley Economic Development
– What All This Means: Interpreting the trends
– Our Plan: How we’ll tackle the summer
– Things to Know for the Summer: Getting ready for the upcoming season

Who Should Attend
– Anyone looking for tourism insights from this past season as well as what we might expect for the future.
– This especially applies to business owners, marketers, and anyone looking for more information on our community.

LIVESTREAM: “Black Wall Street 100” and the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre – A Conversation with Hannibal Johnson

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A recording of this event will be available on Livestream through June 1.

The Community Library and Idaho Humanities Council welcome Hannibal B. Johnson, author of Black Wall Street 100: An American City Grapples With Its Historical Racial Trauma, for a conversation about the history and continuing implications of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Johnson will be in conversation with David Pettyjohn, executive director of the Idaho Humanities Council, and Jenny Emery Davidson, executive director of The Community Library.

On May 31, 1921, a white mob attacked the predominantly Black neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tensions among white Tulsans had been running high over Greenwood, home of the thriving business district referred to as the Black Wall Street, even before the events leading up to May 31. Over the course of eighteen hours, hundreds of Black citizens were killed, thousands were left homeless, and black-owned businesses including two newspapers, a school, a hospital, churches, hotels, and stores were destroyed or damaged by fire. The event is one of the deadliest riots and worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. history, and has remained one of the least known.

Hannibal B. Johnson, a Harvard Law School graduate, is an author, attorney, and consultant. He has taught at The University of Tulsa College of Law, Oklahoma State University, and The University of Oklahoma. Johnson serves on numerous boards and commissions, including the Federal 400 Years of African-American History Commission and the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission. His books, including Black Wall Street 100: An American City Grapples With Its Historical Racial Trauma, chronicle the African American experience in Oklahoma and its indelible impact on American history. Johnson’s play, Big Mama Speaks—A Tulsa Race Riot Survivor’s Story, was selected for the 2011 National Black Theatre Festival and has been staged in Caux, Switzerland. He has received numerous honors and awards for his work and community service. 

  

“Beyond: How Humankind Thinks About Heaven” with Catherine Wolff

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July 20, 2021

Watch the Recording

A free outdoor lecture presented in collaboration with the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference.

This free lecture will be outdoors on the Library’s Donaldson Robb Family Green on 4th Street. Attendees are invited to bring their own low-back chairs or blankets, spread out on the lawn, and enjoy the evening. 

What do we think of when we think about heaven? What might it look like? Who or what might be there? Since humans began to huddle together for protection thousands of years ago, these questions have been part of how civilizations and cultures define heaven, the good place beyond this one. From Christianity to Islam to Hinduism and beyond, from the brush of Michelangelo to the pen of Dante, people across millennia have tried to explain and describe heaven in ways that are distinctive and analogous, unique and universal.

In this engrossing cultural history of heaven, Catherine Wolff delves into how people and cultures have defined heaven over the centuries. She describes how different faiths and religions have framed it, how the sense of heaven has evolved, and how nonreligious influences have affected it, from the Enlightenment to the increasingly nonreligious views of heaven today. Wolff looks deep into the accounts of heaven to discover what’s common among them and what makes each conception distinct and memorable. The result is Beyond, an engaging, thoughtful exploration of an idea that is central to our humanity and our desire to define an existence beyond death.

Catherine Wolff is a therapist, writer and the former director of the Arrupe Center for Community-Based Learning at Santa Clara University. She edited the collection Not Less Than Everything: Catholic Writers on Heroes of Conscience. She is married to author Tobias Wolff. They have three grown children and three grandchildren and live in Stanford, California.

A book signing will follow, and Chapter One Bookstore will be selling books on site following the presentation.

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