Tuesday, September 20th, 2022, 12 pm - 1:30 pm ET, online only.
In celebration of National Voter Registration Day, New Hampshire Writers for Democratic Action, Book the Vote and Global Citizens Circle join together with readers, writers, artists, booksellers, publishers, librarians, and citizens to listen to, learn from and converse with two defenders of democracy, 21-year-old Jahnavi Rao and 96-year-old Robert Jay Lifton. We invite you to join us online for an inspiring intergenerational dialogue! Registration required to join this virtual meeting.
Jahnavi Rao is a senior at Harvard College and President and Founder of New Voters, a 501(c)3 dedicated to making the youth voice heard in politics. At New Voters, she leads 50 high school and college student team members and has registered 80,000 students to vote across 300+ high school chapters. At college, Jahnavi is pursuing a major in Government on the Public Policy track and a minor in Music.
Robert Jay Lifton is an American psychiatrist and author whose subject is the holocaust, mass violence, and renewal in the 20th and 21st centuries. He has written twenty-four books and edited eight others. He is a leading public intellectual and lifelong defender of democracy, antinuclear activist and a founding member of the Nobel Prize winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
Katherine Towler is author of the novels Snow Island, Evening Ferry, and Island Light, a New England trilogy, and the memoir The Penny Poet of Portsmouth. With Ilya Kaminsky, she is the co-editor of A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith. She teaches in the Mountainview MFA Program in Writing at SNHU and lives in Portsmouth. She is chair of the NH steering committee of Writers for Democratic Action.
Media track record: His previous book, The Climate Swerve, was reviewed in the Washington Post and excerpted in the New York Times. Lifton has been a contributor to the New York Times for over fifty years. He has appeared on many NPR shows, including Fresh Air. He has appeared in many TV and feature documentaries.
Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Editors Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler have gathered conversations with nineteen of America's leading poets, reflecting upon their diverse experiences with spirituality and the craft of writing.
The Penny Poet of Portsmouth is a memoir of the author’s friendship with Robert Dunn, a brilliant poet who spent most of his life off the grid in downtown Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
On Snow Island, a remote community off the New England coast, sixteen-year-old Alice Daggett struggles to come to terms with her father's death while managing the family store. George Tibbits, a loner in his forties and owner of the island's twin houses, returns each year in an act of homage to the women who raised him there.
Nick Daggett, a Vietnam veteran in his early forties, has returned to Snow Island to live year-round and run a pirate radio station from the abandoned mansion. Nora Venable, a lesbian in her seventies and owner of the decaying mansion, comes to the island after a fifty-year absence and decides to stay.
Katherine Towler returns to Snow Island with "Evening Ferry" - the second installment of her multigenerational trilogy about family bonds, unexpected love, and the threat of war. Thirty-two-year-old Rachel Shattuck grew up on Snow Island but left at the age of eighteen, anxious to escape the confines of the isolated community.