IMAGE: Jim Hodges, With Liberty and Justice for All (A Work in Progress), 2014–2016. Stainless steel, Dichrolam, acrylic, enamel paint, and LED lights. Installed, 84 x 1,737 x 10 inches. Installation view, The Contemporary Austin – The Moody Rooftop at the Jones Center, Austin, Texas, 2017. Artwork © Jim Hodges. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels. Image © The Contemporary Austin. Photograph by Brian Fitzsimmons.
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With Liberty and Justice for All Book Club
Free with registration!
The Austin Public Library and The Contemporary Austin co-present a new book club series that draws on fiction, poetry, and visual art to explore themes of racism, social justice, empathy, healing, and community.
Our April book Lost Children Archive, by Mexican-born author Valeria Luiselli, was inspired by Luiselli’s volunteer work helping undocumented immigrant children with their asylum paperwork. Told through several compelling voices, blending texts, sounds, and images, the novel follows two documentarians and their children on a road trip across the Southwest as they struggle to pursue their projects on Native American history and missing Latin American children, while also keeping their blended family together.
Click here to check out the book from Austin Public Library!
Save the date for our next book club meeting, featuring On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a novel by Ocean Vuong (2019) on Wednesday, June 9 at 7P CST.
Angelica Johnson is the Assistant Branch Manager at the Twin Oaks Branch of Austin Public Library. She recently moved to the Austin area and is hoping to build roots here. She has a great affinity for social justice causes that affirms the humanity and voices of marginalized groups while pushing for equitable structural change. Before entering management, she served as a Young Adult Librarian at Brooklyn Public Library where she worked closely with teens of diverse backgrounds to cultivate adequate programming and outreach efforts in addition to serving as an advocate for more teen spaces in the library.
Jeremy Garza is a Library Associate at the Twin Oaks Branch of the Austin Public Library, and graduate student at the Texas Woman’s University. He is a native Austinite, electric bike enthusiast, podcast addict, and tries to embrace Octavia Butler’s “Earthseed” virtues about change (especially in this city of constant transformation). As a librarian & community facilitator in-training, he is dedicated to the teachings of black feminisms and the mission of collective uplift for all people through life-long learning & grassroots community connection.