Registration now closed

Author Donna Seaman

Join us when author Donna Seaman discusses her latest book, River of Books: A Life in Reading.

Donna Seaman is the adult books editor at Booklist, a member of the Content Leadership Team for the American Writers Museum, and a recipient of the Louis Shore Award for excellence in book reviewing, the James Friend Memorial Award for Literary Criticism, and the Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award. Seaman has written for the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and other publications. She has been a writer-in-residence for Columbia College Chicago and has taught at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. Seaman created the anthology In Our Nature: Stories of Wildness, her author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air: Conversations about Books, and she is the author of Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists.

River of Books is a meditation on reading and its redemptive powers.

“I didn’t devote myself to reading because I was instructed to or because it was supposed to be good for us, like vegetables, which I also devour,” writes Seaman of her formative years. “I read because reading was a way to escape the chaos and the pressure and to make sense of it.” A compulsive reader of the cereal box and matchbook variety, Seaman chases down madeleines and Rosebud sleds in long-forgotten books from her childhood, such as a copy of Chinese Fairy Tales buried away in her parents’ basement, and exalts in memories of early heroes and heroines (“Jo March was my idol, as she was for so many bookish girls”). In later youth Seaman turns from characters to their creators as her chief source of fascination, the idea gaining on her that she, too, might become one of the world’s storytellers, if one of the disaffected teenage variety, cutting class with a book and a joint. Art school in the Midwest introduced her to new books and new readers, from Irish epics to difficult modernist novels; moving to the bookishly scruffy city of Chicago, home to Studs Terkel and Studs Lonigan, introduced her to other kinds of readers, among them the shadowy figures who haunted the “porn rags” section of a bookstore at which she worked. All along, Seaman’s life is punctuated by books, an ocean of Roth and Sontag and Woolf and Chekhov. A “constant reader” who generously advocates for a wide diet of literature, from novels to poetry to narrative nonfiction to essays and all that lie between, Seaman counsels that “the more varied our reading, the more detailed, intricate, and vital our perceptions become.”

A lively and entertaining contribution to the shelf of books about books.

Books will be available for purchase courtesy of Mac's Backs - Books on Coventry.