MILESTONES: THE 2011 PAGES & PLACES BOOK FESTIVAL
2011 marks both the sesquicentennial of the start of the American Civil War as well as the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the most influential work by Scranton-born urban theorist Jane Jacobs. While Pages & Places turns a comparatively pale three years old this fall, these two anniversaries prompted us to organize this year’s event around the theme of Milestones, setting Death and Life in the center of this year’s celebration of books and the city.
Festival day kicks off at 9:00am with a panel dedicated to three Coal Region Writers—Schuylkill County’s Thomas Malafarina and Joseph Tarone, authors of 99 Souls and Raven Run respectively and Mike Breslin, author of Robbing the Pillars—all published by Pennsylvania’s Sunbury Press, allowing us to start the day with a reminder of the rich history of the region Pages & Places is dedicated to celebrating, engaging, and challenging and the literature that is still emerging from it.
At 11:00am, the Civil War, Slavery, and Justice considers our nation’s pivotal moment from the distance of 150 years. Panelist Eric Foner, long considered the country’s leading historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in history for this year’s The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, a consideration of Lincoln’s evolving attitudes toward slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War. At almost the same time, Lawrence Goldstone produced another of the year’s most compelling books, Inherently Unequal: The Betrayal of Civil Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865-1903, an examination of the deliberate unraveling of Lincoln’s emancipation legacy. Foner and Goldstone’s discussion takes places across the war years, with a view of its causes and intentions on one side and a consideration of a society not yet ready for its most powerful implications on the other.
Our Free as in Freedom panel takes a stark view of the rise of corporate culture and corporate ownership, especially with regards to the internet, computer software, and the stuff of culture and the implicit and manifold threat to democracy. Software developer and free software activist Richard Stallman is a MacArthur “Genius grant” winner, the creator of the free Linux Operating System creator, and founder of GNU, with which he launched the free software movement. At 2:00pm he engages in discussion with Nina Paley, director of the animated musical feature Sita Sings the Blues, which sets the ancient Sanskrit epic Ramayana to the American Jazz-age vocal stylings of Annette Hanshaw. Sita has screened in over 200 film festivals and won over 30 international awards. But after completing Sita, Paley found herself combating our broken copyright system, which led her to Copyleft the film, ensuring that it remains free, and join QuestionCopyright.org as Artist-in-Residence.
At 4:00pm we consider Jane Jacobs’ legacy directly, especially as it applies to Scranton and cities like it, in Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of American Rust Belt Cities. Three men deeply involved in the revitalization of post-industrial cities discuss Jacobs’ work, her legacy, and their own efforts to employ it in the name of reenergizing their cities. In Baltimore, Bill Struever has been the driving force behind community revitalization efforts that bolster entire neighborhoods and a key contributor in the city’s revitalization through his Jacobs-inspired passion, creativity and commitment to rebuilding. Chris Doherty has been mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania since 2001 and presided over the most dramatic transformation in the city’s history, seeing new construction, the rehabilitation of architectural landmarks, and the revitalization of parks and neighborhoods. Named by the Atlantic Monthly as one of America’s “Brave Thinkers,” Braddock, Pennsylvania Mayor John Fetterman earned a master’s degree in Public Policy from Harvard University before moving to Braddock in 2001 to work for AmeriCorps. He won Braddock’s mayoral election in 2005, was re-elected in 2009 and has drawn international attention for trying to revitalize his city’s economy.
Our capstone panel, The City as Literary Influence at 6:30pm, brings together two of American literature’s most extraordinary and vivid novelists, Aleksander Hemon and Teju Cole, both of whom consider the American experience from an outsider’s point of view—Hemon comes to the U.S. from Bosnia, Cole from Nigeria—and elevate their observations to the condition of art. Hemon is author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and three collections of short stories: The Question of Bruno; Nowhere Man, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Love and Obstacles. He won a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2004. A photographer and art historian, Cole has been lauded on both sides of the Atlantic for Open City, a novel structured mostly as a series of walking tours through Manhattan, winning praise in The New Yorker, where James Wood called it “Beautiful, subtle, and finally, original,” and the New York Times, which called Open City “An indelible novel [that] does precisely what literature should do: it brings together thoughts and beliefs, and blurs borders…A compassionate and masterly work.”