Get Lit!, the Northwest's best festival for readers and writers, is celebrating its 10th year by welcoming award-winning authors Naomi wolf and Diana Abu-Jaber to events at the Bing Crosby Theater.
The core of the 2008 festival, produced by Eastern Washington University Press, is scheduled for April 16-19, in Spokane and Cheney.
Additional headliners will be announced at a later date.
Renowned author, feminist and social critic Naomi wolf will feature her latest book, “The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot,” an impassioned call to return to the aspirations and beliefs of the founding fathers, at the festival's evening event on Saturday, April 19.
As part of her presentation, wolf will discuss how events of the last six years parallel steps taken in the early years of the 20th century's worst dictatorships.
Through her writing and presentations, wolf strives to raise awareness of society's pervasive inequities and encourages her audiences to take charge of their lives, voice their concerns and enact change. Ms. wolf's landmark international bestseller, “The Beauty Myth,” challenged the cosmetics industry and the marketing of unrealistic standards of beauty and launched a new wave of feminism in the early 1990s. The New York Times called it one of the most important books of the 20th century.
A graduate of Yale and a former Rhodes Scholar, wolf has written essays for The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
She was a consultant to the Gore 2000 presidential campaign and is a former Glamour magazine Woman of the Year.
The Thursday, April 17, headline event will feature author, journalist and essayist Diana Abu-Jaber. Abu-Jaber believes that food is a great human connector and often uses cuisine as support for her narratives. Abu-Jaber chronicled her own experiences growing up in a food-obsessed Arab-American family during the 1970s and ‘80s by developing each chapter of her award-winning immigrant tale “The Language of Baklava” around one of her father's traditional Middle Eastern recipes.
As part of her Get Lit! presentation, Abu-Jaber will read from “Origin”, an engaging novel set in her hometown of Syracuse, N.Y., that explores the issues of memory and identity.
Her first novel, “Arabian Jazz,” is considered by many to be the first mainstream Arab-American novel ever published. In addition to receiving an American Book Award and PEN Center USA Award for Literary Fiction, Abu-Jaber is frequently featured on National Public Radio and recently wrote and produced an hour-long personal documentary for NPR entitled “The Language of Peace.”
Tickets for Get Lit! 2008 headline events are available at all TicketsWest outlets, by phoning 1.800.325.SEAT or online at http://www.ticketswest.com.
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