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Newport Beach Public Library Foundation has announced the Library Live speaker series for 2024-2025 featuring award-winning authors Bonnie Garmus, Rosanna Xia, Javier Zamora, and Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Tickets are on sale now at www.npblf.foundation.
These four authors cover a wide range of topics and ideas, from Bonnie Garmus’ Lessons in Chemistry on how the bonds of love, respect, and mutual support create a family to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s A Man of Two Faces that explores the necessity of both forgetting and of memory. Rosanna Xia investigates the impacts of engineered landscapes, the market pressures of development, and the ecological activism and political scrimmages that have carved California’s contemporary coastline, home to 27 million people. In Solito, Javier Zamora highlights the sacrifices of family, the vulnerability of children, and courage and perseverance.
The Library Live presentation by Bonnie Garmus will be a unique event, held outside the Central Library on the Civic Center Green. This Library Live event will be held on Friday, Oct. 4, at 6 p.m.
The remaining Library Live lectures will be held on Thursdays in the Central Library’s Friends Room at 7 p.m.
Bonnie Garmus / “Lessons in Chemistry”
Friday, October 4, 6 p.m.
In captivating conversations, Bonnie Garmus talks about her journey from copywriter and creative director to writing and publishing her own bestselling novel. With wit and candor, she describes the process of creating her subversive protagonist Elizabeth Zott and how real-life experience fueled and inspired “Lessons in Chemistry,” a number one global bestseller that has captivated readers worldwide and won multiple national and international awards. Set in 1960s California, the book introduces us to Elizabeth Zott, a gifted research chemist whose career takes a detour when she becomes the unlikely star of a beloved TV cooking show. Lessons in Chemistry became a hit drama series on Hulu starring Brie Larson, garnering 10 Emmy nominations.
Rosanna Xia / “California Against the Sea: Visions for our Vanishing Coastline”
Thursday, November 7, 7 p.m.
Celebrated environmental journalist Rosanna Xia explores sea level rise along the West Coast, focusing on California’s coastline imperiled by the rising Pacific Ocean. Through human stories and ecological dramas, she delves into the impacts of engineered landscapes, development pressures, and activism shaping the coastline. Xia’s investigation spans from the Mexican border to the North Coast, highlighting the voices of various stakeholders advocating for climate-wise coastal stewardship. The narrative emphasizes the urgency of addressing climate change to secure a sustainable future for coastal communities in California. Rosanna Xia is an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2020 for explanatory reporting.
Javier Zamora in conversation with Gustavo Arellano / “Solito: Home, Identity, and the Immigrant Experience”
Thursday, February 27, 7 p.m.
What is the meaning of home? At only nine years old, Javier Zamora left his native El Salvador to embark on a 3000-mile journey to reunite with his parents in the United States. Alone except for the other migrants in his group and the “coyote” hired to guide them across the border, he survived perilous trips across oceans and deserts. Javier Zamora shares his harrowing journey and explores how identity influences our ideas of home and brings humanity and warmth to the figure of the “immigrant,” stressing there are always moments of joy, love, and hope, even in the worst of circumstances.
Zamora puts a face to child immigrants and the humanitarian crisis along the US-Mexico border. “Solito” was a New York Times bestseller, longlisted for the PEN America 2023 Literary Awards, and Winner of the Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiography. Zamora is the winner of a 2024 Whiting Fellowship. He holds fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Foundation, Stanford University (Stegner), and was the recipient of Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University.
Gustavo Arellano is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and former OC Weekly investigative reporter and editor. He authored “Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America” and is the child of Mexican immigrants, one of whom arrived in the U.S. in a Chevy trunk.
Viet Thanh Nguyen / “A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial”
Thursday, April 24, 7 p.m.
With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, in “A Man of Two Faces” Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel “The Sympathizer” is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It is now an Emmy-nominated HBO TV series.
Lecture Details & Tickets
Bonnie Garmus event on October 4 will be held on the Civic Center Green on the north side of the Central Library, 1000 Avocado Avenue. The three remaining presentations will be held in the Friends Room at the Central Library.
Free parking on the ground level and in the parking structure. Parking in the parking structure is recommended for the Garmus Library Live on October 4.
Tickets are $35 general, Library Book Collector Member $30. Season passes are available to Library members for $100.
For questions about Library Live contact Director of Programs Kunga Wangmo-Upshaw at kupshaw@nbplf.foundation or (949) 717-3818.
