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Upcoming Events
Attention: Due
to an unexpected commitment in Berkeley, this event has been postponed until sometime in February or March 2019.
We will announce the new date when it is confirmed.
U.C.
Berkeley neuroscientist
Prof.
David E. Presti
will discuss his new
book
MIND BEYOND BRAIN:
Buddhism,
Science, and the Paranormal
Saturday, December 1st, 7 PM
Professor
Presti will be introduced by distinguished neuroscientist
Prof.
V.S. Ramachandran, Director of the UCSD Center
For
Brain and Cognition
Among
the most profound questions we confront are the nature of what and who we are
as conscious beings, and how the human mind relates to the rest of what we
consider reality. For millennia, philosophers, scientists, and religious
thinkers have attempted answers, perhaps none more meaningful today than those
offered by neuroscience and by Buddhism. The encounter between these two
worldviews has spurred ongoing conversations about what science and Buddhism
can teach each other about mind and reality.
In Mind Beyond Brain, neuroscientist David E. Presti, with the
assistance of other distinguished researchers, explores how evidence for
anomalous phenomena—such as near-death experiences, apparent memories of past
lives, apparitions, experiences associated with death, and other so-called psi
or paranormal phenomena, including telepathy, clairvoyance, and
precognition—can influence the Buddhism-science conversation. Presti describes
the extensive but frequently unacknowledged history of scientific investigation
into these phenomena, demonstrating its relevance to questions about
consciousness and reality. The new perspectives opened up, if we are willing to
take evidence of such often off-limits topics seriously, offer significant
challenges to dominant explanatory paradigms and raise the prospect that we may
be poised for truly revolutionary developments in the scientific investigation
of mind. Mind Beyond Brain represents the next level in the science and
Buddhism dialogue.
David E. Presti is Professor
of neurobiology, psychology, and cognitive
science at the University of California, Berkeley; and also teaches
neuroscience to Buddhist monks and nuns in India and Bhutan. He has doctorates
in molecular biology and biophysics from Caltech, and in clinical psychology
from the University of Oregon. He is also the author of Foundational
Concepts in Neuroscience: A Brain-Mind Odyssey (2016).
__________________
Renowned Poet
QUINCY
TROUPE
will read from two new books
GHOST
VOICE:
A
Poem in Prayer
and
SEDUCTIONS:
New
Poems, 2013-2018
Saturday,
February 9th, 7PM
QUINCY
TROUPE is
the author of nine volumes of poetry, three children's books; and the author,
coauthor, or editor of six nonfiction works. He collaborated with Miles Davis
on his autobiography and with Chris Gardner on The Pursuit of Happyness,
which spent more than forty weeks on the New York Times best-seller list
and was made into a major motion picture starring Will Smith. Troupe has also
written a screenplay for Miles and Me, the memoir of his friendship with
Miles Davis. Poetry collections include Transcircularities: New and Selected
Poems, winner of the 2003 Milt Kessler Poetry Award and selected by
Publishers Weekly as one of the ten best books of poetry in 2002; The
Architecture of Language, winner of the 2007 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary
Achievement; and Errançities,
published in
"Ghost Voices: A Poem
in Prayer by master poet Quincy Troupe is 'a journey of miracles.' To read it
is to traverse a zig-zagging, profoundly moving Middle Passage that moves
through time and geography to find a new home in a 'new born America.' Troupe
elegantly and powerfully dances myth, history, religion and music to gather us
up with him in his prayer of reconciliation. Ghost Voices, with its
haunting rhythms and imagery, is extraordinary and worthy of deep
attention." ----Angela Jackson
"In Quincy
Troupe’s new collection Seduction,
we see the evolution of a man who has been steeped in and devoted to the
cultural productions of black artistic life for over five decades. These poems
carry with them a sincerity and clarity always imbued in landscape and focused
on the questions that shape an Africanist humanity. The poems found here are
intrepid and made nuanced by a vision long fixated on liberation. Troupe’s
poems are also a welcome reminder that the Black Arts Movement wasn’t simply a
moment in time, but an unfolding that remains ever-present."—Matthew
Shenoda, author of Tahrir Suite and coeditor of Bearden's Odyssey
_____________________________ Pulitzer
Prize Winning Poet
RAE ARMANTROUT
will read from her new collection
WOBBLE
Saturday,
February 16, 7PM
Rae Armantrout's short-lined poems are often
concerned with dismantling conventions of memory, pop culture, science, and
mothering, and these unsparing interrogations are often streaked with wit. She
explained, “you can hold the various elements of my poems in your mind at one
time, but those elements may be hissing and spitting at one another.” According
to critic Stephanie Burt, “William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson together taught Armantrout how to
dismantle and reassemble the forms of stanzaic lyric—how to turn it inside out
and backwards, how to embody large questions and apprehensions in the
conjunctions of individual words, how to generate productive clashes from
arrangements of small groups of phrases. From these techniques, Armantrout has
become one of the most recognizable, and one of the best, poets of her
generation.”
Rae
Armantrout ,
one of the founding members of the West Coast group of Language poets, stands
apart from other Language poets in her lyrical voice and her commitment to the
interior and the domestic. Armantrout earned her BA at the University of
California, Berkeley—where she studied with Denise Levertov —and she earned her MA at San
Francisco State University. The author of more than ten collections of poetry,
Armantrout has also published a short memoir, True (1998). Her Collected
Prose was published in 2007. Her most recent collections include Versed (2009),
which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and a 2009 National Book
Critics Circle Award, and was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award; Itself
(2015); Partly: New and Selected Poems (2016); Entanglements (2017);
and Wobble (2018), a finalist for the National Book Award. She is
a professor emerita at University of California, San Diego, where she
taught for more than 20 years and was the longtime director
of the New Writing Series.
_______________________________
Colorado
poet
MAUREEN
OWEN
reads from her book
EDGES of WATER
and New York poet
BARBARA
HENNING
reads from her book
A DAY LIKE TODAY
Friday, February 22, 7PM, 2019
 Maureen Owen, former editor and chief of Telephone
Magazine and Telephone Book, is the author of eleven books of poetry, most
recently Edges of Water from Chax Press. Her title Erosion’s Pull from
Coffee House Press was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award and the Balcones
Poetry Prize. Her collection American Rush: Selected Poems was a
finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and her work AE(Amelia Earhart)was
a recipient of the prestigious Before Columbus American Book Award. She has
most recently published work in Dispatches, Positive Magnets #5,
Resist much/Obey Little, The Denver Quarterly, Vanitas, New American Writing, and
Bombay Gin. Her awards include grants from the Foundation for
Contemporary Arts, the Fund for Poetry and a Poetry Fellowship from the
National Endowment for the Arts. She has taught at Naropa University and
served as editor-in-chief of Naropa’s on-line zine not enough night.
 Barbara Henning is the author of four
novels, seven collections of poetry, four chapbooks and a series of photo-poem
pamphlets. Lewis Warsh published her first book of poems with United
Artists, Smoking in the Twilight Bar. Subsequent poetry
collections include A Day Like Today, A Swift Passage, Cities
and Memory, My Autobiography, Detective Sentences, Love
Makes Thinking Dark. Her novels include Just Like That, Thirty
Miles to Rosebud, You Me and the Insects, and Black Lace. Between
2003 and 2014, she published limited editions of a series of artist pamphlets
(16), combining photography and poetry. Poems from her current poetic
project Digigrams have been published in several journals,
including Dispatches, Talisman, The Brooklyn Rail, Journal of Poetics
Research, Posit and Recluse. Henning is the editor of a book of
interviews, Looking Up Harryette Mullen, and The Selected
Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins. She was also the editor of the
poetry/art journal, Long News: In the Short Century (1990-1995). As
a long-time yoga practitioner, having lived and studied in Mysore, India with
Shankaranarayana Jois, she brings this knowledge and discipline to her writing
and her teaching at Naropa University (2006-14), University of Arizona
(2006-2009), and Long Island University in Brooklyn, where she is
Professor Emerita.
Previous Events at D.G.Wills Books
Christopher Hitchens
Director Oliver Stone
Historian and Churchill biographer Sir Martin Gilbert
Francoise Gilot
Vogue magazine photo of Francoise Gilot
at the original store
Michael McClure
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman, Director of the Neurosciences
Institute, with U.C. Berkeley philosopher John Searle with Mrs. Searle
Nobel Laureate Manfred Eigen
Quincy Troupe
Iris Chang
Gerry Spence
Noted editor Robert Weil, editing a Patricia
Highsmith manuscript for W.W. Norton & Co.
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