One of the most asked questions in astronomy is whether we are alone in the universe. Life on earth is abundant with the most obvious example: ourselves. However, we also see life in less obvious places like the Mariana Trench which reaches depths of around 36,000 feet—think the altitude of a commercial airplane but underwater! The life we see at these depths is typically microbial but relies on one major factor: hydrothermal vents. One other place we may see this similar microbial life is on Europa, one of Jupiter’s numerous moons. In October 2024, NASA aims to begin the journey to Europa and determine if extraterrestrial life is closer than we thought. Speaker Lauren Osburn is a recent graduate of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, where she earned her Bachelor’s degree in Astronomy and Astrophysics. During her undergraduate studies, she became interested in the possibility of extraterrestrial life within our solar system, and in the history and evolution of the universe. She also completed a research project in estimating the age of one of the oldest known globular clusters. Passionate about making the wonders and beauty of space accessible to everyone, she hopes to demystify astronomical concepts and …

Join us for an evening with Brittany Perham and Peter Kline, Writers-In-Residence with The Community Library at the historic Ernest and Mary Hemingway House. Brittany and Peter will share selected readings, engage in a conversation about their work, and take questions from the audience. Peter Kline is the author of two poetry collections, Mirrorforms (Parlor Press) and Deviants (SFASU Press). A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he has also received residency fellowships from the Amy Clampitt House and James Merrill House, and he was has won the Morton Marr Prize from Southwest Review, the River Styx International Poetry Prize, and The Columbia Review Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and many other journals, as well as the Best New Poets series, the Verse Daily website, the Random House anthology of metrical poetry, Measure for Measure, and the Persea anthology of self-portrait poems, More Truly and More Strange. Since 2012 he has directed the San Francisco literary reading series Bazaar Writers Salon. He teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and Stanford University, and can be found online at www.peterklinepoetry.com. Brittany Perham is the author of Double Portrait (W.W. Norton), which received the …

American photographer Jim Mangan began The Crick as a photographic survey of the unorthodox architecture of Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) houses in the Utah-Arizona border town of Short Creek. He soon found that the bigger story lay in a group of teenage boys navigating their disintegrating community, fractured after leader Warren Jeffs was imprisoned in 2011. These subjects were children at the time of the fallout, who remained with their families in Short Creek as others elected to leave the town altogether. The Crick is a meditation on religious succession, patriarchal systems, zealotry and fraternity in the life built by these young men. Mangan’s pictures transport the reader into an alternate reality of the boys’ making: where they explore the rugged terrain of southern Utah, northern Arizona and southern Nevada on horseback, emulating old-time explorers of the Western frontier. His “ecological and sociological approach” to this series, spanning five years, depicts the playfulness of youth against the capricious landscape of the American West. In both their real and imaginary worlds, these subjects have gained a knowledge of and closeness to nature that has largely been lost in the conventions of modern life. Join us for …