Growing up white in Washington state, Barbara Hilyer’s dad never told her anything about his family—except that his mother was “crazy.” Ten years after his death, she learned his sister was living in Hawai’i. Discovering “the family secret” introduced her to the concept of passing, and the complex nature of race and identity. Uncommon in the white world, passing is a familiar concept among African Americans. Meeting her aunt, an African American woman deeply involved in state politics, took Barbara’s life in a new direction, which led her to Hilo, Minneapolis, Washington, DC, and the Deep South—researching the extended family she could never know, and the historic times that defined them. This story challenges America’s oversimplified view of race and explores how different individuals across generations pursued all available avenues of opportunity to define their lives in a race-conscious society. American history is not white history, although it has been presented that way. The times call for a truth telling. S. Barbara Hilyer spent her public school teaching career in Ashland, Oregon, where she taught elementary school as well as middle and high school social studies, including American History. She holds a Master’s Degree in Curriculum and Instructional Leadership. At …

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 …