Join The Community Library for a conversation with photographer Nick Brandt and local gallery owner L'Anne Gilman as they discuss Brandt's latest photographic series SINK / RISE. SINK / RISE is the third chapter of "The Day May Break," Brandt’s ongoing global series portraying those impacted by environmental destruction and climate change. This chapter focuses on South Pacific Islanders impacted by rising oceans from climate change. Photographed in-camera underwater in the ocean off the coast of the Fijian islands, the local people in these images are representatives of the many people whose homes, land and livelihoods will be lost in the coming decades as the water rises. "Although they are several meters below the surface, the subjects of Nick Brandt’s mesmerizing photographs do not float or swim. Incredibly, they sit on sofas, stand on chairs, use seesaws, and pose in ways they might on land. The effect is otherworldly, as though the familiar laws of physics have stalled in this strange, liminal zone between land and sea. Sit with these photographs and the others in the series, and the subject’s expressions will change like water. Stoicism becomes resignation. Frustration becomes resolve. In their pensive faces, we can read tenderness, grief, ...

Join us for a conversation with Nigerian hydrologist and climate activist Ichor Joshua Keghnen, who at age 12 contracted typhoid fever, a water borne disease that nearly killed him and ultimately shaped the trajectory of his life. Learn about his quest to improve water access and quality for underserved communities in sub-Saharan Africa. At just 23 years of age, Joshua has been recognized with international awards and fellowships. He’s presented his water innovations at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, was chosen as one of 25 finalists for the first cohort of the Young Climate Prize in 2023, is a Because Accelerator alumni, a Swarovski Foundation Creative, a 776 Climate Fellow, and a scholar of the British Council. Joshua is committed to driving positive change at the nexus of water, climate, and technology. With a background in earth sciences, he has developed innovative technologies that are revolutionizing water infrastructure and management. His Geotek technology monitors water quality and checks for needed maintenance of wells in rural areas of Nigeria. With hardware sensors installed at water sources, the system can provide needed alerts when there is a mechanical fault, allowing for quick intervention to prevent water contamination and other health ...

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 ...