Lunch with Alumni Authors

In 1918, a young and bright-eyed Dorothea Lange arrives in San Francisco, where a disaster kick-starts a new life. Her friendship with Caroline Lee, a vivacious, straight-talking Chinese American with a complicated past, gets Dorothea into Monkey Block, an artists' colony and the bohemian heart of the city. Dazzled by Caroline and her friends, Dorothea is catapulted into a heady new world of freedom, art, and politics. She also finds herself unexpectedly falling in love with the brilliant but troubled painter Maynard Dixon. Dorothea and Caroline eventually create a flourishing portrait studio, but a devastating betrayal pushes their friendship to the breaking point and alters the course of their lives.

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Read more about Jasmin on her website
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A rhapsodic follow-up to Tongo Eisen-Martin’s Heaven is All Goodbyes, this collection further explores themes of love and loss, family and faith, refracted through the lens of Black experience. These poems honor intellectual tradition and ancestral knowledge while blazing an entirely new path, recording and replaying the poet’s sensory travels through America, from its packed metropolises to desolate Anytowns. Packed with politically astute and clear-eyed takes on race and class, filled with wisdom and great humanity, these poems perform mind-bending leaps and wander down back alleys to arrive at their moment of ultimate truth.

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Watch the Inaugural Address of the San Francisco Poet Laureate 

At the center of the story is Lili‘uokalani, the last queen of Hawai‘i. Born in 1838, she lived through the nearly complete economic transformation of the islands. Lucrative sugar plantations gradually subsumed the majority of the land, owned almost exclusively by white planters dubbed the “Sugar Kings.” Hawai‘i became a prize in the contest between America, Britain, and France, each seeking to expand their military and commercial influence in the Pacific.The monarchy had become a figurehead, victim to manipulation from the wealthy sugar plantation owners. Lili‘u was determined to enact a constitution to reinstate the monarchy’s power but was outmaneuvered by the United States. The annexation of Hawai‘i had begun, ushering in a new century of American imperialism.

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Just weeks from her twenty-ninth birthday, Emily Radstock, unmarried daughter of the Earl of Candover, receives from her mother a little blue advice book, The Husband Hunter's Guide to London. Outraged at her mother's attempt to push her out of the nest, Emily declares she'll marry the first imbecile she meets. Overhearing the beautiful heiress declare her intention, Baronet Sir Ajax Lynley, newest gentleman spy in the Pantheon Club, takes her at her word. From the moment their engagement begins, Emily finds herself more and more intrigued by her fiancé, a man who encourages her daring and who offers a most seductive partnership in spy-catching.

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