Afternoons in Special Collections & Afternoons in Special Collections & Archives is a series sponsored by the UCR Libraries and Special Collections & Archives. This series takes place 3 to 4 times a year featuring UCR faculty and staff and members of the Riverside Community.
These events are held in Special Collections & Archives, 4th floor of the Rivera Library. A small reception will follow each event.
2012-2013 Afternoons in Special Collections & Archives
WEDNESDAY, October 3, 2012 3:15 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Between Heaven and Here by UCR Professor Susan Straight
Susan Straight will be reading excerpts from her new book Between Heaven and Here
Set several years before the events of Straight’s Take One Candle Light a Room (2010, etc.), the third installment of her trilogy concerns the reactions and memories that a prostitute’s death stirs up in the tightknit black community in Rio Seco, California. In August the ground is too hard to bury a body. But Glorette Picard is dead, and across the canal, out in the orange groves, they’ll gather shovels and pickaxes and soak the dirt until they can lay her coffin down. First, someone needs to find her son Victor, who memorizes SAT words to avoid the guys selling rock, and someone needs to tell her uncle Enrique, who will be the one to hunt down her killer, and someone needs to brush out her perfect crown of hair and paint her cracked toenails. As the residents of this dry-creek town prepare to bury their own, it becomes clear that Glorette’s life and death are deeply entangled with the dark history of the city and the untouchable beauty that, finally, killed her.
Susan Straight has published eight novels. Her new novel Between Heaven and Here (McSweeney’s) is the final book in the Rio Seco trilogy. Take One Candle Light a Room (Anchor Books) was named one of the best books of 2010 by The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and Kirkus. A Million Nightingales (Anchor Books) was a 2006 Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her novel Highwire Moon was a Finalist for the 2001 National Book Award. "The Golden Gopher" won the 2008 Edgar Award for Best Mystery Story. Her stories and essays have been in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Harpers, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Salon, Zoetrope, Black Clock, and elsewhere. She has been awarded The Lannan Prize for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. She is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at UC Riverside. She was born in Riverside, California, where she lives with her family, whose history is featured on susanstraight.com.
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WEDNESDAY, October 17, 2012, 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
Patricia Ortlieb Researcher and Author
Patricia Ortlieb will be discussing her years of researching the life and many contributions of Riverside's most famous "Founding Mother," Eliza Lovell Tibbets. As the great-great granddaughter of Tibbetts, Ms. Ortlieb had access to family archives that greatly enriched her exploration into the fascinating of the story of the dynamic woman who fostered the introduction of the navel orange tree in Riverside. Ms. Ortlieb will also be discussing her book, Creating an Orange Utopia: Eliza Lovell Tibbets & the Birth of California's Citrus Industry.
Patricia Ortlieb is a great-great granddaughter of Eliza Lovell Tibbets. A San Diego Resident, she has volunteered as a docent at the San Diego Museum of Art for the past ten years. Before that, she served for more than two decades as a trainer, counselor, and teacher specializing in training skills and therapeutic behavior modification, including assertive and humanistic psychology.
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Saturday, November 3, 2012, 3:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
UCR California Museum of Photography
UCR Professor Ron Chilcote
Ron Chilcote will speak about the exhibition and book, Mexico at the Hour of Combat: Sabino Osuna's Photographs of the Mexican Revolution based on the Osuna Collection of 427 glass negatives of the Mexican Revolution, which are held in the Special Collections section of University of California, Riverside, which mainly cover the period 1910 to 1914.
There will be a panel discussion and book signing from 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. followed by a reception .