Conversation and Book Signing with Daisy Hernandez, Author of The Kissing Bug

Young Research Library Presentation Room (11348) 280 Charles E Young Dr N., Los Angeles, CA, United States

Join us for a conversation and lunch with Daisy Hernández, who will discuss The Kissing Bug and health humanities. A limited number of free copies of The Kissing Bug will be available at the event. Author Bio: Daisy Hernández is the author of The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease (Tin House, 2021), which won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and was selected as an inaugural title for the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature Program. The book was named a top 10 nonfiction book of 2021 by...

‘Rather Than Her Biography’: Listening to Nina Simone’s Diary

Royce 314 10745 Dickson Ct, Los Angeles, CA, United States

“If we can draw out the emphasis on the female vocalist’s art, rather than her biographies,” critic Hortense Spillers once wrote. “Then we gather from the singer that power and control maintain an ontological edge. Whatever luck or misfortune the Player has dealt her, she is, in the moment of performance, the primary subject of her own invention.” Considering Spillers’s provocative claim, Professor Salamishah Tillet will look at Civil Rights musician Nina Simone’s diary (and her friendship with the writer Lorraine Hansberry) and discuss the tensions and possibilities that arise as she writes about Simone's inner life, while also exploring...