Events

Meet celebrated author Joe Starita who will be talking about his book “I Am a Man”: Chief Standing Bear’s Journey for Justice.

In 1877, Chief Standing Bear’s Ponca Indian tribe was forcibly removed from their Nebraska homeland and marched to what was then known as Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), in what became the tribe’s own Trail of Tears. “I Am a Man” chronicles what happened when Standing Bear set off on a six-hundred-mile walk to return the body of his only son to their traditional burial ground.  Joe Starita’s well-researched and insightful account reads like historical fiction as his careful characterizations and vivid descriptions bring this piece of American history brilliantly to life.

Joe Starita spent 14 years at The Miami Herald where his investigative reporting won more than 20 regional and national awards, including a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting. The author of three critically acclaimed books on Native Americans, one of which earned a second Pulitzer nomination, Starita has spoken at numerous book festivals and literary events throughout the country and has given more than 200 talks on Ponca Chief Standing Bear and Susan La Flesche, an Omaha Indian who became the nation’s first Native American doctor. For the last 18 years, Starita has taught Depth Reporting classes at the University of Nebraska College of Journalism and Mass Communications, taking classes on award-winning projects to Cuba, France and Sri Lanka. In 2017, he supervised a depth project investigating liquor sales in Whiteclay, Nebraska, that won the Robert F. Kennedy Humanities Foundation Grand Prize – the only time in the foundation’s 50-year history that the award went to a college entry. In July 2011, Starita received the Leo Reano National Civil Rights award from the National Education Association for his work on behalf of Native Americans. In 2015, he started his “Chief Standing Bear Journey for Justice Scholarship Fund” that each year awards five $1,500 scholarships to Nebraska Native American high school graduates.

Books available for purchase and autograph.

Want to meet interesting people? Want to read things you might not otherwise read? Want to talk about it?

The Raven & Finch Book Club meets every third Tuesday at The Happy Raven (which also happens to be the favorite beer bar in Nebraska for the second straight year!) Located at 122 N. 11th Street. The meeting starts at 6:00 p.m.

We’ll talk for an hour or so and enjoy libations and camaraderie.

F&F offers a 15% discount on all Raven & Finch Book Club Selections**

December 17th – Born a Crime by Trevor Noah plus Holiday Pop Up!

January 21st – Bloodlust & Bonnets by Emily McGovern

** We hope you’ll give the club a try, but if you’re just not into clubs and groups, we invite you to check out these books…..and you’ll still get the discount !

Meet author and photographer Madeline Cass.  Her latest work is a personification of place, an emotional reverie on a salt marsh near her hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska.

A mostly forgotten and misunderstood place, this inland salt marsh is moistened by groundwater seeps, with water nearly as salty as the ocean, where endemic and endangered species call home. Frank Shoemaker Marsh and the surrounding protected wetlands are what remains of Nebraska’s saline wetlands, one of the rarest ecosystems on the Great Plains. how lonely, to be a marsh is an attempt to engender an elusive place not readily known – at once both heartfelt & heartbroken.

Cass combines her poetry and photography, images of botanical and zoological specimens, and early 1900s glass plate negatives and journal excerpts by pioneering prairie ecologist Frank Shoemaker.

“touching a place,/you ask it to enter your DNA//stroke the grasses, the flowers, the birds, the beetles,/the salt, the water,/in an act of becoming.”

Photographer and poet Madeline Cass makes her new work in order to merge with a Salt Marsh and speak. That her project is convincing, erotic, exquisite, and memorable is no surprise. As passionate in her conviction as she is masterful in her art, this latest piece is a gift to readers. Enjoy it, consume it! And act to save these rare and precious environments. – Hilda Raz, author of All Odd and Splendid

Commissioned by Platte Basin Timelapse with support from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, the Nebraska State Museum, and the Center for Great Plains Studies.

Mad(eline) Cass (b.1993) earned a BFA in studio art with an emphasis in photography from the University of Nebraska in 2017. Her work examines the myriad relationships between art, science, nature, and humanity. Through photography, artist books, zines, poetry, drawing, collage, video, installation and sculpture, her work follows mycological metaphors of growth and decay.

Books available for purchase and Mad will sign them!

Always free gift wrap!