Beatrice Greene is a Jamaica Plain-based writer, composer, and pianist. She has been a featured poet at poetry festivals nationwide. Greene is a member of Streetfeet Women, a multicultural women writers’ organization, which recently published the book The Bones We Carry. In 2009 she led a concert of her works and two jazz trios. Greene composed and performed Spirit Warriors, a piano composition commissioned by the United Nations Women’s Reporting Network (WUNRN) in 2005. Her music and writing highlights social justice, spirituality, nature, and science. She holds degrees from Howard University, the College of Wooster and Berklee College of Music.

We will have two featured readers this month.

Alan Smith Soto is a Jamaica Plain resident originally from Costa Rica.  He has many published works, including Fragmentos de alcancía, Poetas sin fronteras and Sabia savia.  He has published more than fifty poems in various magazines, including Ínsula, Anthropos, International Poetry Review, Abril, Amén and Plaza.  His translation of Robert Creeley’s Life and Death was published in 2000. Smith Soto has translated and edited a special issue of the International Poetry Review Spain’s Poetry of Conscience.  Smith Soto is also a professor of Spanish literature at Boston University, where he has published various books and articles on Spanish literature. He has read his poetry in various venues, from Jamaica Plain to Madrid, including, more locally, the City Nights series at the Cafe Luna, Cambridge, Chapter and Verse at the Greenough Mansion, and the Jamaicaway Books & Gifts.

Elena Harap is a Jamaica Plain resident who has contributed poems and prose pieces to the anthologies Roxbury Literary Annual, and Summer Home Review, as well as to Sojourner, Jewish Currents, The Boston Poet, Out of  Line, Bayou, and Amoskeag.  As a member of The Streetfeet Women, a company of writer/performers based in the Boston area, Harap edited and contributed to Many Voices, (1988), The Road to Beijing (1996), Laughing in the Kitchen (1998), and The Bones We Carry (2009). Her radio commentaries have aired on NPR in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.  She tours “Meet Eleanor Roosevelt,” a one-woman show co-written and -produced with Josephine Lane.

Store Highlight
When Hurricane Katrina tore through New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, hundreds of thousands were left behind to suffer the ravages of destruction, disease, and even death. The majority of these people were black; nearly all were poor.  Displaying the intellectual rigor, political passion, and personal empathy that have won him acclaim and fans all across the color line, Michael Eric Dyson’s Come Hell or High Water offers a searing assessment of the meaning of Hurricane Katrina. With this clarion call Dyson warns us that we can only find redemption as a society if we acknowledge that Katrina was more than an engineering or emergency response failure. What’s at stake is no less than the future of democracy.

As you know, the J’Way Cafe has been changing up its menu here and there. We are now open on Sundays 10AM – 3PM for Gospel Brunch. Start your Sunday with our breakfast combination The Rosalyn (named after the store owner), which includes a slice of spinach & mushroom quiche, bacon and waffles.  Or you might want to try The J’Way, our ode to chicken & waffles.  All of these items can be purchased individually or have a vegetarian/vegan option added on from our menu.

Author Spotlight
Among the most important female authors to emerge from postcolonial Africa, Nigerian-born Buchi Emecheta is distinguished for her vivid descriptions of female subordination and conflicting cultural values in modern Africa. Her best-known novels, including Second-Class Citizen, The Bride Price, and The Joys of Motherhood, expose the injustice of traditional, male-oriented African social customs that relegate women to a life of child-bearing, servitude, and victimization. Often regarded as a feminist writer, Emecheta illustrates the value of education and self-determination for aspiring young women who struggle against sexual discrimination, racism, and unhappy marital arrangements to achieve individuality and independence. While critical of patriarchal tribal culture, Emecheta’s fiction evinces an abiding reverence for African heritage and folklore that reflects the divided loyalties of Africans torn between the competing claims of tradition and modernization. Noted for her realistic characters, conversational prose style, and sociological interest, Emecheta is highly regarded for introducing an authentic female perspective to contemporary African literature. -ENotes

Store Highlight
Zadie Smith’s dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie to John Irving and Martin Amis. But the truth is that Zadie Smith’s voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own.  At the center of her first novel White Teeth are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith. Set against London’s racial and cultural tapestry, venturing across the former empire and into the past as it barrels toward the future, White Teeth revels in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, confounding expectations, and embracing the comedy of daily existence.

Dr. Cornwell is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies and French at San Diego State University. She is also a third generation entrepreneur and beauty specialist. She has researched African descended cultures worldwide, and understands how deeply hair issues relate to cultural identity. This understanding was the driving force behind her decision to found her trademark company, Sisterlocks.

Speaking of fabulous women writers, Virginia DeBerry and Donna Grant, co-authors of Uptown: A Novel, dropped by the store the other day to talk about their book and their relationship as writers and best friends.

Due to high demand from our customers, J’Way Cafe has added more vegetarian and vegan options to its menu, with more healthy choices coming in the near future.  Don’t worry; we still have cafe favorites like the Tennessee pulled pork sandwich and sweet potato pie, but we also now have vegan corn muffins made by none other than our vegan sous chef Kanga.  Check out the new menu with the new additions!

Store Highlight
In SuperSized Kids, the authors show how the mushrooming childhood obesity epidemic is destroying children’s lives, draining family resources and pushing America dangerously close to a total health care collapse — but also explains, step by step, how parents can work to avert the coming crisis by taking control of the weight challenges facing every member of their family. For the first time in American history, a new epidemic is killing our kids. In 1960, only 4 percent of American children were considered obese. That number has skyrocketed to 15 percent today and is almost triple that number in certain ethnic groups. The most common health problem facing U.S. children today is being overweight — a condition robbing kids of both their quality and quantity of life. Medical problems that doctors once saw only in adults aged 50 or older are now striking children: heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, asthma, joint problems, arthritis. One in three children born in 2000 is expected to develop Type 2 diabetes, with the risk of blindness, loss of kidney function, and early death associated with it. This is the first generation in American history whose life expectancy may actually decrease.  The book shows parents how to cure the #1 family health crisis facing them today. It provides a step-by-step, medically sound and eminently doable lifestyle change program designed for the whole family. It also includes practical suggestions for impacting school and community programs as well as what government leaders can do to help.

Chad Parenteau is a Jamaica Plain resident and a recognized member of the Boston poetry community. Parenteau is the host of the Stone Soup Poetry series, the oldest weekly poetry open mic in Massachusetts. In 2003 he was the recipient of a Cambridge Poetry Award. Parenteau’s work was included in French Connections: A Gathering of Franco-American Poets. He self-published his first chapbook, Self-Portrait In Fire. His later chapbook Discarded: Poems for My Apartment was published by Červená Barva Press Parenteau has been featured in such prestigious venues as Spoken Word Nantucket, Fox Chase Reading Series in Philadelphia, and The 17 Poets Reading Series in New Orleans.

We will host a book reading with Virginia DeBerry and Donna Grant, authors of Uptown: A Novel, Friday, August 6 at 7PM.  Copies of the book will be available for purchase. In Uptown a prominent Harlem family is strained to the breaking point by the high-stakes world of the Manhattan real estate industry, and one woman searches for her identity and the will to forgive. Steamy, provocative, and sexy, Uptown is a turbulent and triumphant read.  With seven novels to their credit, Virginia DeBerry and Donna Grant, best friends for more than 25 years, have turned a friendship into one of the most successful and enduring writing collaborations in women’s fiction.

Both authors were plus-size models before embarking on writing careers. Their efforts eventually led to Tryin’ to Sleep in the Bed You Made, which was a critical success, an Essence magazine bestseller, and won the Merit Award for Fiction from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, as well as the 1998 Book of the Year Award from the Blackboard Bestseller List/African-American Booksellers Conference-Book Expo America. More than that, Tryin‘ hit an emotional nerve with readers from all over the world who continue to write to Grant and DeBerry more than a decade later. Far From the Tree became a New York Times bestseller, and Better Than I Know Myself received two Open Book Awards, and was included on the Best African-American Fiction of 2004 lists of both Borders and Walden Books.

Store Highlight
In the early 1980s Hanif Kureishi emerged as one of the most compelling new voices in film and fiction. His movies My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and his novel The Buddha of Suburbia captivated audiences and inspired other artists. In Something to Tell You, he travels back to those days of hedonism, activism and glorious creativity. And he explores the lives of that generation now, in a very different London. Jamal is middle-aged, though reluctant to admit it. He has an ex-wife, a son he adores, a thriving career as a psychoanalyst and vast reserves of unsatisfied desire. “Secrets are my currency,” he says. “I deal in them for a living.” And he has some of his own. He is haunted by Ajita, his first love, whom he hasn’t seen in decades, and by an act of violence he has never confessed. With great empathy and agility, Kureishi has created an array of unforgettable characters — a hilarious and eccentric theater director, a covey of charming and defiant outcasts and an ebullient sister who thrives on the fringe. All wrestle with their own limits as human beings; all are plagued by the past until they find it within themselves to forgive. Comic, wise and unfailingly tender, Something to Tell You is Kureishi’s best work to date, brilliant and exhilarating.

Do you ever read the content labels on food packages at the supermarket and wonder what the ingredients really mean? Many food companies use big, fancy words like “Monounsaturated Fat,” “Polyhydric Alcohol” or “High Fructose Corn Syrup” in label descriptions to hide from customers what’s really in their food, and what you don’t know about your food can have a detrimental effect on your health and well-being.

Our summer series Intro to Whole Foods concludes on Tuesday, July 27 at 7PM with a look at how to read food labels and how to find the hidden additives. Participants in the class will be given recipes, names of cookbooks and websites to find more information on reading food labels, as well as food samples. The workshop is run by Esther Piszczek, a Charlestown resident and whole foods enthusiast since 2005. She has experience with macrobiotics, the Blood Type Diet, and Gluten Free, vegan and vegetarian cooking. Pisczek enjoys creating and enjoying sugar-free desserts! This event is free and open to the public.

Paul Korins, author of Haunting Whispers, came by the other day to talk about his love for writing children’s literature.

Store Highlights
Jamaicaway Books & Gifts now sells products from I AM… Entertainment & Design, an environmentally friendly company that provides fun activities for children and web design solutions for individuals and organizations. The next time you are in the store, don’t forget to check out our “eco-system” of t-shirts, marachas, book cases and tote bags. I AM founder Liliana Marquez talk to us recently about her company and the virtues of being green.

We will host a book reading with Paul Korins, author of the young adult mystery Haunting Whispers, on Thursday, July 22 at 7PM.  Copies of the book will be available for purchase.

About the Book
Gunshots, popping like firecrackers, rip through the quiet of a local drug store in the tranquil town of Hamilton Cove, resulting in a brutal loss for 13-year-old Jake Mactaggart and his mother. They hear the final, bone-chilling words, “Nothing we could do,” and are devastated. Thus begins Jake’s grueling journey from his safe, comfortable suburban home to the turmoil of the inner-city, where trouble lurks and challenges await. While struggling to adjust to his new environs, Jake is on an even more important mission-to uncover the identity of the person who committed that heinous crime back in Hamilton Cove, and finally, to come to terms with those strange, Haunting Whispers.

Store Highlights
The history of women in jazz is well-documented and rightly cherished. Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan are some of the most celebrated musical artists of the 20th century. However, there is a contemporary crop of female artists blazing a new trail and creating a history all their own. In the NPR’s Discover Songs Series, The New Jazz Divas take center stage. While they certainly owe a debt to the women who came before, the artists featured on this compilation are some of the best and most interesting talents in jazz today. From the unmistakable vocals of Madeleine Peyroux and Diana Krall to the singular piano styles of Eliane Elias and Patricia Barber – the legacy of great jazz divas is in very capable hands.

Soul Revival features tracks from legends like Chaka Khan and Bettye LaVette as well as new artists such as Sharon Jones, Eli Paperboy Reed and Ryan Shaw. With songs that warm your heart, or break it, soul music is steeped in the traditions of gospel and R&B. This CD demonstrates that diversity thrives within this flourishing genre, but the common thread is unmistakable it s music with a passion.

These are just two examples of some of the great music we sell in the store.  Check out our music selection the next time you are in the store!

Jamie Cat Callan came by the store again last week to tell us about her latest creation, The Writer’s Toolbox: Creative Games and Exercises for Inspiring the ‘Write’ Side of Your Brain. According to Callan, the toolbox, which we carry in the store,  is a useful resource for both aspiring and established writers.  Check out the video to see for yourself.

Store Highlights
It’s that time of year we go on vacations and hit the beaches and want to take a good book with us on those excursions. We have created a summer reading list of books we sell and recommend for your warm weather amusement. Summertime is also a time to think about love and courtship. What better way to lighten up the romance senses than with a good old classic like Emma by Jane Austen. This is a sparkling comedy of provincial manners which concerns a well-intentioned young heiress and her matchmaking schemes that result in comic confusion for the inhabitants of a 19th-century English village. Droll characterizations of the well-intentioned heroine, her hypochondriacal father, plus many other finely drawn personalities make this sparkling satire of provincial life one of Jane Austen’s finest novels.

Another sizzling classic is Alexander’s Bridge by Willa Cather. Bartley Alexander, an engineer famous for the audacious structure of his North American bridges, is at the height of his reputation. He has a distinguished and beautiful wife and an enviable Boston home. Then, on a trip to London, he has a chance encounter with an Irish actress he once loved. When their affair re–ignites, Alexander finds himself caught in a tug of emotions — between his feelings for wife, who has supported his career with understanding and strength, and Hilda, whose impulsiveness and generosity restore to him the passion and energy of his youth. Coinciding with this personal dilemma are ominous signs of strain in his professional life. In this, her first novel, originally published in 1912, Willa Cather skillfully explores the struggle between opposing sides of the self, a facility that was to become a hallmark of her craft.

Summer is a great time to reevaluate your eating habits and make changes for the better.  We are hosting a series of workshops in July on whole foods and making healthier lifestyle choices.  The first workshop will be “Intro to Grains,” and it will be held Tuesday, July 6 at 7PM. The workshops will be run by Esther Piszczek, a Charlestown resident and whole foods enthusiast since 2005.  She has experience with macrobiotics, the Blood Type Diet, and Gluten Free, vegan and vegetarian cooking. Pisczek enjoys creating and enjoying sugar-free desserts!  This event is free and open to the public.

If you are an aspiring writer and need some help with getting your juices going, you should come out to our writers’ workshop hosted by Jamie Cat Callan, author of The Writer’s Toolbox: Creative Games and Exercises for Inspiring the ‘Write’ Side of Your Brain on Thursday, July 8 at 7PM.  Callan came to the store recently to talk about her latest book and her own writing process.

Liliana Marquez of I AM…Entertainment & Design comes back to the store Saturday, July 10 at 11AM to spread her wealth of green knowledge in our monthly children’s recycling workshop.  The workshop includes video information games and recycled craft activities which will give children a new appreciation for the planet we share.  They will learn about the ecological challenges our earth is facing while having fun. IAM… is a professional entertainment company that provides parties and workshops through a culturally diverse mix of music, art, games and activities by movements that reflect a multitude of eras and rhythms while feeling the positive impact music and art brings along.

Finally, we wrap the week up with our monthly folk music night in the J’Way Cafe with musicians Hamin Reed, Shane Hall (left) and Sarah Benoit happening on Saturday, July 10 at 7PM.  In the last two months we have been hosting this monthly event, we have seen great interest and appreciation from Boston’s folk music community for providing a space for aspiring and veteran musicians and singers.  We hope the store’s supporters will also continue this same support! 
Don’t forget to check out the great food we offer in the J’Way Cafe, Jamaicaway Books & Gifts’ latest addition to Jamaica Plain’s food experience.  Check out the menu for all the good stuff.  All the goodies on the menu are made by none other than the store owner Rosalyn Elder!

As a storyteller and spoken word artist, H.R. Britton gravitates towards the anxiously comic. Alternating between original monologues and literary adaptations, he has been spinning yarns in New York City since 1999. Since 1999 Britton has also meditated on academic madness in his tragi-comic monologue The Kafka Thesis, where the narrator must create a huge piece of writing without succumbing to the insane authority of his professor and the faceless university bureaucracy. Britton has likened the piece to “doing standup comedy in Weimar Berlin,” and has performed it at The Producer’s Club, DTX, The Dumbo Art Under the Bridge Festival, The Auk, and as a guest of Jane LeCroy with “Transmitting.” Britton is a resident of Brooklyn, and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Stay in touch with us throughout the summer online.  As you may already know, we now have a YouTube Channel where you can view interviews with authors who visit the store.  For those of you who want to see all the fun we have at our events, we now put up photos on our Flickr web album.  You can also subscribe to its RSS feed in order to be among the first  to see what’s going on here.  And for the Twitter addicts, you can follow us at @jwbooks.   Links to all of our social media tools are on the right side panel of this site.

Store Highlights
Independence Day is around the corner, and now is a good time to get up to speed on your American history and wow your friends and family at the barbecue next weekend. In Celebrating the Fourth, author Len Travers traces the origins and functions of the quintessential American holiday from the first festivals in 1777 to the Jubilee of Independence in 1826. Applying anthropological analyses of social rituals, he skillfully explicates the rich symbolic content of such activities as processions, banquets and entertainments. By examining Fourth of July celebrations in Boston, Philadelphia and Charleston, he is able to discuss the interplay between local/regional and national identities and interests. Travers’s thoughtful and perceptive decipherings of Independence Day celebrations make a significant contribution to our understanding of the importance of ritual in early republican political culture. This work should appeal to historians, social scientists, folklorists and general readers alike.

To get the local angle on the holiday, check out Robert Allison’s The Boston Massacre.  “Once two regiments of British troops were posted to Boston in October 1768, the colonies approached a slippery slope toward revolution. The troops’ mission was to ensure collection of taxes due the British crown, but the taxes were deemed unfair by colonials and the troops were unwelcome, taunted, reviled. Tensions built over the next year and a half, and on March 5, 1770, a mob spoiling for a fight met a line of redcoated regulars armed with muskets. Taunts came to a crescendo, ice balls and rocks flew, and within a short, chaotic span, five colonists were dead. In the days following, the official British report referred only to an “unhappy disturbance,” but colonial leaders expressed shock at a “horrid massacre.” Sam Adams, Paul Revere, and others used the event for propaganda, even while the patriotic John Adams agreed to defend the soldiers who had fired into the mob. It is a tribute to Adams and the democratic spirit of the city that all but one of the soldiers finally were acquitted. But the “Boston Massacre,” as it was commemorated in patriotic speeches of the early 1770s, became one of the seminal events of the American Revolution. One of Boston’s leading historians remembers this extraordinary event and its long, fascinating aftermath.”

Store Highlights
Okay, so the Celtics didn’t win the championships this year, but that doesn’t mean we love them any less. If you are a fan of the team and the game overall, you might want to check out The Boston Celtics by Jack Clary. After 22 years, the Celtics regained the crown for their 17th NBA Championship, leading the 2007-2008 season with a record of 66-16, their close wins over Atlanta and Cleveland, a win over perpetually strong Detroit, and their final game rout of the Lakers, the Celtics left no doubt in the basketball world that they are the true champions. And not only did the heralded trio of Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen deliver – many members of the team came through. And not to be overlooked is the role that “Doc” Rivers played in turning his team around from the previous season’s disastrous record. This book celebrates the Celtics tradition of excellence with more than 120 illustrations capturing the great players, the title victories and all the excitement of the Celtics game since 1946. With its text by sportswriter and longtime Celtics fan Jack Clary, this book will be prized not only by those who revel in the rows of green-and-white championship banners in what is now known as the TD Garden, but it will also be enjoyed by all who appreciate the game of basketball played at its highest level.

Not long ago, the Red Sox took the sports world by storm too.  Early in 2004, two writers and Red Sox fans, Stewart O’Nan and Stephen King, decided to chronicle the upcoming season, one of the most hotly anticipated in baseball history. They would sit together at Fenway. They would exchange emails. They would write about the games. And, as it happened, they would witness the greatest comeback ever in sports, and the first Red Sox championship in eighty-six years. What began as a Sox-filled summer like any other is now a fan’s notes for the ages.  The result was Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season.  You won’t find any of the Roger Angell-style lyricism here that baseball, and the Sox in particular, seem to bring out in people. (King wouldn’t stand for it.) Instead, this is the voice of sports talk radio: two fans by turns hopeful, distraught, and elated, who assess every inside pitch and every waiver move as a personal affront or vindication. Full of daily play-by-play and a season’s rises and falls, Faithful isn’t self-reflective or flat-out funny enough to become a sports classic like Fever Pitch, Ball Four, or A Fan’s Notes, but like everything else associated with the Red Sox 2004 season, from the signing of Curt Schilling to Dave Roberts’s outstretched fingers, it carries the golden glow of destiny. And, of course, it’s got a heck of an ending.