Tag Archives: Author Talk

Word Up: Let’s Talk About Abortion: How to Talk to Kids About Abortion with Doulas, Carly Kol and Emulsify

Saturday, April 26, 2025 – 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Word Up Community Bookshop / Librería Comunitaria
2113 Amsterdam Ave. & 165th St.
New YorkNY 10032

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We invite parents, educators, caregivers, and abortion providers to join for an important and thought-provoking event featuring Carly Kol and Emulsify, the authors of Let’s Talk About Abortion. This book is a groundbreaking resource that provides a compassionate and age-appropriate approach to discussing abortion care with kids. It serves as a guide for adults looking to navigate conversations about reproductive health with children and young people in a supportive and nonjudgmental way.

In this event, both authors, who are experienced abortion doulas, will share how their work in the field informed the creation of the book and why it is crucial to have these open discussions. The event will include an interactive reading of the book, followed by a Q&A where attendees can engage with the creators on approaching these topics with children and how caregivers can create spaces for healthy, empathetic dialogue.

“Straightforward language frames an approachable, gender-neutral discussion of abortion … Warm, stylized illustrations visualize people with various abilities, body types, and skin tones, many in domestic and natural spaces. It’s a high-level explanation of the topic that works to fill a significant gap in children’s books about healthcare. Includes a creators’ note, resources, discussion questions, and more. Ages 6–12.” — Publishers Weekly

We require all children under the age of 12 to be accompanied by an adult.

This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket with 30 max attendees. Please register in advance.

In compliance with Word Up Community Safety guidelines, all attendees for this event must wear a mask inside.

Word Up Community Bookshop is located at 2113 Amsterdam Ave. (& 165th St.) in Washington Heights, NYC. You can take the 1 train to 168th St and the A/C train to 163rd or 168th  St.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Let’s Talk About Abortion is a groundbreaking and essential resource designed to help parents, caretakers, and providers discuss the topic of abortion with children ages 6 to 12. Authored and illustrated by experienced abortion doulas and vetted by early childhood educators, this book is crafted with the intention of fostering intentional, compassionate, and nonjudgmental conversations about abortion care.

In a landscape where no other children’s books discuss this topic, Let’s Talk About Abortion fills a crucial gap. It provides a medically accurate, gender-inclusive, and nonjudgmental resource that acknowledges the diverse and complex nature of abortion care. The book’s text is carefully constructed without gender-specific language or one specific character, recognizing that each abortion experience is unique and personal.

This book serves as a starting point for discussion, offering parents, educators and caretakers a thoughtful and sensitive tool to approach discussions about abortion. By avoiding the portrayal of “good” or “bad” reasons for seeking an abortion, the authors ensure that all experiences are respected and validated.

Let’s Talk About Abortion is more than just a book; it’s a compassionate guide designed to support honest and open dialogue, empowering young readers with knowledge and understanding in a safe and supportive manner.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carly Kol (she/her) is a white, queer, Jewish full-spectrum doula from New York. She has always believed that young people deserve honesty and compassion when it comes to information about their sexual health and bodies. Carly has supported over 3,000 individuals during their procedural abortions and medication abortions. She currently lives in Los Angeles, California with her partner and their pitbull, Mickey.

Emulsify (they/them) is a queer parent and full-spectrum doula. They create art to imagine new worlds. Emulsify lives in Brooklyn with their family and spends a lot of time creating while snuggling their pups. Through their work, they have made incredible friendships, learned from brilliant peers, and found their home.

Word Up at Alianza Dominicana Cultural Center: Alejandro Heredia’s LOCA with Elizabeth Acevedo

Thursday, March 6, 2025 – 7:00pm to 8:30pm
Alianza Dominicana Cultural Center
530 W 166th St
New YorkNY 10032

 

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Word Up Community Bookshop and Dominican Writers Association invite you to celebrate the debut release of Loca by Alejandro Heredia. In conversation with Heredia will be award-winning author Elizabeth Acevedo. There will be a limited signing after the event.

“In a novel that is as tender as it is brilliant, Heredia writes with ferocity and warmth.”—Elizabeth Acevedo

This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket.

Alianza Dominican Cultural Center is located at 530 West 166th Street New York, NY 10032. The event will take place on the second floor, which is accessible by an elevator.

ABOUT THE BOOK

If Junot Diaz’s critically acclaimed collection Drown and Janet Mock’s Emmy-winning series Pose produced offspring, Alejandro Heredia’s Loca would be their firstborn.

It’s 1999, and best friends Sal and Charo are striving to hold on to their dreams in a New York determined to grind them down. Sal is a book-loving science nerd trying to grow beyond his dead-end job in a new city, but he’s held back by tragic memories from his past in Santo Domingo. Free-spirited Charo is surprised to find herself a mother at twenty-five, partnered with a controlling man, working at the same supermarket for years, her world shrunk to the very domesticity she thought she’d escaped in her old country. When Sal finds love at a gay club one night, both his and Charo’s worlds unexpectedly open up to a vibrant social circle that pushes them to reckon with what they owe to their own selves, pasts, futures, and, always, each other.

Loca follows one daring year in the lives of young people living at the edge of their own patience and desires. With expansive grace, it reveals both the grueling conditions that force people to migrate and the possibility of friendship as home when family, nations, and identity groups fall short.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alejandro Heredia is a writer from the Bronx. He has received fellowships from LAMBDA Literary, Dominican Studies Institute, UNLV’s Black Mountain Institute, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in fiction from Hunter College. Loca is his debut novel.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Elizabeth Acevedo is the current Young People’s Poet Laureate and the New York Times-bestselling author of The Poet X, which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, the Pura Belpré Award, the Carnegie medal, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, and the Walter Award. She is also the author of With the Fire on High—which was named a best book of the year by the New York Public Library, NPR, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal—and Clap When You Land, which was a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor book and a Kirkus finalist. She holds a BA in Performing Arts from The George Washington University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland. Acevedo has been a fellow of Cave Canem, Cantomundo, and a participant in the Callaloo Writer’s Workshops. She is a National Poetry Slam Champion, and resides in Washington, DC with her loves.

Word Up: Alec Karakatsanis’s COPAGANDA

Wednesday, April 16, 2025 – 7:00pm to 8:30pm
Word Up Community Bookshop / Librería Comunitaria
2113 Amsterdam Ave. & 165th St.
New YorkNY 10032

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Word Up welcomes prizewinning civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis to discuss his new book Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, a powerful warning about how the media manipulates public perception, fueling fear and inequality, while distracting us from what truly matters.

“Alec Karakatsanis exposes our criminal injustice system for what it is: a bureaucracy of punishment, propped up by a biased media machine that feeds mass incarceration. After Copaganda, you’ll never read the news the same way again.” –Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket with 30 max attendees. Please register in advance.

In compliance with Word Up Community Safety guidelines, all attendees for this event must wear a mask inside.

Word Up Community Bookshop is located at 2113 Amsterdam Ave. (& 165th St.) in Washington Heights, NYC. You can take the 1 train to 168th St and the A/C train to 163rd or 168th  St.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In this groundbreaking expose, essential for understanding the rising authoritarian mindset, award-winning civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis introduces the concept of “Copaganda.” He defines Copaganda as a special kind of propaganda employed by police, prosecutors, and news media that stokes fear of police-recorded crime and distorts society’s responses to it. Every day, mass media manipulates our perception of what keeps us safe and contributes to a culture fearful of poor people, strangers, immigrants, unhoused people, and people of color. The result is more and more authoritarian state repression, more inequality, and huge profits for the massive public and private punishment bureaucracy.

For readers of Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky, Copaganda documents how modern news coverage fuels insecurity against these groups and shifts our focus away from the policies that would help us improve people’s lives–things like affordable housing, adequate healthcare, early childhood education, and climate-friendly city planning.

Recognized by Teen Vogue as “one of the most prominent voices” on the criminal legal system, Karakatsanis brings his sharp legal expertise, trenchant political analysis, and humorous storytelling to drastically alter the way we consume information, while offering a hopeful path forward. One towards a healed humanity–and media system–with a vested interest in public safety and equality.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A former public defender, Alec Karakatsanis is the founder of the Civil Rights Corps, an organization designed to advocate for racial justice and bring systemic civil rights cases on behalf of impoverished people. He was named the 2016 Trial Lawyer of the Year by Public Justice and was awarded the Stephen B. Bright Award for contributions to indigent defense in the South by Gideon’s Promise. The author of Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System (The New Press), he lives in Washington, DC.


Word Up Recirculation: LOST PATHS by Juan R. Valdez

Tuesday, March 18, 2025 – 7:00pm to 8:00pm
RECIRCULATION A project of Word Up
876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.)
New York , NY 10032

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We invite you to a reading with author Juan R. Valdez for his book Sendas extraviadas: Ensayos para vici en el mundo que nos queda (UAM, 2024), about the position of human beings on a planet Earth on the brink of destruction. We have been dragged to this critical point by unbridled consumerism and capitalism, and by our all-too-human inability to resolve the very sociopolitical ills we create. 

Lost Paths represents an effort to make a meaningful and creative textual contribution to what he calls “the planetary superconsciousness.” This is nothing less than the full contemplation of the problems and wonders of this world that transcends temporal and territorial boundaries and seeks, above all, to do no more harm.

This event has a suggested donation of $5, with a maximum of 30 attendees. Please register in advance.

In accordance with Word Up community safety guidelines, all attendees of this event are required to wear a mask in the store.

Word Up Community Bookshop is located at 2113 Amsterdam Ave. (and 165th St.) in Washington Heights, NYC. You can take the 1 train to 168th St. and the A/C train to 163rd or 168th St.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Juan R. Valdez is a writer, teacher, and hiker. He was born in Santo Domingo and raised in the Bronx. His work is part of a tradition of maroon intellectuals and socio-naturalists who wander freely between the city and the mountains, between literature and science. He is a graduate of the CUNY Graduate Center.

United Palace: Literature to Life stage presentation of I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter

Date: Monday, January 27th | Doors: 6:30pm | Performance followed by talkback: 7–8:30pm | $20 general admission

Literature to Life adapts Erika L. Sánchez’s YA novel as their newest title in their Signature Performance series. This title will be co-produced in partnership with Freedom Reads, the only organization in the nation transforming the experience of incarceration by opening libraries in prison housing facilities. I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter takes place in modern day Chicago. The novel focuses on the idea of finding one’s own identity, and breaking free from societal, cultural, and familial expectations.

United Palace of Cultural Arts presents
Literature to Life stage presentation of
I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter
By Erika L. Sánchez
Performed by Elizabeth Raquel Ramirez
Adapted and Directed by Ana Maria Jomolca

Based on the novel I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, © 2017

Production produced in partnership with Freedom Reads.

Elizabeth Raquel Ramirez is a proud Hispanic actress from San Antonio, Texas. Her credits include In The Heights at Oklahoma City University and two award-winning shorts, Most Likely To and Dream Carriers. She is most known for her contribution to the HBOMax documentary Homeschool Musical: Class of 2020, produced by Tony Award winner Laura Benanti.

LITERATURE TO LIFE (LTL) is a performance-based literacy program that presents professionally staged verbatim adaptations of American literary classics. LTL’s mission is to perform great books that inspire young people to read and become authors of their own lives. LTL was founded more than three decades ago as the educational program of the American Place Theatre. Now an independent organization, this mighty collective of artists and educators brings the voices of diverse authors to thousands of students and audiences nationwide, giving them the tools to become the empowered “voices worth hearing” of our future. www.literaturetolife.org | @lit2life