Anne Trubek: Voices from the Rust Belt

April 5th 6:30-8:30pm at the American Writer's Museum 180 N. Michigan Ave.

Trubek, the founder of Belt Publishing, presents 24 essays by current and former residents of the Rust Belt states that explore the region’s postindustrial decline, as well as its resilience. They reflect upon happy childhoods, successful community ventures, warm refuges for outsiders, and hidden oases of natural beauty. But mainly they are stories drawn from uniquely personal experiences. These essays go a long way toward expanding the narrative about the Rust Belt in that they refute stereotypes, explore a vastly varied series of experiences, and provide a valuable history lesson on industrialism.

Kate Moore March 18th at the American Writer's Museum

March 18^th 5:30pm

American Writer’s Museum 180 N. Michigan 2^nd floor

As World War I raged across the globe, hundreds of young women toiled away at the radium-dial factories, where they painted clock faces with a mysterious new substance called radium. Assured by their bosses that the luminous material was safe, the women themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered from head to toe with the glowing dust. With such a coveted job, these "shining girls" were considered the luckiest alive - until they began to fall mysteriously ill. As the fatal poison of the radium took hold, they found themselves embroiled in one of America's biggest scandals and a groundbreaking battle for workers' rights. The Radium Girls explores the strength of these extraordinary women in the face of almost impossible circumstances and the astonishing legacy they left behind.

Kate Moore is a New York Times bestselling author who writes across many genres, including biography, memoir, and history. She was also the director of the acclaimed play about the Radium Girls called 'These Shining Lives'.

Books will be sold before and after the event.

Erin Banco March 13th at the American Writer's Museum

March 13^th 6pm

American Writer’s Museum 180 N. Michigan 2^nd floor

Pipe Dreams: The Plundering of Iraq's Oil Wealth is a riveting expose of the oil industry by Star-Ledger reporter Erin Banco. Banco traveled to oil-rich Kurdistan - an autonomous zone that the regional government claims holds some 45 billion barrels of crude - to uncover how widespread corruption, tribal cronyism, kickbacks to political parties, and the war with ISIS have contributed to the plundering of Iraq's oil wealth.

The region's economy and political stability have been on the brink of collapse, and local people are suffering. Based on court documents and on exclusive interviews with sources who have investigated energy companies and their dealings with government officials, Pipe Dreams is a cautionary tale that reveals how the dream on an oil-financed, American-style democracy in Iraqi Kurdistan now looks like a completely unrealistic fantasy.

Erin Banco is an investigative reporter at the Star-Ledger and NJ.com. A former fellow at The New York Times and the Middle East correspondent for International Business Times, she has covered armed conflict and human rights violations in the Middle East for years.

Erin appears in conversation with Danny Postel, assistant director of the Middle East and North African Studies program at Northwestern University. Danny Postel is the author of Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran (2006) and co-editor of three books: The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future (2011), The Syria Dilemma (2013), and Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East (2017).

Join us for an interesting discussion followed by a book signing.