Book Release Party

Join us for a celebration of the release of "Guide to the Exhibit" by Lisa Allen Ortiz. Enjoy a reading by the author, activities, book signing, and light refreshments after hours at the museum. This event is FREE and all are welcome.

About the 2016 Perugia Press Prize-winning Book:
Inspired by displays at our Museum, the poems in Lisa Allen Ortiz’s collection, Guide to the Exhibit, are about what we set aside to examine and remember. The quirky, scientific lens—grimy, focused, funny, always illuminating—animates the odd and overlooked. With humility and curiosity, Ortiz is moved to learn how to see more clearly both as lover and as griever. Speaking the names of things—animals, skeletons, teeth, feathers—is a way of connecting with the complications of being alive. How does the stillness of an exhibit encourage us toward love and joy? Does studying details increase the pleasure of felt experience? Ortiz is paying close attention to love while death and sorrow lurk nearby. “Survival is the mutest joy,” she writes. Guide to the Exhibit looks outward and reflects, examines, links, and contradicts.