Color Purple events include 'interview'
The Arkansas Literary Festival is celebrating Banned Books Week with a program focused on The Color Purple, Alice Walker's novel that won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
A short performance on the book's author will be presented Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. at the Ron Robinson Theater, 100 River Market Ave. The 1985 film adaptation of the book will be shown after the presentation.
Actresses Verda Davenport Booher and Vivian Norman will re-enact an interview with Walker that touches on Walker's inspiration for the book and the success it had. The event is free.
Banned Books Week, which ends Saturday, is an annual event sponsored by the American Library Association that celebrates the freedom to read.
Literary prizes to go to 2 state authors
Two Arkansas authors will be honored Thursday with the Worthen and Porter Literary Prizes.
An event is planned for 6 p.m. in the Central Arkansas Library System's Darragh Center at the main library at 100 Rock St. A book signing and reception will follow.
Reservations can be made by emailing kchagnon@cals.org or by calling (501) 918-3033, but a reservation is not required to attend.
The Booker Worthen Literary Prize is being awarded to Guy Lancaster for his book, Racial Cleansing in Arkansas, 1883-1924: Politics, Land, Labor and Criminality.
The prize was established in memory of William Booker Worthen, a longtime member of the library system's board of trustees. It is presented annually for the best work by an author or editor living in the system's service area.
The Porter Fund Literary Prize will be given to Davis McCombs for his "substantial and impressive body of work," according to a library news release. McCombs has published two volumes of award-winning poetry. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the American Poetry Review and the Pushcart Prize Anthology.
The Porter Fund was established in honor of Dr. Ben Drew Kimpel, a longtime professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, who requested the prize be named for his mother, Gladys Crane Kimpel Porter.
Partnership links UALR to libraries
Through a new partnership with the Central Arkansas Library System, students can use their University of Arkansas at Little Rock library cards to borrow and return materials from the regional library system online.
Library system cardholders now also can reserve and receive UALR materials without visiting the campus.
The new program, called ArkReach, allows cardholders to place holds on UALR or library system materials and be sent the books in just a few days. It does away with a former process in which patrons had to wait to have librarians place inter-library loan requests.
The program will be available through the online catalogs of both institutions.
UALR and the library system hope to extend the scope of the partnership throughout the state by adding other libraries in the future, a release said.
Metro on 09/27/2015