(From Left to Right: Scott Kennedy, Anita Heckman, Grace Paley, Phil McManus, Deena Hurwitz, Betsy Fairbanks, Doug Rand, Judy Bloomgardener) Please join us for a celebration of the life and work of Grace Paley. A notable list of local poets, feminists, activists, pacifists, writers and rascals will read from Paley’s work, including, Lee Swenson, Julie Olsen Edwards, Darrell Darling, Emily Reilly, Betsy Fairbanks, Cappy Israel, Bill Monning, Morton Marcus, Nanlouise Wolfe, Barbara Hayes, Richard Moss, Shannon Spencer, Merrie Shaller, Lynn Zachreson, Nick Zachreson, Marion Vittitow and Ellen Bass. At the Mill Gallery, 131-B Front Street in Santa Cruz (south of Laurel). Come join us to celebrate this extraordinary woman and a life well-lived! $5-$20 suggested sliding-scale donation (no one turned away for lack of funds).Grace Paley, who died August 22, 2007, was most famously a writer of short stories. But folks at the Resource Center for Nonviolence knew her as a political activist, friend, ally and supporter who spoke at the Center’s Annual Dinner and Program in 1987. Grace Paley was, according to the LA Times, “an acclaimed writer and activist who in only three collections of short stories gave earthy voice to the interior life of the Bronx Everywoman.” Grace’s three collections of short stories, again according to the LA Times, “won her critical acclaim and the prestigious Rea Award for short-story writing. But Paley, known as a passionate activist for causes ranging from the Vietnam War to feminism to the Iraq War, was perhaps less prolific for those efforts – a diversity of experience she embraced in a June interview, saying, ‘It’s not as if anybody is one thing.'” A descendant of the East European Jewish socialist tradition, who came to her own as a writer in the tumultuous 1960s, Grace embodied good humor, imagination, working with other people, radical politics, and a dogged persistence — all necessary ingredient for times such as those in which we live.
