Upcoming Tiny Store Author Events: Anna Von Mertens and Sy Montgomery
Anna Von Mertens, in conversation with Rebecca Dinerstein Knight
Wednesday, September 25, 6:30 p.m.
Join Peterborough-based artist Anna Von Mertens to celebrate the release of her book Attention Is Discovery: The Life and Legacy Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt and for an engaging conversation with writer Rebecca Dinerstein Knight who contributed a guest essay to the book.
Attention Is Discovery: The Life and Legacy of Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt is a recognition and celebration of the woman whose discovery founded modern cosmology and how her practice of attention is relevant to science, art, and our everyday lives. Essays that examine Leavitt's groundbreaking discovery, her methodologies, the cultural context surrounding her work, and the continued relevance of her discovery—including three guest essays by novelist and screenwriter Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, astrophysicist João Alves, and art historian Jennifer L. Roberts—are paired with a wealth of imagery: details of artworks Von Mertens made in response to Leavitt's legacy; examples of the glass plate photographs of the night sky Leavitt studied; and historic photos of the unique community of women, now known as the Harvard Computers, who worked at the Harvard College Observatory at the turn of the 20th century.
About Anna Von Mertens
Visual artist and author Anna Von Mertens received an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Public Understanding of Science and Technology book grant in support of Attention Is Discovery. Her 2018–2019 exhibition Measure, presented at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, traveled to University Galleries of Illinois State University and Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in 2023. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she studied dark matter as a structuring force in our universe, and a United States Artists Fellowship in Visual Arts. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College; Berkeley Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; RISD Museum; Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery; and Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College. Von Mertens is represented by Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, Oregon.
About Rebecca Dinerstein Knight
Rebecca Dinerstein Knight is the author of the novels Hex (Viking, 2020) and The Sunlit Night (Bloomsbury, 2015), the bilingual English-Norwegian collection of poems Lofoten (Aschehoug, 2012), and the forthcoming nonfiction project Notes to New Mothers (W. W. Norton). Her screenplay adaptation of The Sunlit Night premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and is now a major motion picture. Knight has reviewed restaurants for The Village Voice and novels for The New York Times Book Review, and her essays have appeared online in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times, among others. A graduate of Yale and the NYU MFA program, she lives and writes in New Hampshire.
About the event
This event is free and open to the public. Complimentary cookies, lemonade, and iced tea will be offered, as well as books for sale. The store will also be open for business, with beer and wine available for purchase.
Book Launch with Sy Montgomery
Tuesday, November 12 at 6:30 pm
Join local author Sy Montgomery to celebrate the release of her latest book, What the Chicken Knows: A New Appreciation of the World's Most Familiar Bird.
For more than two decades, Sy Montgomery—a National Book Award finalist—has kept a flock of chickens in her backyard. Each chicken has an individual personality (outgoing or shy, loud or quiet, reckless or cautious) and connects with Sy in her own way.
In her new book, Sy takes us inside the flock and reveals all the things that make chickens such remarkable creatures: only hours after leaving the egg, they are able to walk, run, and peck; relationships are important to them and the average chicken can recognize more than one hundred other chickens; they remember the past and anticipate the future; and they communicate specific information through at least 24 distinct calls.
About sy montgomery
Sy Montgomery is a naturalist, adventurer, and author of more than thirty acclaimed books of nonfiction for adults and children, including The Hummingbirds’ Gift, The Hawk’s Way, the National Book Award finalist The Soul of an Octopus, and most recently, Of Time and Turtles, which was a New York Times bestseller. The recipient of numerous honors, including lifetime achievement awards from the Humane Society and the New England Booksellers Association, she lives in New Hampshire with her husband, writer Howard Mansfield, and a border collie.
About the event
This event is free and open to the public. Complimentary cookies, lemonade, and iced tea will be offered, as well as books for sale. The store will also be open for business, with beer and wine available for purchase.
Our Tiny Store Series
Historic Harrisville's Tiny Store Series features authors, talks, and music in the cozy and comfortable environment of the Harrisville General Store. Writer Sy Montgomery and artist Matt Patterson kicked off the series with a reading from their books Of Time and Turtles and The Book of Turtles. Other guests have included writers Rebecca Kaiser Gibson, Tory McCagg, Firelight Theatre Workshop, Julie Buntin, Mimi Bull, and Susie Spikol, as well as the Apple Hill String Quartet and speaker and mediator Adar Cohen.
