Boston Flora

Category: Author Book Signing

  • Thursday, May 1, 7:00 pm – Good Soil

    Porter Square Books is excited to welcome author Jeff Chu to celebrate the release of his book, Good Soil. Author Kristin T. Lee will join Chu in conversation. This event will take place on Thursday, May 1 at 7pm at Porter Square Books (1815 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02140).

    In his late thirties, Jeff Chu left his job as a magazine writer and found himself at Princeton Theological Seminary’s “Farminary”—a twenty-one-acre working farm where students learn to cultivate the earth while examining life’s biggest questions. Now, he unpacks what he learned about creating “good soil,” both literally and figuratively, drawing lessons from the rhythms of growth, decay, and regeneration that define life on the land.

    In gorgeous, transporting reflections, Chu introduces us to the cast of characters, human and not, who became his teachers. While observing the egrets that visit the pond, the worms that turn waste into fertile soil, and the Chinese long beans that get passed over in the farm’s CSA, Chu considers our desire to belong, the story behind the food on our plate, and the significance of his own roots. What is the earth trying to tell us, if we’ll only stop and listen?

    Good Soil helps readers connect to the land and to one another at a time when we seem drawn most to the phones in our hands. For nature lovers, foodies, and anyone who has daydreamed about a more fulfilling life, this book is a tribute to friendship, to the sacredness of our bond with the natural world, and to how love can grow from the unlikeliest of places.

    Our Cambridge store offers validated parking in the lot on Roseland St. behind Lesley’s University Hall. Register at https://www.portersquarebooks.com/event/jeff-chu-author-good-soil-conversation-kristin-t-lee

  • Thursday, April 10, 7:00 pm – To Wildness

    Porter Square Books is thrilled to welcome Julia Thacker to discuss her collection of poetry, To Wildness. Author Katherine Hollander will introduce Thacker. This event will take place on Thursday, April 10 at 7pm at Porter Square Books (1815 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02140).

    To Wildness is winner of the 19th annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, and was chosen by the internationally acclaimed poet, Paul Muldoon. As Joan Houlihan says in her enthusiastic endorsement, “Teeming with image, sensation and sound, the poems in To Wildness tumble us into a glorious exuberance of catalog and character, rural landscape and dark imaginings (‘We ate ants peeled from bark, a rain of plums / when he rattled the trees. Lumbering. Shackled.’). Ancestral voices speak from the grave; fabulist figures like the girl buried with a finch tell their stories; and contemporary ghosts only the narrator sees abound (Let me touch them as they pass.) A southern gothic atmosphere hovers here: shapes twisting in the dark and the language to conjure them near. What a rich and thrilling collection!”

    In recipes, spells, odes and elegies, To Wildness conjures what has been lost and what remains. These are poems of the body. They rub up against one another and knock elbows. Plum Jam calls preserving fruit as spiritual labor: To be elbow deep in a barrel/arms gloved crimson. In this collection, the dead reside alongside the living. Ancestors roost in trees, having forgotten language, their coats inside out. Others sulk in the eaves, their ears clogged with clover. The past made vivid renders an extravagant present and offers a balm to the isolation of the contemporary world.

    Our Cambridge store offers validated parking in the lot on Roseland St. behind Lesley’s University Hall. Register at https://www.portersquarebooks.com/event/julia-thacker-author-wildness

  • Wednesday, April 16, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm – Don’t Waste Perfectly Good Food!

    Join the Boston University Food & Wine department on Wednesday, April 16 from 1 – 2 for a cooking demonstration with Irene and Mei Li in celebration of Earth month. Learn how to turn scraps into delicious dishes. Free, but reserve your spot through Eventbrite HERE. This event is part of the Spring 2025 Pépin Lecture Series and will take place at 808 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 124.

  • Sunday, April 13, 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm – Brunch with Margaret Renkl

    Grow Native Massachusetts is delighted to host a conversation with New York Times Opinion writer and bestselling author Margaret Renkl on April 13. We will be delving into her book The Comfort of Crows, which tells the story of the creatures and plants observed in her backyard over the course of a year. 

    Moving through the seasons—beginning with a crow spied on New Year’s Day, its resourcefulness and sense of community setting a theme for the year—what develops is a portrait of joy and grief. Joy at the ongoing pleasures of the natural world: “Until the very last cricket falls silent, the beauty-besotted will always find a reason to love the world.” And grief at a shifting climate, at winters that end too soon, at songbirds growing fewer and fewer.

    Along the way, we also glimpse the changing rhythms of a human life. Grown children, unexpectedly home during the pandemic, prepare to depart once more. Birdsong and night-blooming flowers evoke generations past. The city and the country where Renkl raised her family transform a little more with every passing day. How can one person make a difference amid such destabilizing changes?

    Exploring Renkl’s observations and themes of change, personal action, and hope, this intimate brunch chat will span topics from taking time to notice and appreciate nature right outside your door, to preserving and restoring wildlife habitat, addressing climate change, and making other difficult systemic changes in the way human beings live. 

    Our venue, Bull Run, is a farm-to-table restaurant and function hall situated in a historic tavern at 215 Great Road in Shirley, MA. You can enjoy their delicious brunch buffet before or during the discussion with Margaret, included as part of your ticket.

    The Comfort of Crows and its companion journal Leaf, Cloud, Crow, will be available for purchase and signing at the event, courtesy of Little Bee Bookshop in Ayer.

    Doors open at 10 am – book signing prior to discussion. Discussion begins at noon. Grow Native members $50, public $60, including brunch. Register at www.grownativemass.org

  • Wednesday, February 26, 6:00 pm – Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe

    Harvard Book Store, the Harvard University Division of Science, and the Harvard Library welcome Carl Zimmer—award-winning science journalist, writer of the “Origins” column for The New York Times, and professor adjunct in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University—for a discussion of his new book Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe. This event will take place on February 26 at 6 pm at the Harvard Science Center, located at 1 Oxford St, Cambridge. There are two ticket options available for this event. Following the presentation will be a reception and book signing in the Cabot Science Library across the hall from the presentation room. 

    Every day we draw in two thousand gallons of air—and thousands of living things. From the ground to the stratosphere, the air teems with invisible life. This last great biological frontier remains so mysterious that it took over two years for scientists to finally agree that the Covid pandemic was caused by an airborne virus.

    In Air-Borne,  Carl Zimmer leads us on an odyssey through the living atmosphere and through the history of its discovery. We travel to the tops of mountain glaciers, where Louis Pasteur caught germs from the air, and follow Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh above the clouds, where they conducted groundbreaking experiments. We meet the long-forgotten pioneers of aerobiology including William and Mildred Wells, who tried for decades to warn the world about airborne infections, only to die in obscurity.

    Air-Borne chronicles the dark side of aerobiology with gripping accounts of how the United States and the Soviet Union clandestinely built arsenals of airborne biological weapons designed to spread anthrax, smallpox, and an array of other pathogens. Air-Borne also leaves readers looking at the world with new eyes—as a place where the oceans and forests loft trillions of cells into the air, where microbes eat clouds, and where life soars thousands of miles on the wind.

    Weaving together gripping history with the latest reporting on Covid and other threats to global health, Air-Borne surprises us on every page as it reveals the hidden world of the air.

    Free General Admission Ticket: Includes admission for one. Book-Included Ticket: Includes admission for one and one hardcover copy of Air-Borne. Register through Eventbrite HERE.

  • Tuesday, February 18, 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm – Pépin Lecture Series: A Talk with Sara B. Franklin

    Join Sara B. Franklin at Boston University, 928 Commonwealth Avenue Room 110, on February 18 at 6 pm for a conversation about her latest book, The Editor, to kickoff the Boston University Food & Wine Program’s spring 2025 lecture series. The event is free but registration is requested at www.eventbrite.com. Copies of the book will be available for purchase.

    Legendary editor Judith Jones, the woman behind some of the most important authors of the 20th century—including Julia Child, Anne Frank, Edna Lewis, John Updike, and Sylvia Plath—finally gets her due in this “surprising, granular, luminous, and path-breaking biography” (Edward Hirsch, author of How to Read a Poem).

    At Doubleday’s Paris office in 1949, twenty-five-year-old Judith Jones spent most of her time wading through manuscripts in the slush pile and passing on projects—until one day, a book caught her eye. She read it in one sitting, then begged her boss to consider publishing it. A year later, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl became a bestseller. It was the start of a culture-defining career in publishing.

    During her more than fifty years as an editor at Alfred A. Knopf, Jones nurtured the careers of literary icons such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Tyler, and John Updike, and helped launched new genres and trends in literature. At the forefront of the cookbook revolution, she published the who’s who of food writing: Edna Lewis, M.F.K. Fisher, Claudia Roden, Madhur Jaffrey, James Beard, and, most famously, Julia Child. Through her tenacious work behind the scenes, Jones helped turn these authors into household names, changing cultural mores and expectations along the way.

    Judith’s work spanned decades of America’s most dramatic cultural change—from the end of World War II through the civil rights movement and the fight for women’s equality—and the books she published acted as tools of quiet resistance. Now, based on exclusive interviews, never-before-seen personal papers, and years of research, her astonishing career is explored for the first time in this “thorough and humanizing portrait” (Kirkus Reviews).

    About the Speaker

    Sara B. Franklin is a writer, teacher, and oral historian. She received a 2020–2021 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Public Scholars grant for her research on Judith Jones, and teaches courses on food, writing, embodied culture, and oral history at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She is the author of The Editor, the editor of Edna Lewis, and coauthor of The Phoenicia Diner Cookbook. She holds a PhD in food studies from NYU and studied documentary storytelling at both the Duke Center for Documentary Studies and the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. She lives with her children in Kingston, New York. Find out more at SaraBFranklin.com.

  • Monday, February 3, 6:30 pm – Curated Cuisine: Easy Weeknight Dinners

    WBUR and CitySpace host an edition of Curated Cuisine on February 3 with New York Times Cooking’s Emily Weinstein, Melissa Clark, and Eric Kim. Inspired by one of The New York Times’s most popular newsletters, Weinstein’s “Five Weeknight Dishes,” the new book Easy Weeknight Dinners offers 100 fast and flavorful meals that will satisfy whether you’re seeking a standout dinner for one, crowd pleasers for picky kids or something special for company. Just because you’re busy doesn’t mean that you can’t have something excellent to eat.

    Weinstein will be joined by popular Cooking columnists Melissa Clark and Eric Kim, who will discuss recipe writing, go-to meals and tips for easy excellence in the kitchen. Copies of the book will be available for purchase, the chefs will sign and guests will enjoy a bite from the book following the conversation. $10 (students) – $30. Register HERE.

  • Sunday, January 19, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm – Plants for the Winter Garden with Warren Leach

    If you missed Warren Leach at the Arnold Arboretum, you have a second chance at New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill on January 19 at 2 pm. The winter garden is truly a low maintenance affair and a time to enjoy – no weeding, no watering and no dead-heading! The winter landscape may be quiescent, but the garden need not be bleak. Plants with brightly colored berries, twigs, stems, foliage and even winter-blooming flowers shrug off the snow and cold. They bring cheer, even as the sun enters Capricorn. Landscape horticulturist Warren Leach, and author of the new book from Timber Press Plants for the Winter Garden, will showcase gardens he has designed that celebrate the winter season as well as planting design ideas for your own garden.

    Warren will be available for book signings after the lecture. Free for NEBG members, $10 for nonmembers. If you wish to purchase a book, $38.25 for members and $52.50 for nonmembers. Register HERE.

  • Tuesday, January 21, 7:00 pm – Sandwiches of History: Live!

    In celebration of his brand-new cookbook, Sandwiches of History creator Barry Enderwick is hitting the road to share the history of his wildly popular internet deep-dive on all things sandwich.

    The live show on January 21 at 7 pm at WBUR CitySpace will feature a special guest star, and sandwich making and tasting with audience-suggested “plus ups,” Enderwick’s signature technique for taking good sandwiches and making them great. There will also be a Q&A and more surprises. VIP ticket holders will receive reserved seating, a signed copy of Sandwiches of History: The Cookbook and exclusive access to a meet and greet after the show.  The ultimate book for the sandwich connoisseur (or even the sandwich curious), the book contains nearly 100 recipes spanning the centuries, from the most well-known to obscure but delicious sandwiches. 

    Ah, sandwiches. They’re everywhere. But what’s the story behind the club, the Cuban, or the hot brown? Through his various social media platforms, Barry Enderwick has been exploring all things sandwich for years. For the first time, he has taken the source material for dozens of sandwiches and painstakingly recreated them — staying as faithful as possible to every original sandwich, while providing much more guidance on successfully making each one. From the classics, like the Cucumber Tea Sandwich or The Sophisticated Club Sandwich, to the out-of-the-box, like The Hot Chicken Tuna Sandwich and the Mock Banana Sandwich, Barry provides not only recipes, but interesting information and fun facts that pertain to them.

    To order tickets (ranging from $10 for students to $75 for VIP) click HERE.

  • Saturday, January 11, 12:00 noon – 1:30 pm – Plants for the Winter Garden

    When gardens go dormant for the winter months, there are still certain species and cultivars that draw the eye with their bright berries, interesting seed pods, and spectacular bark. Join Warren Leach at the Hunnewell Lecture Hall at the Arnold Arboretum on January 11 at noon for a book talk on his new book, Plants for the Winter Garden: Perennials, Grasses, Shrubs, and Trees to Add Interest in the Cold and Snow, and discover all that a winter garden has to offer. Warren Leach has years of gardening experience in the cold Northeast and will be sharing all of his winter garden tips, from plant selection and placement, to pruning techniques, to structural components that complement the plants themselves. And if you decide to buy a book after the program, make sure to look for some references to the Arnold Arboretum’s own winter landscape! Register at https://arboretum.harvard.edu/events/plants-for-the-winter-garden-by-warren-leach/?occurrence=2025-01-11