Editor's pick: Listening to local voices

Award-winning local authors read from their works

• WHEN: Saturday, May 26, 3:00 p.m.

• WHERE: Hamish and Henry Booksellers, 34B Main Street, Livingston Manor, NY.

• COST: Free.

• CONTACT: Hamishandhenry.com or 845/439-8029.

LIVINGSTON MANOR, NY — It’s impossible to spend much time in this area without being astonished by the depth of artistic talent to be found here across a range of media. There will be another reminder of that treasure this weekend, when two award-winning authors read from their work at Hamish and Henry Booksellers.

First will be American Book Award winner and Pen/Faulkner Award nominee Rilla Askew, reading from her new book, “Harpsong.”

“The idea for the book came from attending the Woody Guthrie Festival a few years back and the evening at the Crystal Theatre,” said Askew. “Woody’s son Arlo was there with his kids and they were singing all of Woody’s old songs. Arlo said his dad so believed in everyday people, believed in the working man, and that that came across in his music. I remember thinking that I really wanted to honor Oklahoma and Oklahomans by exploring that in a way that was not as darkly themed as my previous books.”

Askew, who now divides her time between Oklahoma and Liberty, NY, was born in the Sans Bois Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma, where her family has lived for five generations. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of literary magazines, and her story “The Killing Blanket” was selected for Prize Stories 1993: The O. Henry Awards. Among her other awards are the Oklahoma Book Award and the Western Heritage Award for her first novel, “The Mercy Seat,” which was also nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She has taught creative writing at Brooklyn College, the University of Central Oklahoma, Syracuse University, and the University of Massachusetts/Amherst.

Patricia Eakins will read from upcoming work. She is the author of “The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste, Father and Mother, First and Last,” a novel that has been awarded New York University Press’s Prize for Fiction as well as the Capricorn Prize for Fiction of the Writer’s Voice.

“I wanted to create stories that read as if they came from the body of lost history,” said Eakins. “I had the sense, and have it now, that most of the history of most of the world has necessarily always been lost. And partly I wrote the stories to console myself for this loss, which I felt as a wound—a wound in the world, but also a personal wound, a loss as ‘original’ to me as some people think sin is to mankind. A powerful sense of challenge and joy resides for me in the notion that there is a vast repository of untold story I can make and remake.”

Eakins is also the author of “The Hungry Girls and Other Stories” (San Francisco: Cadmus Editions, 1988), a collection characterized by The New York Times Book Review as “triumphantly quirky.”

Hamish and Henry Booksellers will continue to host readings by local authors throughout the season. This will be one spot to keep your eye on.