Come see the Swans of Harlem & how do YOU arrange your bookshelves?

Come see the Swans of Harlem & how do YOU arrange your bookshelves?

We moved last Saturday and are now in the happier phase of unpacking boxes. My study (below) is a work in progress. The Jack of Hearts picture in the corner was a college art project by my younger daughter.

I have a system for shelving books that would look opaque to anyone else. Some books are arranged alphabetically and some by subject. One shelf is for current writing projects while others have random book groupings that make sense only to me. How do you arrange your bookshelves?

Books for current writing projects.

I love miniatures, so I keep a few on my shelves.

A miniature bookstore I found at a craft fair in Paris a while back.

Five magnificent Black ballerinas helped found the Dance Theatre of Harlem to create the world class troupe that it still is. Four survive today—Lydia Abarca Mitchell, Sheila Rohan, Marcia Lynn Sells, and Karlya Shelton-Benjamin. As they are fond of saying, they performed decades before Misty Copeland. It is appalling that they have been ignored by our white-centered myopia.

SO excited to interview the Swans of Harlem at 7 PM on May 3 at Politics & Prose.

These extraordinary artists worked with writer Karen Valby to tell their stories in THE SWANS OF HARLEM. I’ll be interviewing them at 7 PM May 3 at Politics & Prose’s Connecticut Avenue store. If you’re in the DMV, please join us! The event is free. If you live elsewhere, please join the live-stream here.

I’m excited to interview author Julia Ridley Smith about her debut short story collection SEX ROMP GONE WRONG. On May 10 at 6 PM, we’ll be at Potter’s House bookstore, 1658 Columbia Road, NW DC 20009. The event is free but please register here.

If you were in or near the path of totality, I hope you had a grand eclipse. We were mired in such chaos with moving that we failed to get eclipse glasses. Fortunately, a recently unpacked box and a little aluminum foil did the trick. It was awesome, in the full sense of the word.

When second grade science comes to the rescue.

Wishing you a joyous spring.

Love, Martha