Cultural Events Calendar

Expand your health span and learn how to live for today. That's the focus of National Geographic photojournalist David McLain's captivating look into the world’s Blue Zones—regions where people live the longest, healthiest lives. Drawing on his work with Blue Zones founder Dan Buettner, McLain shares remarkable stories and stunning images that reveal the daily habits, community values, and cultural insights behind extraordinary well-being. Start your Food & Wine week off right and stick around for the post show Q&A and Meet & Greet with David. Explore Booksellers will be on site with Blue Zones Kitchen and Blue Zones American Kitchen available for purchase.

On June 22, First Draft welcomes author Torrey Peters to TACAW. Stag Dance is the sophomore book by Torrey Peters, consisting of three short stories and the titular novel, released in March to rave reviews.

Torrey Peters is the author of the novel Detransition, Baby, which won the 2021 PEN/Hemingway award for debut fiction and was named a Best Book of the Century by the New York Times. She is an amateur sauna builder, rides a pink motorcycle, and splits her time between Brooklyn and an off-grid cabin in Vermont.

Author Event with:  Bernice L. McFadden & her first memoir FIRSTBORN GIRLS .

Bernice has appeared on the New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and Notable Books lists, received an American Book Award and NAACP Image Award, been longlisted for the Women’s Prize, and much more. 25 years after her debut, she turns the lens toward her own life, tracing her remarkable journey—from a devastating childhood accident to the publication of her award-winning first novel, Sugar.

Samuel Marquis will speak about and sign his new book, Captain Kidd: A True Story of Treasure and Betrayal

A breakneck adventure of war, romance, and politics in the golden age of piracy.

Captain William Kidd stands as one of the most notorious “pirate” outlaws ever, but his legend is tainted by a bed of lies. Having captivated imaginations for more than three hundred years and inspired many stories about pirates, troubling questions remain. Was he really a criminal or is the truth more inconvenient: that he was a buccaneer’s worst nightmare, a revered pirate hunter tu

Join us for the free public lecture, William A. Nitze Community Lecture with Robin Wall Kimmerer at Paepcke Auditorium at 5 pm on Friday, July 18. Registration will be open June 1.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, which has earned Kimmerer wide acclaim.

A Young Doctor’s Unlikely Adventure

BY Mimi Zieman, M.D.

Tap Dancing on Everest, at once riveting and reflective, explores the risks we take to become our truest selves. Mimi Zieman blazes an unexpected path from the daughter of immigrants raised in New York City to a 25-year-old medical student who becomes the doctor and only woman on a team attempting a new route on the remote East Face of Everest in Tibet. In an outrageous plan, the team embarks without the use of supplemental oxygen, Sherpa support, or chance for rescue. When three climbers disappear during their summit attempt, Zieman reaches the knife edge of her limits, digging deeply to fight for the climbers’ lives and to find her voice.

Weaving adventure and medicine in a feminist story of self-discovery, Tap Dancing on Everest captures the curiosity and awe of a young woman as she faces down childhood messages to stay small and safe and ventures into the unknown. The book was acknowledged: Best Memoir of 2024 by the American Writing Awards

A gorgeous, expansive piece of narrative non-fiction about care, dependence, and what it means to breathe in an age of environmental catastrophe

A few moments after birth we begin to use our lungs for the first time. From then on, we must continue breathing for as long as we are alive. And although this mostly happens unconsciously, in a society plagued by anxiety, climate change, environmental racism, and illness, there are more and more instances that “teach us about the privilege that is breathing.”

On August 19, First Draft welcomes poet luminary (and lawyer) Reginald Dwayne Betts.

Doggerel is a majestic volume of poetry that marks a transformative stage in his life and career. This resplendent tableau ruminates on dogs and the ostensibly trivial joys that transform us—peonies blooming, a “symphony” of wine glasses, father-son bike rides, basketball, seeing and being seen, surrendering to a lover’s touch. Channeling dogs both literally and metaphorically, these poems trace everything from the companionship of Betts’s own Jack Russell Terrier to the ways we are dogged by our deepest desires for connection, love, and repair.

Fiction. Nonfiction.

Big names. Small town.

Music. Art. Food. Drink.

In the mountains. In autumn.

Literary insiders, outsiders and in-betweeners.

For Aspen. In Aspen.

Open to all. Most of it free.

September 26-28th.

Agenda

Fiction. Nonfiction.

Big names. Small town.

Music. Art. Food. Drink.

In the mountains. In autumn.

Literary insiders, outsiders and in-betweeners.

For Aspen. In Aspen.

Open to all. Most of it free.

September 26-28th.

Agenda