
CLSC Lectures
Reading together since 1878, the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle has remained a leader in adult education through quality programming.
Each summer, the CLSC chooses at least nine books of literary quality and invites the authors to Chautauqua present their work to an audience of approximately 1,000 readers.
Contact Information
CLSC Octagon
716-357-6293 (in-season)
clsc@chq.org
Department of Education
716-357-6255
Chautauqua Institution
Attn: Department of Education/CLSC
PO Box 28
Chautauqua, NY 14722

CLSC Book Discussion
Presenters Emily Novak and Mary Pat McFarland will lead a community discussion on our Week Five CLSC selection Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution by Cat Bohannon

CLSC Young Readers Book Discussion
Presenters Mary Kay Szwejbka and Charlotte Cohen will lead a community discussion on our Week Four CLSC Young Readers selection Stranded by Nikki Shannon Smith and Hatchet by Gary Paulsen


Cat Bohannon
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle Presentation — Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon
How did the female body drive 200 million years of human evolution? Why do women live longer than men? Why are women more likely to get Alzheimer’s? Why do girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet? Is sexism useful for evolution? And why, seriously why, do women have to sweat through our sheets every night when we hit menopause?
These questions are producing some truly exciting science – and in Eve, with boundless curiosity and sharp wit, Cat Bohannon covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex: “We need a kind of user’s manual for the female mammal. A no-nonsense, hard-hitting, seriously researched (but readable) account of what we are. How female bodies evolved, how they work, what it really means to biologically be a woman. Something that would rewrite the story of womanhood. This book is that story. We must put the female body in the picture. If we don’t, it’s not just feminism that’s compromised. Modern medicine, neurobiology, paleoanthropology, even evolutionary biology all takes a hit when we ignore the fact that half of us have breasts. So, it’s time we talk about breasts. Breasts, and blood, and fat, and vaginas, and wombs—all of it. How they came to be and how we live with them now, no matter how weird or hilarious the truth is.”
Eve is not only a sweeping revision of human history, it’s an urgent and necessary corrective for a world that has focused primarily on the male body for far too long. Picking up where Sapiens left off, Eve will completely change what you think you know about evolution and why Homo sapiens has become such a successful and dominant species.
Cat Bohannon is a researcher and author with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Georgia Review, The Story Collider, and Poets Against the War. She lives with her family in Seattle.
This program is made possible by The Beverly and Bruce Conner Endowment for Education.

CLSC Book Discussion
Presenters Vanessa Weinert and Susan Allen will lead a community discussion on our Week Six CLSC selection Chain-Gang All-Stars: A Novel by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

CLSC Young Readers Book Discussion
Presenters Stephaine Dawson and Mary Pat McFarland will lead a community discussion on our Week Six CLSC Young Readers selection Squire: A Graphic Novel by Nadia Shamas and Sara Alfageeh


Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle Presentation — Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the stars of the Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly popular, highly controversial profit-raising program in America’s increasingly dominant private prison industry. It’s the return of the gladiators, and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.
In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death matches before packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. As fan favorites, teammates, and lovers, Thurwar and Staxxx fight for their lives and consider how they might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games. But CAPE’s corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo, and the obstacles they devise have devastating consequences.
In his debut novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah examines an America in which systemic racism, wanton capitalism, and mass incarceration combine to create a new privatized and monetized gladiator production in the United States, on which the kaleidoscopic lives of his main characters take center stage as they fight to survive and pursue their freedom — by any means necessary. A work longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence and named a finalist for the 2024 Chautauqua Prize, among other accolades, Chain-Gang All-Stars combines prose that is both provocative and forthright in its critique of the American incarceration system.
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah was raised in Spring Valley, New York, and now lives in the Bronx. His debut collection, Friday Black, was a New York Times bestseller, won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize. His first novel Chain-Gang All-Stars was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the Books Are My Bag Awards, and selected as a New York Times Top Ten Books of the Year. Adjei-Brenyah is a National Book Foundation’s ‘5 Under 35’ honoree.
This program is made possible by The Caroline Roberts Barnum and Julianne Barnum Follansbee Fund.

CLSC Book Discussion
Presenters Steven Pallie and Toby Schermerhorn will lead a community discussion on our Week Seven CLSC selection Mỹ Documents by Kevin Nguyen.

CLSC Young Readers Book Discussion
Presenters Anne Pekrul and Mary Pat McFarland will lead a community discussion on our Week Seven CLSC Young Readers selections J vs. K by Kwame Alexander and Nic Blake and the Remarkables by Angie Thomas.


Kevin Nguyen
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle Presentation — Mỹ Documents: A Novel by Kevin Nguyen
Ursula, Alvin, Jen, and Duncan grew up as cousins in the sprawling Nguyen family. As young adults, they’re on the precipice of new ventures: Ursula as a budding journalist in Manhattan, Alvin as an engineering intern for Google, Jen as a naïve freshman at NYU, and Duncan as a promising newcomer on his high school football team. Their lives are upended when a series of violent, senseless attacks across America creates a national panic, prompting a government policy that pushes Vietnamese Americans into internment camps. Jen and Duncan are sent with their mother to Camp Tacoma while Ursula and Alvin receive exemptions.
Cut off entirely from the outside world, forced to work jobs they hate, Jen and Duncan try to withstand long, dusty days in camp and acclimate to life without the internet. That is, until Jen discovers a way to get messages to the outside. Her first instinct is to reach out to Ursula, who sees this connection as a chance to tell the world about the horrors of camp—and as an opportunity to bolster her own reporting career in the process.
Informed by real-life events, from Japanese incarceration to the Vietnam War and modern-day immigrant detention, Kevin Nguyen’s novel gives us a version of reality only a few degrees away from our own. Moving and finely attuned to both the brutalities and mundanities of racism, Mỹ Documents is a strangely funny and touching portrait of American ambition, fear, and family. The story of the Nguyens is one of resilience and how we return to one another, and to ourselves, after tragedy.
Kevin Nguyen is the author of the novel New Waves. He is the features editor at The Verge and was previously a senior editor at GQ. He lives in Brooklyn.
Nguyen will replace the previously announced Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle author Angie Thomas, who was originally scheduled for August 7. Her book, Blackout, remains a 2025 CLSC selection.
This program is made possible by The Gail Anne Clement Olson Fund.

CLSC Book Discussion
Presenters Georgia Court and Fred Zirm will lead a community discussion on our Week Eight CLSC selections The Tiny Journalist by Naomi Shihab Nye and the little book of e by E. Ethelbert Miller

CLSC Young Readers Book Discussion
Presenters Suzanne Fassett-Wright and Rachel Lykins will lead a community discussion on our Week Eight CLSC Young Readers selection Grace Notes: Poems About Families by Naomi Shihab Nye
August 14 @ 3:30 pm Week Eight (August 9–16)
Naomi Shihab Nye and E. Ethelbert Miller
Hall of Philosophy


Naomi Shihab Nye and E. Ethelbert Miller
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle Presentation — The Tiny Journalist by Naomi Shihab Nye and the little book of e by E. Ethelbert Miller
The Tiny Journalist
Internationally beloved poet Naomi Shihab Nye places her Palestinian American identity center stage in her latest full-length poetry collection inspired by the story of Janna Jihad Ayyad, the “Youngest Journalist in Palestine,” who at age 7 began capturing videos of anti-occupation protests using her mother’s smartphone. Nye draws upon her own family’s roots in a West Bank village near Janna’s hometown to offer empathy and insight to the young girl’s reporting. Long an advocate for peaceful communication across all boundaries, Nye’s poems in The Tiny Journalist put a human face on war and the violence that divides us from each other.
Award-winning Palestinian American poet, essayist, and educator, Naomi Shihab Nye, describes herself as a “wandering poet.” She has spent more than 40 years traveling the country and the world to lead writing workshops and inspiring students of all ages. Nye was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother and grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Drawing on her Palestinian American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her experiences traveling in Asia, Europe, Canada, Mexico, and the Middle East, Nye uses her writing to attest to our shared humanity.
Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than 30 volumes of poetry, essays, and fiction for adults and children. Naomi Shihab Nye was a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow (Library of Congress). She has also been the recipient of many awards and prizes including a Lavan Award, Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, four Pushcart Prizes, Robert Creeley Prize, NSK Neustadt Award for Children’s Literature, May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award, Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement, two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards, the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement, the 2024 Texas Writer Award and the 2024 Wallace Stevens Award. In 2021 she was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Nye was affiliated with The Michener Center for writers at the University of Texas at Austin for 20 years and was also poetry editor at The Texas Observer for 20 years. In 2019-2020 she was the editor for New York Times Magazine poems. She is Chancellor Emeritus for the Academy of American Poets and is Professor of Creative Writing – Poetry at Texas State University.
the little book of e
In the little book of e poet E. Ethelbert Miller embraces the Japanese poetic form of haiku to comment on our contemporary world in a collaboration with translator Rafi Ellenson. Haiku presented in English and Hebrew is symbolic of how language can bring people together. Miller and Ellenson have given us a book that shows how Black and Jewish relations can continue to be a beacon of hope. This book is filled with words that blossom like flowers.
E. Ethelbert Miller is a literary activist and author of two memoirs and several poetry collections. He hosts the WPFW morning radio show On the Margin with E. Ethelbert Miller and hosts and produces The Scholars on UDC-TV which received a 2020 Telly Award. Miller is Associate Editor and a columnist for The American Book Review. He was given a 2020 congressional award from Congressman Jamie Raskin in recognition of his literary activism, awarded the 2022 Howard Zinn Lifetime Achievement Award by the Peace and Justice Studies Association, and named a 2023 Grammy Nominee Finalist for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album. Miller’s latest book is the little book of e published by City Point Press. Recently Miller was awarded the Furious Flower Lifetime Achievement Award.
Exploring the various ways in which language and story bring us together, Naomi Shihab Nye and E. Ethelbert Miller will be featured together in conversation during our Week Eight CLSC lecture on Thursday, August 14, 2025, in the Hall of Philosophy.
This program is made possible by The Bess Sheppard Morrison CLSC Fund.

CLSC Unbound Book Discussion
Presenters Stuart Blerch and Mary Weiser will discuss our CLSC Unbound selections, Harlem Rhapsody: A Novel by Victoria Christopher Murray and The Queens of Crime: A Novel by Marie Benedict


Elizabeth O’Connor
The Chautauqua Prize Award Ceremony and Presentation – Whale Fall: A Novel by Elizabeth O’Connor
Chautauqua Institution presents author Elizabeth O’Connor with the 2025 Chautauqua Prize for her book Whale Fall: A Novel. Awarded annually since 2012, The Chautauqua Prize celebrates a book of fiction or literary/narrative nonfiction or a full length collection of poetry that provides a richly rewarding reading experience and to honor the author for a significant contribution to the literary arts.
Whale Fall is a striking and sensual debut that defies simple genre classification. While it is a beautiful bildungsroman and work of historical fiction, it is also a study in anthropology, ethnography and folklore. It is a rich, metaphorical examination of the bones of what makes us human — history, culture, storytelling — against a backdrop of the literal bones of a decaying whale carcass washed ashore on the coast of Wales.
In a seafaring community with a population that is slowly diminishing in the wake of industrialization and a world on the brink of World War II, it is the whale that sets the events of Whale Fall in motion. The changing tides bring not just a whale, but two ethnographers interested in recording the quiet way of life in — and preserving the traditions of — the small island town the main character, a young woman named Manod, calls home.
Since first appearing on bookshelves in May 2024, Whale Fall has been named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and NPR, an ALA Notable Fiction Book, and was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award.
O’Connor lives in Birmingham, England. Her short stories have appeared in The White Review and Granta, and she was the 2020 winner of the White Review Short Story Prize. She holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Birmingham, specializing in the modernist writer H.D. and her writing of coastal landscapes.

CLSC Book Discussion
Presenters Ruth S. Becker and Kathryn O’Neal will lead a community discussion on our Week Nine CLSC selection The Lost Journals of Sacajewea: A Novel by Debra Magpie Earling

CLSC Young Readers Book Discussion
Presenters Amber Sipior and Margaret Edwards will lead a community discussion on our Week Nine CLSC Young Readers selection Light and Air by Mindy Nichols Wendell


Debra Magpie Earling
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle Presentation — The Lost Journals of Sacajewea: A Novel by Debra Magpie Earling
Among the most memorialized women in American history, Sacajewea served as interpreter and guide for Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. In this visionary novel, acclaimed Indigenous author Debra Magpie Earling brings this mythologized figure vividly to life, casting unsparing light on the men who brutalized her and recentering Sacajewea as the arbiter of her own history.
Here, the young Sacajewea is bright and bold, growing strong from the hard work of “learning all ways to survive.” When her village is raided, Sacajewea is kidnapped and then gambled away to Charbonneau, a French-Canadian trapper. Heavy with grief, she learns how to survive at the edge of a strange new world. When Lewis and Clark’s expedition party arrives, Sacajewea knows she must cross a vast and brutal terrain with her newborn son, the white man who owns her, and a company of men who wish to conquer and commodify the world she loves.
Written in lyrical, dreamlike prose, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is an astonishing work of art and a powerful tale of perseverance—the Indigenous woman’s story that hasn’t been told.
Debra Magpie Earling was born in Spokane, Washington. She received her BA from the University of Washington in Seattle and her MA and MFA in Fiction from Cornell University. From 1991 to 1998, Earling held positions in both Native American Studies and Creative Writing at the University of Montana in Missoula. Currently, she is an associate professor in the English Department there and teaches Fiction and Native American Studies.
Perma Red (Blue Hen Books 2002) was her first novel. It received the Western Writers Association Spur Award for Best Novel of the West in 2003, the Mountain and Plains Bookseller Association Award, WWA’s Medicine Pipe Bearer Award for Best First Novel, a WILLA Literary Award, and the American Book Award. It is a Montana Book Award Honor Book and was chosen by Barnes & Noble as part of its Discover Great New Writers series.
Her latest novel (May 2023), The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is a devastatingly beautiful novel that challenges prevailing historical narratives of Sacajewea.
This program is made possible by The Stephen and Edith Benson CLSC Endowment.
Young Readers program
The CLSC Young Readers program encourages the enjoyment of good reading. The books have been chosen for their quality, the variety of styles and subjects, and their appeal to young adult readers.