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
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. A special program is offered at 1 p.m. each Sunday on the Hultquist Center Porch. Book selections and program information are fully described in the Young Readers brochure available in-season at the CLSC Octagon.
2024 CLSC Selections
June 27 @ 3:30 pm Week One (June 22–29)
Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray
Hall of Philosophy | CHQ Assembly
Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle Presentation – The First Ladies: A Novel
The daughter of formerly enslaved parents, Mary McLeod Bethune refuses to back down as white supremacists attempt to thwart her work. She marches on as an activist and an educator, and as her reputation grows she becomes a celebrity, revered by titans of business and recognized by U.S. Presidents. Eleanor Roosevelt herself is awestruck and eager to make her acquaintance. Initially drawn together because of their shared belief in women’s rights and the power of education, Mary and Eleanor become fast friends confiding their secrets, hopes and dreams—and holding each other’s hands through tragedy and triumph.
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt is elected president, the two women begin to collaborate more closely, particularly as Eleanor moves toward her own agenda separate from FDR. Eleanor becomes a controversial First Lady for her outspokenness, particularly on civil rights. And when she receives threats because of her strong ties to Mary, it only fuels the women’s desire to fight together for justice and equality.
This is the story of two different, yet equally formidable, passionate, and committed women, and the way in which their singular friendship helped form the foundation for the modern civil rights movement.
Marie Benedict is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Mitford Affair, Her Hidden Genius, The Mystery of Mrs. Christie, The Only Woman in the Room, Lady Clementine, Carnegie’s Maid, The Other Einstein, and with Victoria Christopher Murray, the Good Morning American Book Club pick The Personal Librarian and the Target Book of the Year The First Ladies. All have been translated into multiple languages, and many have been selected for the Barnes & Noble Book Club, Target Book Club, Costco Book Club, Indie Next List, and LibraryReads List. She lives in Pittsburgh with her family.
Victoria Christopher Murray is the New York Times and USA Today best selling author of more than 30 novels, including the New York Times Instant Best Sellers, The Personal Librarian and The First Ladies. Both novels, Victoria co-wrote with Marie Benedict. Over her career, Victoria has received numerous awards including the Phyllis Wheatley Trailblazer Award, the Delta Sigma Theta Osceola Award for Excellence in the Arts, Go On Girl Book Club Author of the Year, eleven African American Literary Awards and five NAACP Image Award nominations. In 2016, she won the Image Award for Outstanding Literature for her social commentary novel, Stand Your Ground. With almost three million books in print, Victoria is one of the country’s top African American contemporary authors. A native New Yorker, Victoria Christopher Murray attended Hampton University where she majored in Communication Disorders. After graduating, Victoria attended New York University’s Stern School of Business where she received her MBA in Marketing.
Martha Brockenbrough
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle Presentation — Future Tense: How We Made Artificial Intelligence—and How it Will Change Everything, by Martha Brockenbrough
Human history has always been shaped by technology, but AI is like no technology that has come before it. Unlike the wheel, combustion engines, or electricity, AI does the thing that humans do best: think. While AI hasn’t reproduced the marvelously complex human brain, it has been able to accomplish astonishing things. AI has defeated our players at games like chess, Go, and Jeopardy!. It’s learned to recognize objects and speech. It can create art and music. It’s even allowed grieving people to feel as though they were talking with their dead loved ones.
On the flip side, it’s put innocent people in jail, manipulated the emotions of social media users, and tricked people into believing untrue things.
In Future Tense, acclaimed author and teacher Martha Brockenbrough guides readers through the development of this world-changing technology, exploring how AI has touched every corner of our world, including education, healthcare, work, politics, war, international relations, and even romance. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how artificial intelligence got here, how to make the best use of it, and how we can expect it to transform our lives.
Martha Brockenbrough graduated from Stanford University, where she studied English and Classics and was the editor in chief of the Stanford Daily. She has worked as a journalist, a teacher, the editor of MSN.com, a question writer for Cranium and Trivial Pursuit, and now taught at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she served as co-chair of the Writing for Children Young Adults department. A lifelong Seattle resident, Martha has written two books for adults and 24 books for young readers.
Dan Egan
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle Presentation — The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance, by Dan Egan
Phosphorus has played a critical role in some of the most lethal substances on earth: firebombs, rat poison, nerve gas. But it’s also the key component of one of the most vital: fertilizer, which has sustained life for billions of people. In this major work of explanatory science and environmental journalism, Pulitzer Prize finalist Dan Egan investigates the past, present and future of what has been called “the oil of our time.”
The story of phosphorus spans the globe and vast tracts of human history, and over the past century, phosphorus has made farming vastly more productive, feeding the enormous increase in the human population. Yet, overreliance on this vital crop nutrient is today causing toxic algae blooms and “dead zones” in waterways across the country. Egan explores the alarming reality that diminishing access to phosphorus poses a threat to the food system worldwide — which risks rising conflict and even war.
With The Devil’s Element, Egan has written an essential and eye-opening account that urges us to pay attention to one of the most perilous but little-known environmental issues of our time.
Dan Egan for many years covered the Great Lakes for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Now he writes occasional long-form pieces about climate change for national media outlets and is a senior water policy fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences. He is the author of the 2019 CLSC selection The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. Twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, he has won the Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award, John B. Oakes Award, AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award and J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award.
July 17 @ 12:15 pm Week Four (July 13–20)
CLSC Young Reader Book Discussion — Big Tree
Alumni Hall Porch
CLSC Young Reader Book Discussion — Big Tree
Valeria Luiselli
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle Presentation – Lost Children Archive: A Novel
In Valeria Luiselli’s fiercely imaginative follow-up to the American Book Award-winning Tell Me How It Ends, an artist couple set out with their two children on a road trip from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, the bonds between them begin to fray: a fracture is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet.
Through ephemera such as songs, maps and a Polaroid camera, the children try to make sense of both their family’s crisis and the larger one engulfing the news: the stories of thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States but getting detained—or lost in the desert along the way. A breath-taking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost Children Archive is timely, compassionate, subtly hilarious, and formally inventive—a powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world.
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in Costa Rica, South Korea, South Africa and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of Sidewalks, Faces in the Crowd, The Story of My Teeth, and Tell Me How It Ends (An Essay in Forty Questions). Her most recent novel, Lost Children Archive was an international critical and commercial success. It was a New York Times 10 Best Books of 2019, won the Rathbone Folio Prize 2020, the Dublin Award 2021, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Booker Prize 2019 among others. In 2019 she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant for “challenging conventional notions of authorship in fiction, essays, and inventive hybrids of the two that pose profound questions about the various ways we piece together stories and document the lives of others.” Her work is published in more than thirty languages. She is a professor at Bard College.
Geraldine Brooks
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle Presentation — Horse: A Novel, by Geraldine Brooks
Kentucky, 1850: An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young artist who has made his name on paintings of the racehorse takes up arms for the Union. On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, very far from the glamor of any racetrack.
New York City, 1954: Martha Jackson, a gallery owner celebrated for taking risks on edgy contemporary painters, becomes obsessed with a 19th-century equestrian oil painting of mysterious provenance.
Washington, DC, 2019: Jess, a Smithsonian scientist from Australia, and Theo, a Nigerian-American art historian, find themselves unexpectedly connected through their shared interest in the horse — one studying the stallion’s bones for clues to his power and endurance, the other uncovering the lost history of the unsung Black horsemen who were critical to his racing success.
Based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred Lexington, Horse — a finalist for the 2023 Chautauqua Prize and the winner of a 2023 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award — is a novel of art and science, love and obsession, and our unfinished reckoning with racism.
Geraldine Brooks is the author of nine books, five of which — Horse, The Secret Chord, Caleb’s Crossing, Year of Wonders and March — have been named as CLSC selections. For March, Brooks was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Her work as a journalist includes time at The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. In 1990, with her husband Tony Horwitz, she won the Overseas Press Club Award for best coverage of the Gulf War. The following year they received a citation for excellence for their series, “War and Peace.” In 2016, she was named an Officer in the Order of Australia.
Eric Gansworth
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle and CLSC Young Readers Presentation — Apple: Skin to the Core, by Eric Gansworth
The term “Apple” is a slur in Native communities across the country. It’s for someone supposedly “red on the outside, white on the inside.” In his poetic memoir, Apple: Skin to the Core, Eric Gansworth tells his story, the story of his family — of Onondaga among Tuscaroras — of Native folks everywhere. From the horrible legacy of the government boarding schools, to a boy watching his siblings leave and return and leave again, to a young man fighting to be an artist who balances multiple worlds. As he covers these topics, Gansworth discusses common slurs against Indigenous Americans, shattering and reclaiming “Apple” in verse and prose and imagery that truly lives up to the word heartbreaking.
Apple: Skin to the Core was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, a Michael L. Printz Award honor book, and the winner of the American Indian Youth Literature Award for Young Adult. It serves as a joint selection for the CLSC and the CLSC Young Readers program.
Eric Gansworth (Sˑha-weñ na-saeˀ) is a member of Eel clan, enrolled Onondaga, born and raised at the Tuscarora Nation. A writer and visual artist, he has published a dozen books and has had solo exhibitions at the Castellani Museum, Colgate University, Westfield State University, SUNY Oneonta and Bright Hill Center. A professor of English and Lowery Writer-in-Residence at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, Gansworth’s work has been supported by the Library of Congress, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. He recently was selected for inclusion in LIT CITY, a public arts project celebrating Buffalo’s literary legacy.
August 8 @ 3:30 pm Week Seven (August 3–10)
Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Matt de la Peña
Hall of Philosophy | CHQ Assembly
Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Matt de la Peña
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle and CLSC Young Readers Presentation – World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Mexican WhiteBoy by Matt de la Peña
World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments
As a child, Nezhukumatathil called many places home: the grounds of a Kansas mental institution, where her Filipina mother was a doctor; the open skies and tall mountains of Arizona, where she hiked with her Indian father; and the chillier climes of western New York and Ohio. But no matter where she was transplanted—no matter how awkward the fit or forbidding the landscape—she was able to turn to our world’s fierce and funny creatures for guidance.
“What the peacock can do,” she tells us, “is remind you of a home you will run away from and run back to all your life.” The axolotl teaches us to smile, even in the face of unkindness; the touch-me-not plant shows us how to shake off unwanted advances; the narwhal demonstrates how to survive in hostile environments. Even in the strange and the unlovely, Nezhukumatathil finds beauty and kinship. For it is this way with wonder: it requires that we are curious enough to look past the distractions in order to fully appreciate the world’s gifts.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the New York Times best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments. She also wrote four previous poetry collections including Oceanic. Her most recent chapbook is Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, a Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. She is poetry editor for Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program and her forthcoming book of food essays is called Bite By Bite (Ecco, May 2024).
Mexican WhiteBoy
Danny’s tall and skinny with arms long enough to give his pitch a power so fierce any college scout would sign him on the spot. A 95-mph fastball, but the boy’s not even on a team. Every time he gets up on the mound, he loses it. But at private school, they don’t expect much else from him. Danny’s brown. Half-Mexican brown. And growing up in San Diego that close to the border means everyone else knows exactly who he is before he even opens his mouth. Before they find out he can’t speak Spanish, and before they realize his mom has blonde hair and blue eyes, they’ve got him pegged.
Danny’s convinced it’s his whiteness that sent his father back to Mexico. And that’s why he’s spending the summer with his dad’s family. Only, to find himself, he might just have to face the demons he refuses to see right in front oh his face. And open up to a friendship he never saw coming.
An ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults (Top 10 Pick) and a Junior Library Guild Selection, Mexican WhiteBoy serves as a joint selection for the CLSC and the CLSC Young Readers program. His picture book, Milo Imagines the World, also serves as an Early Reader selection for Week Seven.
Matt de la Peña is the New York Times Bestselling, Newbery Medal-winning author of seven young adult novels (including Mexican WhiteBoy, We Were Here, and Superman: Dawnbreaker) and six picture books (including Milo Imagines the World and Last Stop on Market Street). In 2016 he was awarded the NCTE Intellectual Freedom Award. Matt received his MFA in creative writing from San Diego State University and his BA from the University of the Pacific where he attended school on a full basketball scholarship. In 2019 Matt was given an honorary doctorate from UOP. de la Peña currently lives in Southern California. He teaches creative writing and visits schools and colleges throughout the country.
Celebrating the awe this world inspires in all things big and small, the wonder literature encourages us to pursue in our everyday lives as we seek to build a greater understanding of our shared humanity, and the significance of our shared reading experiences, Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Matt de la Peña will be featured together in conversation during our Week Seven CLSC Lecture on August 8, 2024, in the Hall of Philosophy.
Nicole Cuffy
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle Presentation — Dances: A Novel, by Nicole Cuffy
At 22 years old, Cece Cordell reaches the pinnacle of her career as a ballet dancer when she’s promoted to principal at the New York City Ballet. She’s instantly catapulted into celebrity, heralded for her “inspirational” role as the first Black ballerina in the famed company’s history. Even as she celebrates the achievement of a lifelong dream, Cece remains haunted by the feeling that she doesn’t belong. As she waits for some feeling of rightness that doesn’t arrive, she begins to unravel the loose threads of her past — an absent father, a pragmatic mother who dismisses Cece’s ambitions, and a missing older brother who stoked her childhood love of ballet but disappeared to deal with his own demons.
Soon after her promotion, Cece is faced with a choice that has the potential to derail her career and shatter the life she’s cultivated for herself, sending her on a pilgrimage to both find her brother and reclaim the parts of herself lost in the grinding machinery of the traditional ballet world.
Written with spellbinding beauty and ballet’s precise structure, Nicole Cuffy’s debut novel Dances centers around women, art and power, and how we come to define freedom for ourselves.
Nicole Cuffy is a D.C.-based writer with a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and an MFA from The New School. She is a lecturer at the University of Maryland and American University, and her work can be found in Mason’s Road, The Master’s Review Volume VI (curated by Roxane Gay), Chautauqua, and Blue Mesa Review. Her 2018 chapbook, Atlas of the Body, was a finalist for the Black River Chapbook Competition, and the inaugural winner of the Chautauqua Janus Prize.