Book Talk with author Gioia Woods

On a San Francisco street corner in 1953, aspiring painter and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti shook hands with sociology instructor and magazine editor Peter Martin. Their handshake sealed Ferlinghetti’s five-hundred-dollar investment in a small retail space above a North Beach flower shop that would become City Lights Bookstore and Press. Since the mid-twentieth century, the bookstore and its press have continued to shape the way literature is produced and consumed. As the first-ever all-paperback bookstore in the nation, sponsor of the Beat Movement and the San Francisco Renaissance, home of the Pocket Poets series, torchbearer for free speech movements, and promoter of global comparative literature and human rights, City Lights has continuously been at the avant-garde of literary experimentation and cultural revolution.
City Lights: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore is the seminal story of the bookstore, its press, and the inimitable Ferlinghetti.

Gioia Woods writes about the environmental humanities, 20th-century literature, and literary activism. Her books include a monograph on poet and ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan; the co-edited volume Western Subjects: Autobiographical Writing In North American West; and Left in the West: Literature, Culture, and Progressive Politics in the American West. Her most recent book is City Lights: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore. Gioia is a professor and chair of the department of Comparative Cultural Studies at Northern Arizona University. She has lived for Flagstaff for over 25 years.

Read Gioia Woods' essay reflection

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Peregrine Book Company, 219 North Cortez Street, Prescott, United States

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