Event Schedule

In partnership with A Room of One's Own Bookstore.

Please note this event will be held at the Barrymore Theatre. It's free and open to the public on a first-come, first-served basis. Seating is by general admission. Doors open at 6 p.m. 

Pre-signed copies of Pageboy will be distributed for free to all attendees courtesy of a gift from the Cheryl Rosen Weston Estate.   

The Oscar-nominated star who captivated the world with his performance in Juno finally shares his truth.

In the 1960s, noted labor leader Jesus Salas energized the farmworkers movement in Wisconsin. His new memoir shares the story of his work, the transnational movement he co-organized, and the long fight for improved working conditions and fairness for migrant workers and their families.

Salas recounts his childhood experiences as a migrant laborer, traveling with his family from
Texas to Illinois, Wisconsin, and other states. In riveting detail, he describes the brutal working
conditions and overcrowded camps experienced by the Mexican-American and Tejano workers who fueled the Midwest’s agriculture industry.

Inspired by the example of César Chávez, Salas and others to led a historic march from
Wautoma to Madison in 1966, demanding that Wisconsin lawmakers address rampant violations of Wisconsin’s minimum wage laws and housing codes. To further the fight for fairness and respect, as well as to provide much-needed services to migrant families, Salas teamed with other young labor leaders to cofound Obreros Unidos—“Workers United."

Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America’s most acclaimed writers, the award-winning, best-selling author of Blonde. 

A brilliant young philosophy student bent on seducing her famous philosopher-mentor finds herself outmaneuvered; diabolically clever high school girls wreak a particularly apt sort of vengeance on sexual predators in their community; a woman stalked by a would-be killer may be confiding in the wrong former lover; a young woman is morbidly obsessed by her unfamiliar new role as “mother.” In the collection’s longest story, a much-praised cutting-edge writer cruelly experiments with “drafts” of his own suicide. 

In these powerfully wrought stories that hold a mirror up to our time, Joyce Carol Oates has created a world of erotic obsession, thwarted idealism, and ever-shifting identities. Provocative and stunning, Zero-Sum reinforces Oates’s standing as a literary treasure and an artist of the mysterious interior life.