Elaine Starkman of Walnut Creek wears many writing hats: memoirist, writing instructor and book editor. Her current focus is poetry, and her new book “Hearing Beyond Sound,” includes new and collected poems that she has written. Her work covers a broad landscape of places — from Israel, where she and her husband lived and raised their young children — to the Bay Area, where she has lived since 1971. Themes cover a broad expanse as well — from the solumn ‘Kaddish for the Columbia” to the lighthearted “Zen Ice Cream.”
Starkman will talk about her life and read some of her poems at 10:30 a.m. April 21 at Afikomen Judaica, 3042 Claremont Ave., Berkeley; and 6:30 p.m. April 23 at the Ygnacio Valley Library, 2661 Oak Grove Road, Walnut Creek.
Maxine De Felice of Woodacre writes about “the resilience of the human spirit,” she says, in “May the Spirit Be Unbroken: Search For the Mother Root.” Her book delves into her childhood as a “Red Diaper Baby” whose parents were “devoted, activist, union organizers and Communist Party members,” she writes, from the early 1930s until the late ’50s.
Her book follows three generations of activists: her maternal grandmother, who illustrates the Jewish immigrant experience in coming to the U.S. and then succeeding as a pioneer in educational reform, her activist parents, and her own search as an adult to find her roots and better understand her parents.
In 1985, De Felice, a psychotherapist, traveled around the country by train to interview people who had worked with her parents as union and Communist Party organizers.
De Felice will be speaking at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, April 6 at Copperfield Books, 140 Kentucky St., Petaluma.
“Hearing Beyond Sound” by Elaine Starkman (88 pages, dvs publishing, $11.95)
“May the Spirit Be Unbroken” by Maxine De Felice (300 pages, AuthorHouse, $19.95)