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White Nights, Black Paradise Book Club and Galentine’s Celebration!

I have decided to be a better friend by giving all of our wonderful readers a chance to get more involved in the Los Angeles Women’s Atheist and Agnostic Group activities. I will do my best to post events that are coming up with enough time for you to participate, as well as a reminder right before the event for those that are in the area and want to join the group activities. This way, even if your are not in Los Angeles, or don’t primarily identify as a woman, you can still participate in- at the the very least- the book club portion of what we do.

So here is your official heads up for LAWAAG book club February!

We are going to read WHITE NIGHTS, BLACK PARADISE a novel by Sikivu Hutchinson.

Our meetup for this LAWAAG Book Club will be February 13th at 2pm in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles.

EDIT 9:31: GREAT NEWS! The author of our book club selection, Sikivu Hutchinson is going to join us for a Q&A at our event! SO AWESOME!

And yes! That happens to coincide with the fictional holiday that has become oh-so-real to so many of the ladies out there, known as Galentine’s Day! Galentine’s Day was invented by Amy Poehler’s character Leslie Knope on the TV series Parks and Recreation. Galentine’s Day is the day before Valentine’s Day and it is better because it is the day where you celebrate what really matters, how much you love your gal pals.

So we are going to read what is sure to be a brilliant novel by a brilliant woman and then we are going to eat cake and celebrate our gal friends old and new!

If you would like to participate in Los Angeles, join our meetup group.

If you would like to participate from afar, get a hold of Sikivu’s novel. It’s available through Amazon. I will post a reminder post about the event a few days before it happens and if you read the book, we can all fill the comment section full of spoilers, thoughts, opinions and life-changing feels at that time.

About White Nights, Black Paradise:

In 1978, Peoples Temple, a multiracial church once at the forefront of progressive San Francisco politics, self-destructed in a Guyana jungle settlement named after its leader, the Reverend Jim Jones. Fatally bonded by fear of racist annihilation, the community s greatest symbol of crisis was the White Night; a rehearsal of revolutionary mass suicide that eventually led to the deaths of over 900 church members of all ages, genders and sexual orientations. White Nights, Black Paradise focuses on three fictional black women characters who were part of the Peoples Temple movement but took radically different paths to Jonestown: Hy, a drifter and a spiritual seeker, her sister Taryn, an atheist with an inside line on the church s money trail and Ida Lassiter, an activist whose watchdog journalism exposes the rot of corruption, sexual abuse, racism and violence in the church, fueling its exodus to Guyana. White Nights, Black Paradise is a riveting story of complicity and resistance; loyalty and betrayal; black struggle and black sacrifice. It locates Peoples Temple and Jonestown in the shadow of the civil rights movement, Black Power, Second Wave feminism and the Great Migration. Recapturing black women’s voices, White Nights, Black Paradise explores their elusive quest for social justice, home and utopia. In so doing, the novel provides a complex window onto the epic flameout of a movement that was not only an indictment of religious faith but of American democracy.

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That’s all for now! Hope this makes our LAWAAG events more open and friendly to a global community!

Amy Roth

Amy Davis Roth (aka Surly Amy) is a multimedia, science-loving artist who resides in Los Angeles, California. She makes Surly-Ramics and is currently in love with pottery. Daily maker of art and leader of Mad Art Lab. Support her on Patreon. Tip Jar is here.

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