SONOMA—Join the opening reception for Making Change and Ruffling Feathers-The extraordinary task of ordinary women at the Sonoma Community Center!
6 pm: Reception Gallery 212
Making Change and Ruffling Feathers Opening Reception
Sonoma Woman’s Club History Panels created for the Sonoma Valley Historical Society, by Tom Whitworth. The panels tell the story of Making Change and Ruffling Feathers-The extraordinary task of ordinary women. The Woman’s Club purpose would be to improve sanitary conditions, parks and streets, and to promote the social and literary interests of the community. The panels tell the story of how the women accomplished their goals.
7 pm: Presentation
Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb presented by Iris Jamahl Dunkle Iris will tell the story of the writer Sonara Babb, a dustbowl immigrant to California from Oklahoma who volunteered for the Farm Security Services that was started in 1937 to help with the poverty of farmers in rural land in the US. The presentation will explore Sanora’s career and now finally recognition for her book she wrote about the people and experiences of that difficult time in US history. A book she was unable to publish. Ironically she was working with the migrants and her own book while writing the reports that were supplied to John Steinbeck as he researched his book Grapes of Wrath.
Exhibit Run: March 1- March 20, 2024
Where: Sonoma Community Center | 276 E Napa Street, Sonoma, CA 95476
Tickets: Free admission
Author Bio
Iris Jamahl Dunkle is an award-winning literary biographer, essayist, and poet. Her academic and creative work challenges the Western myth of progress by examining the devastating impact that agriculture and over-population have had, and continue to have, on the North American West. Taking an ecofeminist bent, her writing also challenges the American West’s male-oriented recorded history by researching the lives of women.
She obtained her MFA in poetry from New York University and her PhD in American Literature from Case Western Reserve University. Dunkle was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA. Her newest poetry collection West : Fire : Archive was published by Mountain/ West Poetry Series in March 2021. Her other poetry collections include Interrupted Geographies (Trio House Press, 2017) and Gold Passage Links (Trio House Press, 2013) and There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air (Word Tech, 2015). Her poem “Listening to the Caryatids on the Palace of Fine Arts” was featured on 100 buses as part of the San Francisco Beautiful and Poetry Society of America Muni Art 2020 campaign. Her works have been published in Tin House, San Francisco Examiner, Fence, Los Angeles Review of Books, Split Rock Review, Taos Poetry Journal, Pleiades, Calyx, Catamaran, Poet’s Market, Women’s Studies, and Chicago Quarterly Review.
Her biography Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer was published by the Oklahoma Press (2020 print edition 2023 audiobook edition). Her biography Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb will be published by the University of California Press, in fall 2024
