What is The Big Read?
The Big Read is a nation-wide reading initiative that encourages reading by asking communities to come together to read and discuss one book. The Pasquotank-Camden Library received a competitive grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in order to spearhead the effort in Pasquotank and Camden counties.
How It Works
The Pasquotank-Camden Library will collaborate with the Northeastern Community Development Corporation, the Elizabeth City-Pasquotank Public Schools, Arts of the Albemarle, and Elizabeth City State University as partners for The Big Read. The library and its partners have planned a series of activities throughout the community for September 21–October 21, 2008. These events will consist of a Hispanic festival, a traveling mural, panel discussions, a poster contest, an essay contest, a teen talent show, dramatic reading, and book club discussions. The project will feature the novel, “Bless Me, Ultima” by New Mexican author Rudolfo Anaya.
Calendar of Events
Please take some time to check out the library’s Calendar of Events. Planning is ongoing so check back frequently to see what we have added to the program.
Highlights for The Big Read
Organizations and individuals with question regarding The Big Read please contact the project director, Jackie King at (252-335-2473) or jking@earlibrary.org.
For a complete list of communities participating in The Big Read or for more information on the program please visit www.neabigread.org.
For more information about the National Endowment for the Arts, Institute of Museum and Library Services, and Arts Midwest please visit their web site.
The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and Arts Midwest
About the Book
Bless Me, Ultima is a coming-of-age novel about a young boy's loss of innocence and approach to maturity. But it also deals with tradition and education, faith and doubt, and good and evil. And if Antonio doesn't find an absolute truth in his search, he still comes to believe with his father that “sometimes it takes a lifetime to acquire understanding, because in the end understanding simply means having a sympathy for people.”
Source: NEA - "Bless Me, Ultima Introduction",
http://www.neabigread.org/books/blessmeultima/anaya02_intro.php, Aug.20, 2007
About the Author
Rudolfo Anaya was born in the small village of Pastura, near Santa Rosa, New Mexico in 1937, to a farmgirl mother and a cowboy father. The curandera who presided at his birth set out tools of both family trades near the newborn—only to see him reach for a paper and pencil instead.
To judge from his early years, one might have expected him to crawl toward a sporting-goods store. As a boy Anaya hunted and fished and swam the Pecos River. Later, after the family left the countryside for Albuquerque, he gravitated toward baseball and football. At 16, while roughhousing around an irrigation channel with friends, Anaya dove in and hit the bottom. Years of arduous rehabilitation and bedridden reading would pass before he regained a full movement in his neck.
Anaya discovered a different kind of movement during his years at the University of New Mexico. El Movimiento, the Chicano Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, encouraged Anaya's dream of writing books that would explore his cultural heritage.
After graduating with his B.A. and M.A., he taught at middle schools, high schools, and universities while writing at night. In 1966, he married Patricia Lawless, who shared his passion for books and storytelling.
After more than seven years of writing and rewriting his novel, Anaya submitted his first manuscript, Bless Me, Ultima, to the small Berkeley press, Quinto Sol. A $1,000 prize accompanied the novel's printing, and the mainstream New York publisher, Warner Books, later acquired its rights. Since its publication in 1972, the novel has become part of high school English and university Chicano literature classes. Writer Tony Hillerman has praised Anaya as the “godfather and guru of Chicano literature.”
Source: NEA - "Bless Me, Ultima About the Author",
http://www.neabigread.org/books/blessmeultima/anaya04_about.php