I just found out about the University of Alaska Anchorage’s (UAA)  Northern Renaissance Arts & Sciences Reading Series.  The literary event, sponsored by UAA’s Department of Creative Writing and Literary Arts, runs July 10-19 in Anchorage. Keynote speaker Richard Rodriguez, is the author of Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez; Days of Obligation: An Argument with my Mexican Father; and Brown: The Last Discovery of America, nominated for the National Book Critics Award.

Hunger of Memory is a memoir about childhood, assimilation and the importance of language. An excerpt:

“…the country of my childhood lives within me with a primacy that is a form of love….It has fed me language, perceptions, sounds, the human kind. It has given me the colors and the furrows of reality, my first loves. The absoluteness of those loves can never be recaptured: no geometry of the landscape, no haze in the air, will live in us as intensely as the landscapes that we saw as the first, and to which we gave ourselves wholly, without reservations.”

I’ve put the book on hold at my library, am looking forward to reading it.