Virtual Author Events: bringing you nationally known authors
The Plainville Public Library is committed to bringing engaging and
thought-provoking virtual author events to the Plainville community.
Sponsored by the Friends of the Plainville Public Library, Inc. Brought to you in partnership with the Library Speakers Consortium.
Upcoming Speakers
An Inside Look at Working with a Literary Agent:
A Conversation with Seth Fishman
Tuesday, January 28th at 1:00 PM EST
Event will begin in 0 days and 4 hours
You’re writing a book (or thinking about it), but what happens next? Join us for an inside look into working with an agent and the beginning stages of the publishing process with Seth Fishman, Vice President and Literary Agent at The Gernert Company.
The Gernert Company represents more than 500 authors and is a full-service literary agency with offices in New York and Los Angeles. Their client list is as broad as the market and they represent fiction, both literary and commercial (such as Liz Moore, John Grisham, Louise Penny, Cixin Liu), as well as general nonfiction and practical nonfiction genres.
In this presentation, Fishman will deep dive into what happens after you’ve signed with a literary agent. He will cover many topics, including but not limited to:
• What agents are and are not looking for,
• How to submit your work to an agent and when,
• What to expect after you’ve both said “yes!” to working together,
• What you can look forward to as you ready your work with an eye towards submitting to publishers, including the revision process and so much more.
This extended, 90-minute presentation, includes 30 minutes of Q&A. This is the year to make all of your publishing dreams come true. To learn about this beginning stage of the process, register now!
About the Author:
Head of the Los Angeles office, Seth is a Vice President and agent at The Gernert Company, which he joined in 2010 after beginning his career as an agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.
Born in Midland, Texas, he graduated from Princeton University and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. His interests are wide-ranging, but in particular he’s looking for the new voice, the original idea, the entirely breathtaking creative angle in both fiction and nonfiction.
He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and children, and is the author of the award-winning picture book, A Hundred Billion Trillion Stars, along with Power Up and The Ocean In Your Bathtub, as well as two YA books.
The views expressed by presenters are their own and their appearance in a program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by Plainville Public Library.
How We Create Pandemics, From Our Bodies to Our Beliefs with Smithsonian Curator Sabrina Sholts
A Library Speakers Consortium and Smithsonian Institution Collaboration
Tuesday, February 4th at 2:00 PM EST
How We Create Pandemics, From Our Bodies to Our Beliefs
Smithsonian Curator Sabrina Sholts
Tuesday, February 4th at 2:00 PM EST
Event will begin in 7 days and 5 hours
Join us for this enlightening presentation with Smithsonian curator Sabrina Sholts as she talks about how the very fact of being human increases our pandemic risks—and gives us the power to save ourselves.
The COVID-19 pandemic won’t be our last—because what makes us vulnerable to pandemics also makes us human. That is the uncomfortable but all-too-timely message of The Human Disease: How We Create Pandemics, From Our Bodies to Our Beliefs, which travels through history and around the globe to examine how and why pandemics are an inescapable threat of our own making.
Drawing on dozens of disciplines—from medicine, epidemiology, and microbiology to anthropology, sociology, ecology, and neuroscience—as well as a unique expertise in public education about emerging infectious diseases, biological anthropologist Sabrina Sholts identifies the human traits and tendencies that double as pandemic liabilities, from the anatomy that defines us to the misperceptions that divide us.
Weaving together a wealth of personal experiences, scientific findings, and historical stories, Sholts brings dramatic and much-needed clarity to one of the most profound challenges we face as a species. Though the COVID-19 pandemic looms large in Sholts’s account, it is, in fact, just one of the many infectious disease events explored in The Human Disease. With its expansive, evolutionary perspective, the book explains how humanity will continue to face new pandemics because humans cause them, by the ways that we are and the things that we do.
By recognizing our risks, Sholts suggests, we can take actions to reduce them. When the next pandemic happens, and how bad it becomes, are largely within our highly capable human hands—and will be determined by what we do with our extraordinary human brains. A presentation you don’t want to miss, register now!
About the Author:
Sabrina Sholts is a biological anthropologist and Curator of Biological Anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). Her research explores intersections of human, animal, and environmental health in the past and present.
She received her PhD in Anthropology at UC Santa Barbara and was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley in Integrative Biology and at Stockholm University in Biophysics and Biochemistry. Sholts has published widely in academic journals including American Journal of Biological Anthropology, Environmental Health Perspectives, JAMA, PNAS, Scientific Reports, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, and Nature Ecology & Evolution, and written for popular audiences in Scientific American and Smithsonian Magazine.
She was named as a World Economic Forum Young Scientist in 2019. In addition, she was Lead Curator of the exhibition Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World at the NMNH (2018-2022) and a scientific advisor for the related exhibition Épidémies: Prendre soin du vivant at the musée des Confluences in Lyon, France (2024-2025).
The views expressed by presenters are their own and their appearance in a program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by Plainville Public Library.