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During May, Mount Holyoke College and the Odyssey Bookshop will cosponsor readings from recent books by longtime MHC professor Penny Gill and 1987 alumna Robin McLean.

• May 7: Penny Gill, author of

Many people worry about the planet's future and feel powerless to change their lives or make an impact on the world. What in the World Is Going On? reframes Earth's crises as invitations to open people's minds and hearts to a new awareness of the fundamental interdependence of all beings.

Much of the book is set up as a kind of Socratic dialogue between Manjushri—a Buddhist deity of wisdom and compassion—and the author, who presents herself as his student. The Teacher assures the Student, and readers, that the world can still be changed for the better.

Gill, Mary Lyon Professor of Humanities, has taught political science at ¹û¶³´«Ã½ for 40 years. She also teaches a first-year seminar at ¹û¶³´«Ã½ that uses a political perspective to consider many of the same global dilemmas discussed from a spiritual viewpoint in her book.

The event starts at 4:30 pm at the Odyssey Bookshop. for this event.

’87 was a lawyer and then a potter for 15 years in the woods of Alaska before graduating from Mount Holyoke and earning an MFA at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her first collection, Reptile House, was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 2011 and 2012.

McLean’s stories appear in such places as the Nashville Review, the Malahat Review, Gargoyle, and the Common, and Copper Nickel, as well as a volume of the anthology American Fiction: The Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers. She teaches at Clark University.

The event starts at 7 pm at the Odyssey Bookshop. McLean will be joined by Jim Shepard, Williams College professor and author of The Book of Aron: A Novel, who will also read from his work.

—By Emily Harrison Weir