Megan Smith is half of Misner & Smith, a really special folk/roots/country music duo. Megan plays the upright bass and mandolin, but it's her phenomenal vocals that won my soul. A native of Davis, California, she's also appeared in a number of theatrical productions. This is music and a musician you don't want to miss.
Nancy Bowker has been forced, and led, into a life of profound solitude, due to illness. From working in blueberry fields as a child, to the jazz stage, to the inner retirement of improvised, sung prayer, Nancy sings out of the depths. Find more of her music on http://nbcrossings.tumblr.com/
In Yeshu: A Novel for the Openhearted, Charles David Kleymeyer re-sees and re-tells a well-known, sometimes culture-limited story, but this time with eyes and tongue influenced by decades of experience in Latin America.
Sam Misner is half of Misner & Smith, and their latest CD is Seven Hour Storm, chock full of great glimpses into the human condition, but even more full of awesome vocals & harmonies. This is Folk/Americana music from a younger generation to match anything that's gone before.
Grammy-award winning singer Lani Hall Alpert talks about her career, growing up as the daughter of famed musician Herb Alpert, and her new book Emotional Memoirs and Short Stories.
Matt Southworth was a wrestler in high school, fought as a U.S. Army intelligence analyst in Iraq after graduation, and now conducts legislative battles for peace on Capitol Hill.
Anne Hills is a folk music gem, prominent and still too little known. She has recorded & toured with Tom Paxton, David Roth, Priscilla Herdman & other greats, and she writes with wonderful depth & color, singing with great beauty.
MEMEnomics: The Next-generation Economics System by Said Dawlabani explores an evolving, growing, & maturing of values systems, leading us to a better future, in spite of and fueled by the crises we go through. A further adaptation of the Spiral Dynamics theories of Don Beck, Memenomics may well be the lens to light our way forward.
Said Elias Dawlabani is the leading expert in the value-systems approach to economics and the founder of The Memenomics Group, an advisory organization that reframes economic issues through the prism of values systems and offers sustainable solutions based on this emerging science.
Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta's book, Refusing to be Enemies: Palestinian and Israeli Nonviolent Resistance to the Israeli Occupation delves deep into sides of the conflict that most US media never approach, and does it through the words of Palestinian & Israeli workers for peace, plus a few people outside of the Middle East. There's both more reality and hope in this work than we've been led to expect. Maxine has spent considerable time in the Middle East, both growing up as a North American Jew, and further as a peace activist and Quaker.
A more in-depth review of the book can be found in Friends Journal.
James Mudcat Grant is the Mudcat in Mudcat & the Bottomfeeders, an appropriate name for someone who has lived his life on the banks of the Mississippi. With 50 years of music making of rock, folk,country and other varieties, Mudcat has the chops and and heart for powerful music. Find him on Facebook, at the Great River Folk Festival, painting houses, or wandering the great outdoors.