Location: Northampton, MA 01062, United States

The Valley Alliance of Worker Co-operatives (VAWC) is rooted in the ideals of co-operation, mutuality and solidarity. VAWC is itself an expression of co-operative principles — a “co-op of worker co-ops” that have come together as a means of strengthening the efforts of our individual co-ops to develop their businesses, serve their members, and contribute to the wider co-operative economy. Our core goal is to provide ourselves with the resources and support we need to advance our co-operatives, empower our members, and benefit more people in our communities.

Monthly Meetings

Our monthly meetings are on the fourth Wednesdays from 6:30pm to 8:30pm, with gathering for food at 6pm. While work in and around the Connecticut River Valley in Western New England, our meeting locations are centered between Springfield, MA and Brattleboro, VT.

Join Food for Thought Books in hosting the June 2013 meeting! (added from IndieBound)… (more)

Dan Drollette, Jr. (Gold rush in the jungle)

DAN DROLLETTE is a writer, editor, and lecturer whose articles have appeared in such publications as Scientific American, International Wildlife, the Boston Globe, Natural History, Cosmos, Science, ABCNewsOnline, New Scientist, Newsday, and The Sciences. Recently, he earned awards from the National Association of Science Writers, the Society of Environmental Journalists, and the "East Meets West" journalism conference at UC Berkeley. (added from Random House)… (more)

Join us for a reading and Q & A with local author, Susannah Sheffer, in celebration of her newest book- Fighting for Their Lives: Inside the Experience of Capital Defense Attorneys.

How do those who represent clients facing the death penalty cope with the stress and trauma of their work? Through conversations with twenty of the most experienced and dedicated post-conviction capital defenders in the United States, Fighting for Their Lives explores this emotional territory for the first time.

... About Susannah: Sheffer is Project Director at Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights, a national organization of family members of murder victims and family members of people who have been executed.

She is the author of several other books, including a book of poetry that also came out this year, and here in Western Massachusetts she works with teenagers, helping them to understand their lives through writing. (added from IndieBound)… (more)

Author Katie Hafner will be at Book Passage to discuss and sign her memoir Mother Daughter Me.

The complex, deeply binding relationship between mothers and daughters is brought vividly to life in Katie Hafner’s remarkable memoir, an exploration of the year she and her mother, Helen, spent working through, and triumphing over, a lifetime of unresolved emotions.

Dreaming of a “year in Provence” with her mother, Katie urges Helen to move to San Francisco to live with her and Zoë, Katie’s teenage daughter. Katie and Zoë had become a mother-daughter team, strong enough, Katie thought, to absorb the arrival of a seventy-seven-year-old woman set in her ways.

Filled with fairy-tale hope that she and her mother would become friends, and that Helen would grow close to her exceptional granddaughter, Katie embarked on an experiment in intergenerational living that she would soon discover was filled with land mines: memories of her parents’ painful divorce, of her mother’s drinking, of dislocating moves back and forth across the country, and of Katie’s own widowhood and bumpy recovery. Helen, for her part, was also holding difficult issues at bay.

How these three women from such different generations learn to navigate their challenging, turbulent, and ultimately healing journey together makes for riveting reading. By turns heartbreaking and funny—and always insightful—Katie Hafner’s brave and loving book answers questions about the universal truths of family that are central to the lives of so many. (KatieHafner)… (more)

Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns)

Isabel Wilkerson won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing as Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times. The first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism and the first African American to win for individual reporting, she has also won the George Polk Award and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. She has lectured on narrative at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University and has served as Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and as the James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism at Emory University. She is currently Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University. During The great migration, her parents journeyed from Georgia and southern Virginia to Washington, D.C., where she was born and reared. This is her first book. (added from Random House)… (more)