Carleton College will host an appearance by California author D.J. Waldie on Wednesday, May 21 at 4:30 p.m. in the Gould Library Athenaeum. Author of the acclaimed biography “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir,” Waldie will read from the book and sign copies, which will be available for purchase at the event. This appearance is free and open to the public.
David Ulin, book critic of the Los Angeles Times, called Waldie “one of the writers responsible for developing a Southern California aesthetic in which what’s most vivid about the place is everything we might take for granted somewhere else." “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir” (W. W. Norton & Company, 1995) is Waldie’s account of growing up in the 1950s in Lakewood, then California's largest planned suburb. Novelist and memoirist Joan Didon once described the book as “infinitely moving and powerful, just dead-on right, and absolutely original.” Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic of the Los Angeles Times, called “Holy Land” one of the 25 most significant books on Southern California architecture and urbanism. "Holy Land" was also optioned by actor/director James Franco in 2013 for a documentary film project.
Although best known for “Holy Land,” Waldie also is a well-established essayist, translator, and editor. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, where he is a contributing editor, and writes for Los Angeles magazine. His work as a translator of the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s book-length poem, Un coup de dé (A Throw of the Dice), is in the special collections of prestigious museums and university libraries all over the world.
He has also written or contributed to “Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles,” “Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape,” “California Romantica,” and “Blue Sky Metropolis: The Aerospace Century in Southern California,” all of which were received with rave reviews by the media and the public.
Waldie has collaborated with the actress Diane Keaton on two books on Southern California architecture and writes a regular blog for KCET, the nation’s largest public television station.
This event is co-sponsored by the Carleton College Departments of English and American Studies, Carleton Environmental & Technology Studies, and the Carleton Bookstore. For more information about this event, including disability accommodations, call (507) 222-4322. The Gould Library Athenaeum is located on the north end of College Street on the Carleton campus.
