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Celebration of Ina Coolbrith at the Pardee Home Museum

The Pardee Home Museum will host a series of lectures inviting the public's participation.

The next in this series will be on Sunday, March 13th, 3:00pm in the Carriage House when the Pardee Home Museum will celebrate Women's History Month by welcoming Aleta George, author of "Ina Coolbrith: The Bittersweet Song of California's First Poet Laureate".

Ms. George will talk about the life of this amazing and colorful woman and what inspired her to write this biography. Ina was Oakland's first public librarian and the most popular literary ambassador in the early American West. Hers is the story of adolescent California; of a female poet who slipped into the male-dominated literary world of postGold Rush San Francisco; and of a woman whose unrequited love for poetry (and a handsome young protégé named Carl) drove her to Roaring Twenties New York in her eighties.

Georges deftly told and deeply researched book follows the struggles and triumphs of Coolbrith from her birth in 1841 as a niece of Mormon leader Joseph Smith to her death on the eve of the Great Depression as Californias most beloved poet. Throughout her life Ina met with a series of monumental challenges that tested her devotion to her art. She worked 70-hour weeks, fought gender and wage discrimination in the workplace, and didn't have the right to vote. She was crowned California's first poet laureate 1915, a gesture that made her the first state laureate in the Nation. In the end, she put her full faith in poetry, and her story reveals the saving grace of creativity in a womans life.

Aleta George's career as an independent journalist started a decade ago. She writes about nature and culture in California and her work has been published in Smithsonian.com, San Francisco Chronicle, Bay Nature, California, High Country News, and the Los Angeles Times. She works part-time as a house manager at the Berkeley Repertory Theater. Several of Aletas travel essays are in anthologies alongside the work of Barbara Kingsolver, Terry Tempest Williams, Edward Abbey, and Anne Lamott. She was a writer-in-residence at New Yorks Blue Mountain Center, and a participant in the Squaw Valley Community of Writers in 2005. She will have copies of book available for sale and autographing.

Following the lecture will be a lovely reception with generous appetizers and wine offered. For more information call Richelle Lieberman at 510.381.1973.