Many graduate students and recent PhDs choose to freelance because of a combination of financial precarity and genuine interest. Often, the opportunity emerges when an advisor, a colleague, or a personal connection reaches out for short-term support with a specific project, such as an academic manuscript index, a dissertation copyedit, or a college-bound teenager’s personal essay. The ad hoc freelancer accepts the offer, excels, and stumbles into a growing side hustle without any marketing at all. If this is you, make no mistake: you are a business owner.

From an entrepreneurial perspective, being sought after in this way is a strong sign that there is a market for your services. Many early-career scholars in this position, however, lack the clarity, confidence, and language to advocate for themselves as business owners. Once you recognize the true value of your services, you will be well-positioned to ask for what you want and seek out the opportunities that work best for you.

This workshop will prompt you to translate your strengths into services. You will be invited to take stock of what you already bring to the table and unpack the complexity of your skill set so that you can clarify what you want to offer and communicate the value of that offer to potential clients and employers. You will learn to:

• Recognize the skills you already have.
• Identify a service you could offer by tomorrow.
• Communicate your value to a potential client or employer.

This session is designed for grad alumni, grad students, faculty, and grad advocates in any field.

For more information, click here: https://www.alumni.upenn.edu/s/1587/gid2/16/interior.aspx?sid=1587&gid=2&pgid=45648&content_id=61792

To register, click here: https://securelb.imodules.com/s/1587/gid2/16/interior.aspx?sid=1587&gid=2&pgid=45649&cid=93451

In collaboration with the Edinburgh Futures Institute, the Media and Communications Cluster of the University of Edinburgh, and Lighthouse Books, you are welcome to attend the launch of

Transmedia Geographies: Decoloniality, Democratization, Cultural Citizenship, and Media Convergence

by Kevin Glynn and Julie Cupples

Rutgers University Press

The launch will include an address by both authors and Dr. Charlotte Gleghorn and be followed by a drinks reception

Doors open at 17:15

Talks from 17:30-18:00

Drinks reception 18:00-18:45

Discounted copies of the book will be available to purchase with sales profits going to Lighthouse Books

For more information and to register, click here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/book-launch-transmedia-geographies-tickets-1306611894349

Join Debra Michals, author of "She's the Boss" for the Newburyport Literary Festival, a celebration of literature, readers, and writers. This festival features author readings, panel discussions, and book signings held in venues across historic Newburyport, Massachusetts.

About 40 percent of small businesses in the U.S. are owned by women, a trend that started after World War II, as the jobs they had stepped into during the war evaporated. Professor and historian Debra Michals explores the last eight decades of female-helmed companies in She’s the Boss: The Rise of Women’s Entrepreneurship Since World War II, as well as the social trends, economic forces, and new technologies that intersect with the movement. In conversation with novelist Nancy Crochiere (Graceland).

Debra Michals is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Humanities at Merrimack College, North Andover, MA. A 20th century women’s historian, her published work includes the book She’s the Boss: The Rise of Women’s Entrepreneurship Since World War II (2025).

For more information, click here: https://newburyportliteraryfestival.org/2025-nonfiction/#DebraMichals

The City College ASLA-NY Student Chapter is hosting its 8th annual Rising Urbanist conference.

In the 2025 installment of Rising Urbanists, “Queering Landscapes”, We spotlight Queer perspectives, works, and spaces in Landscape Architecture and other related fields. The conference will delve into the many meanings of Queerness through social space, ecology, design, aesthetics and more. We will explore how practitioners in our field can integrate these concepts into our profession. In crafting this conference, we hope to encourage transdisciplinary dialogue that bridges the gap between designers and the social and ecological systems we work with. 

Dr. Mel Michelle Lewis' Keynote Presentation, Queer Provocations: Nature, Culture, Place will take place during 12:00-1:00 pm.

$15 for ASLA Members. $25 for non-members. Free for students.

More information and registration here: https://www.aslany.org/event/aslany-ccny-student-chapter-rising-urbanist-conference-queering-landscapes/

You might not know the name Tyrus Wong, but you probably know some of the images he created, including scenes from the beloved Disney classic Bambi. Yet when he came to this country as a child, Tyrus was an illegal immigrant locked up in an offshore detention center. How did he go on to a long and prosperous career drawing animation cels, storyboards, and greeting cards that shaped the American imagination?

Background Artist shares the inspiring story of Tyrus Wong’s remarkable 106-year life and showcases his wide array of creative work, from the paintings and fine art prints he made working for Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration to the unique handmade kites he designed and flew on the Santa Monica beach. It tells how he came to the United States as a ten-year-old boy in 1920, at a time when the Chinese Exclusion Act barred him from legal citizenship. Yet it also shows how Wong found American communities that welcomed him and nurtured his artistic talent. Covering everything from his work as a studio sketch artist for Warner Bros. to the best-selling Christmas cards he designed for Hallmark and other greeting card companies, this book celebrates a multi-talented Asian American artist and pioneer.

 An in-person and virtual presentation by Karen Fang, film scholar, cultural critic, author, and professor, Department of English, University of Houston

Join the Department of Performing and Media Arts for Voices & Visions in Black Media: A Book Talk by Beretta E. Smith-Shomade, on Tuesday, April 29, at 5:00 pm, in the Film Forum, Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. Smith-Shomade will be discussing her book Finding God in All the Black Places: Sacred Imaginings in Black Popular Culture. Moderated by PMA Chair Samantha N. Sheppard.

In Finding God in All the Black Places, Beretta E. Smith-Shomade contends that Black spirituality and Black church religiosity are foundational and central to Black popular culture. She takes readers on a journey to think more fully about the necessity, viability, pervasiveness and intransigence of Black spirituality and religion within Black mediated forms.

BERETTA E. SMITH-SHOMADE is a professor in film and media at Emory University in Atlanta. She is the author of Shaded Lives: African-American Women and Television (Rutgers University Press, 2002) and Pimpin' Ain't Easy: Selling Black Entertainment Television (Routledge 2007). She has also edited two anthologies: Watching While Black: Centering the Television of Black Audiences (Rutgers University Press, 2013) – a Choice Outstanding Academic Title – and its remix, Watching While Black Rebooted! The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences (Rutgers University Press, 2023)

For more information, click here: https://www.syracusenewtimes.com/calendar#!/details/voices-visions-in-black-media-a-book-talk-by-beretta-e-smith-shomade/15563571/2025-04-29T17

About this event

Co-presented with Heyday Books

Join Litquake and Heyday Books at the San Francisco Public Library as we kick off Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month with a very special conversation that celebrates AAPI history while also offering hope and healing for our current moment.

Authors Karen Fang and Satsuki Ina have brought to life remarkable true stories from twentieth-century Asian American history. In her memoir The Poet and the Silk Girl, Ina pieces together secret letters, diary entries, photographs, and haiku to craft the love story of her parents, who were newlyweds when incarcerated at Tule Lake and other prison camps during WWII. In Background Artist, Fang reclaims the overlooked story of Tyrus Wong, a Chinese immigrant who became an accomplished muralist, Hallmark card designer, and artist for Warner Brothers and Disney studios—despite frequent hostilities and restrictions and without receiving proper credit.

The echoes of historical injustices still reverberate today, so this conversation will also give contemporary Asian Americans and their allies powerful tools to encourage recovery, resilience, and hope for the future. In Louder than the Lies, artist and educator Ellie Yang Camp offers context, compassion, and concrete tactics for building understanding and creating coalitions to combat continued racism. And in The Healing Trauma Workbook for Asian Americans, clinical psychologist Helen H. Hsu presents culturally informed treatment methods to contend with trauma, build resilience, and forge strength in Asian American identities. Moderator Dora Wang, a psychiatrist and memoirist (author of The Kitchen Shrink) will guide this empowering and illuminating discussion. FREE

Book sales coordinated by Eastwind Books.

This event is FREE to attend in person. For more information, visit https://www.eventbrite.com/e/history-and-healing-a-celebration-of-aapi-heritage-month-tickets-1248774130039

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About the Speakers

Ellie Yang Camp is an artist and educator from the Bay Area. The proud daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, she has been a high-school history teacher, a full-time parent, a calligrapher, an anti-racist educator, and now an author. She has a bachelor’s degree in political science from UC Berkeley and a master’s degree in education from Stanford.

Karen Fang is a film scholar and visual culture critic who writes and speaks for museums and film festivals around the world. Known for previous books about Hong Kong cinema and nineteenth-century British interest in exotic objects, Fang often writes about the intersection of eastern and western aesthetics. Her work has appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, Hyperallergic, Nikkei Asia, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is also a prominent contributor to The Engines of Our Ingenuity, a long-running, widely distributed public radio series about science and innovation, where her episodes always focus on the visual arts. Committed to amplifying the contributions of underrepresented creatives, her newest book is a biography of Chinese immigrant artist, centenarian, and Disney legend Tyrus Wong.

Helen H. Hsu is a clinical psychologist and the director of outreach at Stanford University Counseling and Psychological Services. Hsu spent twenty years in community-based clinics throughout the Bay Area. Her Healing Trauma Workbook for Asian Americans is published by New Harbinger. She is the past president of the American Psychological Association Div. 45 (Society for the Study of Race, Culture, and Ethnicity) and a past president and fellow of the Asian American Psychological Association.

Satsuki Ina is a psychotherapist specializing in community trauma. She helps victims of oppression to claim not only their voice but also their power to transform the systems that have oppressed them. Her activism has included co-founding Tsuru for Solidarity, a nonviolent, direct-action project of Japanese American social justice advocates working to end detention sites. Ina has produced two documentaries about the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans, Children of the Camps and From a Silk Cocoon. She has been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, TIME, Democracy Now! and the documentary And Then They Came for Us. A professor emeritus at California State University, Sacramento, she lives in the Bay Area.

Dora Calott Wang (moderator) is the author of The Kitchen Shrink: A Psychiatrist’s Reflections on Healing in a Changing World (Riverhead Penguin Random House), a heartfelt literary memoir, and eulogy to her noble profession of medicine, as it becomes a for-profit industry. Wang has won a Lannan Foundation Writers Residency, the Pfeiffer Visiting Scholar Award from Stanford University, and a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. She earned a MA in English literature at UC Berkeley, and is a notable alumnus of the Community of Writers. She is a graduate of the Yale School of Medicine, and a member of the Executive Committee of Yale Alumni in Medicine. Wang was elected to two terms as president of the American Psychiatric Association Caucus of Asian American Psychiatrists. In 2006, she led a political campaign that changed the New Mexico state constitution, removing a section aimed at forbidding Asians and persons of color from owning land.

The Annapolis Book Festival is free to attend and open to all! Every year thousands of people enjoy this community Festival that celebrates the beauty, power, passion, and excitement of the written word.

Join Patricia Roos as she discusses Surviving Alex: A Mother’s Story of Love, Loss, and Addiction with Jessie Dunleavy as moderator. 


Patricia Roos is a professor emerita of sociology at Rutgers University. In 2015, she lost her 25-year-old son Alex to a heroin overdose. Her training as a sociologist led her on a quest to better understand what happened to her family. Building on her professional and academic perspectives, she wrote a sociological memoir, Surviving Alex: A Mother's Story of Love, Loss, and Addiction, published May 2024 by Rutgers University Press.

For more information, click here: https://www.patroos.com/events/mi3isf89308of7lbbz5x10z2irq60x

Michael Rockland will speak about his book, The Other Jersey Shore: Life on the Delaware River. There will be time for Q&A. No registration is necessary.

About the book:  The Other Jersey Shore takes readers on a personal tour of the New Jersey portion of the Delaware River and its surroundings.  You will learn about the role that the river played in human history, including Washington’s four crossings of the Delaware during the Revolutionary War.  And you will also learn about the ecological history of the river itself, once one of the most polluted waterways in the country and now one of the cleanest, providing drinking water for 17 million people.  Michael Rockland, long-time New Jersey resident, shows readers his very favorite spots along the Delaware, including the pristine waterfalls and wilderness in the Delaware Water Gap recreation area.  Along the way, he shares engrossing stories and surprising facts about the river that literally defines western New Jersey.

About the author:  Michael Rockland is professor emeritus of American Studies at Rutgers University.  His early career was in the U.S. diplomatic service, during which he was a cultural attaché in both Argentina and Spain.  He is the author of sixteen books, five of which have received special recognition and prizes.  Rockland has won seven major teaching/lecturing awards, including the National Teaching Award in American Studies.  He has lectured in some twenty-three countries around the world.  A regular contributor to New Jersey Monthly magazine, he has also worked in television and film production, mostly for PBS.  He is regularly interviewed on NPR. 

For more information, click here: https://www.mclib.info/Events/Adults/2025-05-07-Michael-Rockland-The-Other-Jersey-Shore