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Just before the first man landed on the moon, Charlie Brown and Snoopy soared through space with NASA’s Apollo 10 mission in May 1969. The exhibition To the Moon: Snoopy Soars with NASA examines the history of Apollo 10 and the Peanuts characters’ role in that flight and in the NASA Manned Flight Awareness safety program. This traveling exhibit is organized by the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, California. Attendees will also get an exclusive tour of By All Accounts: The Story of Elmhurst, which examines how the city has changed and grown over the past 165+ years. 

Through the Ether[net]: Interactive Magic and Illusory Demonstrations

This elegant, interactive magic performance with Jeanette Andrews occurs on screen, as well as in viewers’ homes and own hands! Weaving together science and folklore with performance and experiments, she'll lead the audience in co-creating the performance. This presentation will combine pieces from her magic performance repertoire, punctuated with interactive components such as scientific visual illusion demonstration, in which viewers learn about the eye and how to make an image disappear. Jeanette also narrates careful instructions for interactive magic tricks that audience members perform along with her in their own homes, and create magic without knowing how they accomplished these magical feats! For adults and older (9+) children.

Signed copies of The Hidden Palace are available from the Book Stall. 

About the Book: "A blend of romance, Mary Shelley-esque horror, and folklore.... Wecker skillfully combines the storylines of Chava the Golem and Ahmad the Jinni and numerous other players, good and evil, in an enchanting tale that pleases on every page." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Chava is a golem, a woman made of clay, who can hear the thoughts and longings of those around her and feels compelled by her nature to help them. Ahmad is a jinni, a restless creature of fire, once free to roam the desert but now imprisoned in the shape of a man. Fearing they'll be exposed as monsters, these magical beings hide their true selves and try to pass as human--just two more immigrants in the bustling world of 1900s Manhattan. Brought together under calamitous circumstances, their lives are now entwined--but they're not yet certain of what they mean to each other.

Both Chava and Ahmad have changed the lives of the people around them. Park Avenue heiress Sophia Winston, whose brief encounter with Ahmad left her with a strange illness that makes her shiver with cold, travels to the Middle East to seek a cure. There she meets Dima, a tempestuous female jinni who's been banished from her tribe. Back in New York, in a tenement on the Lower East Side, a little girl named Kreindel helps her rabbi father build a golem they name Yossele--not knowing that she's about to be sent to an orphanage uptown, where the hulking Yossele will become her only friend and protector.

Spanning the tumultuous years from the turn of the twentieth century to the beginning of World War I, The Hidden Palace follows these lives and others as they collide and interleave. Can Chava and Ahmad find their places in the human world while remaining true to each other? Or will their opposing natures and desires eventually tear them apart--especially once they encounter, thrillingly, other beings like themselves?

About the Author:  A Midwest native, Helene Wecker holds a B.A. in English from Carleton College and an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in literary journals such as Joyland and Catamaran, as well as in the fantasy anthology The Djnn Falls in Love and Other Stories. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her husband and children.  

About Kat Howard: Her short fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, anthologized in best of and annual best of collections, and performed on NPR. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Roses and Rot and the Alex Award-winning An Unkindness of Magicians. She is also the writer of the Books of Magic series, set in the Sandman Universe. She lives in New Hampshire, and you can find her on twitter at @KatWithSword.