Explore the intricate world of Legend with Marie Lu as she encourages readers to look beyond the surface and reveal hidden secrets. Explore the depths of deceit, battle for power, and the lengths characters will go to unmask the Truth. 

Legend is a dystopian novel where two unlikely characters, June and Day, cross paths in search for the Truth. Can they set aside their differences and preconceptions for the greater good? Readers will devour Marie Lu’s words as they are challenged to think critically about the world around them and reminded to never judge a book by its cover. Register now for an event you don’t want to miss!

Join the conversation and register at https://libraryc.org/santacruzpl/78694.

About the Author: Marie Lu is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Legend trilogy and The Young Elites trilogy. She graduated from the University of Southern California and jumped into the video game industry, working for Disney Interactive Studios as a Flash artist. Now a full-time writer, she spends her spare time reading, drawing, playing Assassin’s Creed, and getting stuck in traffic. She lives in Los Angeles, California (see above: traffic), with one husband, one Chihuahua mix, and two Pembroke Welsh corgis.

For upcoming author talks, visit https://libraryc.org/santacruzpl/upcoming.

SCPL's Virtual Author Talks are made possible by the Friends of the Capitola Library.

Illuminating Hope and Grace in the Face of Hardship with Rex Ogle (5th-8th Grade)

You’re invited to join us online with award-winning author Rex Ogle as he talks to viewers about his struggles to navigate sixth grade as written about in his book Free Lunch. 

Instead of giving him lunch money, Rex’s mom has signed him up for free meals. As a poor kid in a wealthy school district, better-off kids crowd impatiently behind him as he tries to explain to the cashier that he’s on the free meal program. The lunch lady is hard of hearing, so Rex has to shout.

Free Lunch is the story of Rex’s efforts to navigate his first semester of sixth grade—who to sit with, not being able to join the football team, Halloween in a handmade costume, classmates and a teacher who take one look at him and decide he’s trouble—all while wearing secondhand clothes and being hungry. His mom and her boyfriend are out of work, and life at home is punctuated by outbursts of violence. Halfway through the semester, his family is evicted and ends up in government-subsidized housing in view of the school. Rex lingers at the end of last period every day until the buses have left, so no one will see where he lives.

Unsparing and realistic, Free Lunch is a story of hardship threaded with hope and moments of grace. Rex’s voice is compelling and authentic, and Free Lunch is a true, timely, and essential work that illuminates the lived experience of poverty in America. Register now to join the conversation!

Join the conversation and register at https://libraryc.org/santacruzpl/79206.

About the Author: Rex Ogle is the author of Free Lunch, winner of the YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults Award; Punching Bag, a New York Public Library Best Book; Abuela Don’t Forget Me, finalist for the YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults Award; and Road Home, which received a Printz Honor and a Stonewall Book Award Honor. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

For upcoming author talks, visit https://libraryc.org/santacruzpl/upcoming.

SCPL's Virtual Author Talks are made possible by the Friends of the Capitola Library.

 Rosemary Hayward was born in Hertfordshire, England and now lives in Santa Cruz, California, with a second home in Seville, Spain. In between she has lived and worked in Oxford, Nottingham, London and Reading. Oxford is the setting for much of the story of Margaret Leaving, her first novel, and Nottingham and Reading are the homes of characters in the Loxley Hall Books: Strait Lace and Crocus Fields.

Santa Cruz Public Libraries welcomes the editors of The Lavender Reader, a local quarterly LGBT magazine published from 1986 to 1998.

Join Scotty Brookie, Sarah-Hope Parmeter, and Jo Kenny as they recollect and celebrate queer life and culture in Santa Cruz in times past. Refreshments will be served and merriment will be had.

On the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains with Pria Anand

You’re invited to a fascinating conversation with neurologist and author Pria Anand to chat about her new book The Electric Mind: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains (forthcoming June 10, 2025).

The Electric Mind tells the stories we tell ourselves about our brains, and the stories our brains tell us.

A girl believes she has been struck blind for stealing a kiss. A mother watches helplessly as each of her children is replaced by a changeling. A woman is haunted each month by the same four chords of a single song. In neurology, illness is inextricably linked with narrative, the clues to unraveling these mysteries hidden in both the details of a patient's story and the tells of their body.

Stories are etched into the very structure of our brains, coded so deeply that the impulse for storytelling survives and even surges after the most devastating injuries. But our brains are also porous—the stories they concoct are shaped by cultural narratives about bodies and illness that permeate the minds of doctors and patients alike. In the history of medicine, some stories are heard, while others—the narratives of women, of Black and brown people, of displaced people, of disempowered people—are too often dismissed.

In The Mind Electric, neurologist Pria Anand reveals—through case study, history, fable, and memoir—all that the medical establishment has overlooked: the complexity and wonder of brains in health and in extremis, and the vast gray area between sanity and insanity, doctor and patient, and illness and wellness, each separated from the next by the thin veneer of a different story.

Moving from the Boston hospital where she treats her patients, to her childhood years in India, to Isla Providencia in the Caribbean and to the Republic of Guinea in West Africa, she demonstrates again and again the compelling paradox at the heart of neurology: that even the most peculiar symptoms can show us something universal about ourselves as humans. Register now to join this intriguing virtual conversation!

Join the conversation and register at https://libraryc.org/santacruzpl/79718.

About the Author: Pria Anand is a neurologist at the Boston Medical Center and an Assistant Professor at the Boston University School of Medicine. She is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Medical School, and she trained in neurology, neuro-infectious diseases, and neuroimmunology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Massachusetts General Hospital.

For upcoming author talks, visit https://libraryc.org/santacruzpl/upcoming.

SCPL's Virtual Author Talks are made possible by the Friends of the Capitola Library.