There have been a lot of big name poets reading on our shores this summer. And we applaud this embarrassment of riches. But next Wednesday, August 24, beginning at 5:30 p.m., we have the chance to stand a bit taller and clap even louder as some of our very own Vineyard poets take the stage at the West Tisbury library. Readers include Justen Ahren, Samantha Barrow, Ellie Bates, Maureen Hall and Jill Jupen.

This event is free and includes refreshments too. A guaranteed sating of both mind and body.

Seal Meets Dog

Sarah French, author of the new children’s book Summer Friends, will be appearing in the garden at Dragonfly Gallery on Friday, July 29, from 5 to 7 p.m.

Summer Friends is an exploration, through collage art, of the imagined friendship between a seal and Ms. French’s black Lab Minnie. Dragonfly Gallery is located in the Oak Bluffs’ Arts District. For more details, call 508-693-8877.

Edward Dillon doesn’t exist. Longtime readers of the Vineyard Gazette may recall reading about Mr. Dillon’s antics in the West Chop column during the summer of 1977. The column, written by then 12-year-old Amor Towles, reported the comings and goings within the close-knit community. Yet unbeknownst to most readers, the man by the name of Edward Dillon, mentioned in columns throughout the summer, was fictional.

Like most of us, Steven Rattner knew little about the automobile industry when in early 2009 he accepted the unenviable task of helping craft a government rescue plan for Detroit’s automakers.

But unlike most of us, Mr. Rattner knew more than a little about finance and profitable companies. And as President Obama’s former “car czar,” he has produced a readable book about the experience in Overhaul: An Insider’s Account of the Obama Administration’s Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry.

Pitchapalooza is coming to Martha’s Vineyard, so time to dust off your pitching chops. But here’s the catch. You will have but just one minute to talk.

The pitch, so to speak, is as follows. Twenty writers will be selected at random from the audience. Each person picked gets sixty seconds to convince the judges of the worthiness of his book idea. At the end of the pitching a winner will be announced. The prize? An introduction to an agent or publisher appropriate for his or her book.

To launch the publication of The Complete Plays of Sophocles, translator Robert Bagg will speak at the West Tisbury library on Wednesday, July 27 from 5 to 6 p.m.

The Emperor of All Maladies is a billed as a biography of cancer and author Siddhartha Mukherjee treats his subject with all the reverence of a living subject.

“Cancer cells grow faster, adapt better,” he writes. “They are better versions of ourselves.”

LIPMAN PIKE: America’s First Home Run King . By Richard Michelson . Sleeping Bear Press. 32 pages, photographs. $16.95.

Governor Deval Patrick is coming to the Island but this is not just another baby-kissing tour. On Saturday, July 23, he will be reading from and discussing his new memoir, A Reason to Believe: Lessons from an Improbable Life.

Mr. Patrick was born in Chicago in 1956 and after junior high school he won a scholarship to attend Milton Academy in Massachusetts. From there it was on to Harvard as an undergraduate and for law school. In 2007 he became the first African American Governor of Massachusetts and was reelected last year.

In the early 1970s, when the tide of summer residents would go out in September, there were always young people who didn’t want to leave the Vineyard — and they didn’t have to, because there was no particular place they planned to go. Land was still relatively affordable, or their families had land, and they built themselves homes back in the woods, had kids, a few animals and a garden, and patched together a living with the usual Vineyard hodgepodge of work or self-employment.