How did Tina Chang become the Poet Laureate of Brooklyn? By writing the following words:

“I walk the streets of Brooklyn looking at this storefront and that, buy a pair of shoes I can’t afford, pumps from London, pointed at the tip and heartbreakingly high, hear my new heels clicking, crushing the legs of my shadow.”

Well, actually that is a mere sampling of her work taken from her poem Duality. There is so much more to choose from.

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.

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.

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.

Writers’ Group Unveiled

On Sunday evenings for the last several years a group of writers has been gathering at the Cleaveland House in West Tisbury, the home of mystery writer Cynthia Riggs. The writers meet to share their work and help critique and inspire each other while traveling down that very solitary road of the creative process.

When Elizabeth Murray was 16 years old, she had already seen far too much of the unforgiving side of life, and she had begun to ask herself if what she knew was all there was. What she knew was that she’d recently buried her mother, who died of AIDS, in a donated pine box with her name misspelled on it. Mr. Murray’s addict father, who was suffering from AIDS himself in a homeless shelter elsewhere in New York city, could not attend. Ms. Murray herself had dropped out of high school and was homeless.

Author Winslow Myers will present Living Beyond War, sharing his beliefs and commitment to end war, on Sunday, May 22, at 5 p.m. at the Unitarian-Universalist Society Chapel at 238 Main street in Vineyard Haven.

The organization called Beyond War has been working for 25 years to change thinking about war. During the Cold War, teams of high level scientists from the then Soviet Union and the U.S. wrote a book together about the dangers of accidental nuclear war.

Pearl Buck Returns

Once the weather turns warmer and the grey, spring skies blow blue and clear the Vineyard beckons to one and all. Time and the grave cannot even thwart the faithful. Pearl Buck is headed our way.

That’s right, on June 1 at 7 p.m. Ms. Buck will be reading from her short story collection East and West at the Vineyard Haven Public Library. Okay, the legendary author of The Good Earth may bear a resemblance to the actress Diane Quaid, but the words will be her own.

The Zen of Award Winning

The lavish book of photography and essays, Martha’s Vineyard – Now & Zen, has been selected the bronze medal winner of the 2011 Indie Excellence Award in the category of Northeast Regional Publications.

This, the book’s second national award, celebrates the highest achievements in independent press and self-publishing.