It may be a small island and small literary community, but authors on Peaks Island make up for it with a flurry of activity. Tomorrow, April 8, 2013, two island authors will be involved in events – one on island and one off.

As published earlier, Scott Nash’s wildly popular The High Skies Adventures of Blue Jay the Pirate will be on stage at 7 p.m. on the mainland at Portland Stage Company. Come meet some dramatic renderings of Nash’s beloved avian characters. For more information see Affiliate Artists Events.

At the same time, island author Eleanor Morse will introduce award-winning writer, Lesléa Newman, at an event sponsored by the Peaks Island Branch of the Portland Public Library. Lesléa has written over 60 books, many of them for children and adolescents, including the children’s classic, Heather Has Two Mommies, the young adult novel, Jailbait, the middle grade novel, Hachiko Waits, and the adult poetry collection, Still Life with Buddy. Her latest book, October Mourning, is a cycle of poems about the death of Matthew Shepard, the gay twenty-one-year old University of Wyoming student who was lured from a bar by two young men, savagely beaten, tied to a fence on the outskirts of Laramie, and left to die. The book, a searing and beautiful tribute to Shepard, has recently been named an American Library Association 2013 Stonewall Honor Book. This event will be 7.00 p.m. at the Doug MacVane Community Center, Peaks Island. The book will be on sale after the reading and talk. Refreshments will be served.