Children's Book Authors

Anne Conway (1631 – 1679) and Mary Astell (1666 – 1731) share a sex, intelligence, and the same unsettled century. After a long obscurity, their work has reemerged and invites the reader to consider how reason, belief, and the self might still be brought into harmony. **The Women** Anne Conway, born and raised in London, spent her youth wandering through the vast hallways of what is now known as Kensington Palace. Apart from being a woman, at least two other notable circumstances shaped Anne’s life – she lost a son in infancy and later suffered from severe pain. Pain as a concept found its way into Anne’s philosophy as a purgative, transformative experience. It was while seeking a relief from pain that she came into contact with the Flemish physician and philosopher Francis Mercury van Helmont, who later introduced her to Kabbalistic thought and to Quakerism. Anne converted to Quakerism shortly before she died. Mary Astell was a native of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England. Unlike Anne Conway, Astell remained unmarried and eventually moved to London with little or no financial support. Her early philosophical writings are found in the correspondence with John Norris and were later published as *Letters Concerning the Love of God* (1695). After publishing the *Letters* and *A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I and II. (1694, 1697),* Astell became somewhat of a celebrity in London. Her two other well-known published works were *Some Reflections upon Marriage* (1700) and *The Christian Religion* (1705). In her later years, in keeping with her investment in female education, Astell managed a charity school for poor girls in the Chelsea neighborhood. **The Philosophies** Anne’s only surviving work, *The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy*, was published posthumously and anonymously in 1690. It is said that Leibniz had a copy of *The Principles* in his library with Anne Conway’s name written on the front page. Anne’s vitalist conception of all being may have influenced Leibnitz’s own views, in particular his *Monadology*. *The Principles* is often viewed as a theodicy. The existence and nature of God occupy the central place in Anne Conway’s triadic philosophical system. The three “species” are God, Christ, and the “unity of multiplicities” where “the whole creation is just but one substance or entity.” God is the immutable and perfect maker of all things. God “wanted to create living beings with whom he could communicate.” Alas, God’s light was intolerable for his Creatures, and, after dimming the light a bit, God designated the Messiah’s soul as the Middle Nature and “a safe place” for all Creatures. Everything and everyone fall under the umbrella of Anne’s “Creatures.” Everything and everyone is a subject to eternal mutability. Creatures can metamorphose into other kinds of creature, growing more or less spiritual – more or less like God. Under the principle of similitude, Conway maintains, everything and everyone has some semblance to God and therefore must be in some sense spiritual and alive. Mary Astell sides with Descartes in his dualistic views and in the method of obtaining knowledge through clear and distinct perceptions. In her metaphysics, Astell distinguishes two kinds of beings—minds and bodies that come in various degrees of finitude and corruptibility. God is placed at the heart of her metaphysical system and is the “first intelligence.” Human minds and corporeal particles are finite and incorruptible, while human bodies and physical objects are finite, naturally corruptible entities. Within the created beings, Astell names four categories: minds, bodies, mind–body unions, and the particles that compose bodies. A mind-body union is mysterious. However, we “know and feel” it, and therefore it must be real. **Reading:** We will read and discuss Anne Conway’s *The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy* and the second part of Mary Astell’s *A Serious Proposal to the Ladies.* Anne Conway, *The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy,* 25 pages, [https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/conway1692_1.pdf](https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/conway1692_1.pdf) Mary Astell, *A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, [https://www.gutenberg.org/files/54984/54984-h/54984-h.htm](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/54984/54984-h/54984-h.htm)* **Additional Reading:** Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Mary Astell, [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/astell/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/astell/) Anne Conway, [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conway/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conway/)

Hey Poetry Lovers! This group is on a roll. Here’s the gist: We meet at the **Capital One Café in Chinatown** from **12pm - 2pm** every other week. For enrichment, we start by reading and reflecting on a **“published poem”**, suggested by someone in the group. No advance preparation is necessary. But feel free to check out some of the poems we’ve read [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSyE_wCLQCPHRrKmN5F9tOIeeRQUZESxjRXGVBoCF2uU8Gm0_d0uECiCBCQXEy6ksxfsBOhtRIOpW3T/pubhtml?gid=0&single=true&widget=true&headers=false%22%3E%3C/iframe%3E). Or submit suggestions for future meetings [here](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSexGc2Z2Kp6bZW0D3_hfJ7NUUkfNHf7TXX-43FglCeBd9EF2Q/viewform?usp=send_form). Next, we **share our work and offer feedback**. Depending on attendance, everyone gets \~10 minutes to use as they like. (No need to share, though; you’re welcome to come even if you prefer just to listen.) We maintain a **Discord server** to help share our work and communicate outside our bi-weekly meet-ups. If you haven’t used Discord before, take a moment to download it and create an account before arriving. When we meet you on Saturday, we will add you to our server, the “DC Poetry Workshop”, and can help you navigate the app if you have questions. Finally, if you plan on sharing a poem, consider how you will do so. Some options include: * Print 5-10 copies to distribute in person * Take and share screenshots in the Discord chat. * Copy the poem into a google doc, change sharing settings to “anyone with link”, and copy the google doc link into the Discord chat. Most importantly, we’re excited to meet you! Catch you on Saturday, Diego / Ian / Cayden / Nate / Otasha / Lia / An

Please join us for the June Romance Book Discussion Club! Location is at my apartment in Dupont. Address and details will be provided to attendees closer to the meeting. Also, please update your RSVP by 6pm the day before, if you're unable to come. That will allow people on the waitlist to have enough time to consider coming, as well. Looking forward to discussing romance books with you all! **Information for New Members:** Each month we will vote on a subgenre and trope to guide our reading choices. There will be a voting link shared in the discussion board with 1 week to vote on your top choices. I'll then post the votes for that month and people can share recommendations. These are just for inspiration and as general themes. There is no set book - you're welcome to read whatever you like, although many members find it fun to explore new subgenres or tropes and see what you may like or hate. This is a book club for mood readers :) You're welcome to read whatever you fancy and come discuss it. Hopefully you'll leave with some new recommendations - or books you know are not your cup of tea. Please feel free to post below or message me with any questions.

Title: What Is Progress? Knowledge Aggregation, Living Textbooks, and the Automation of Scientific Discovery Date: June 20 2026 Noon - 14:00 EDT Summary: Our collective knowledge infrastructure — the textbooks, professional training resources, and literature syntheses that define what professionals across disciplines believe to be true — is quietly accruing a structural liability. Compounded confirmation bias, stacked citation-by-citation into the foundations of formal knowledge, means that breakthroughs can take decades to reach the classrooms, clinical workflows, and decision-making frameworks where they matter most. Meanwhile, the deepest friction is rarely acknowledged: before any field can build meaningful consensus on "why" or "how" a phenomenon occurs, it must first establish honest, consolidated agreement on "what" has actually been observed. That prior step is routinely skipped, assumed, or fragmented across siloed literatures that never cross-pollinate. This talk introduces a framework called "Knowledge Aggregation" — with two distinct but complementary ambitions. The first is descriptive transparency: algorithmically mapping what has been said, measured, and documented across a problem space, without imposing causal interpretation or narrative. The second traces the boundary between empirical observation and explanatory claim, building systems that can separate the "what" from the "why/how" — because consensus on mechanism cannot be meaningfully constructed until consensus on phenomenon is first established. Both ambitions are now within reach. By composing tools already at our disposal — large language models, classical NLP pipelines, public data repositories, and engineering-grade automation frameworks — it becomes possible to model knowledge itself, rather than merely imitate individual experts. One concrete expression of this is automating the writing of living textbooks: compressing the lag from bleeding-edge discovery, through replicated evidence, all the way to professional training resources. But the deeper aspiration reaches further — toward automating the discovery of scientific insights that have never previously been conceived, by systematically surfacing hypothesis combinations that no single siloed researcher would have had the cross-disciplinary vantage point to even ask. Drawing on ongoing systems biology and computational research — with ME/CFS research demoed as a use case for what siloed, fragmented knowledge infrastructure costs in practice — this talk maps the conceptual architecture, the real-world friction, and the data science toolkit for building it. Speaker: As a systems biologist at heart, Sam specializes his biomedical research on interactions and connections in biology - rather than just one domain of expertise. He wears many hats and collects skill sets across disciplines, with degree studies and industry experience acquired across Chemical Engineering (BSc), Bioinformatics (MSc), Systems and Synthetic Biology (M2), Biomedical Sciences (MSc), and beyond. Even more important to him than niches or fields of work, comes down to the synergistic approaches that allow us to move beyond reductionism. The notion that a question can only allow for one answer, is inherently reductionist. By resisting many norms in science and engineering which can get overly reductive, his current role as Principal Investigator of Research for DMV Petri Dish (501(c)(3) non-profit local to the DMV region) embraces computational frameworks that aide scale-up and automation - not only around the processes which already exist with established workflows, but also taking a keen interest in attempting and accomplishing ambitions which have never been perceived to be possible previously. Sam carries a passion for the synergy of computational biology - fused with wet lab validation. This way, one can build a beautiful knowledge base in the theoretical sense, and then test to see if said computational prediction might actually be able to stand in the real world with wet lab validation. Translational modeling starts to become possible once biological experiment design can be iteratively looped alongside computational model design, optimization, and analysis - empowering the design of a better wet lab experiment, followed by a better computational model, back and forth until science is done!

Let's meet at Ledo's Pizza in Springfield to have a comic book meet up meeting Saturday. I'll be wearing a super hero t-shirt. Mike T

Join us in celebrating International Yoga Day with a special talk by author Mark Mays. In this engaging session, Mark Mays will guide a live meditation and share his personal journey of self-realization, along with insights from his book Tell the World: An Author’s Journey of Meditation and Inner Transformation, offering a deeper understanding of inner peace and self-awareness through Sahaja Yoga. All attendees will receive complimentary entry along with a free PDF copy of the book. The session will be followed by light refreshments and an opportunity to connect with others. Walk-ins are welcome.

Join us for a discussion of The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. We will meet at The Spot from 1-3 pm on Saturday, June 20th.

This meeting will be dedicated to talking about the entirety of "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" by Italo Calvino Due to recent high popularity of our meetings, we will be having a temporary moratorium new members until a level of member cultivation has occurred. We estimate this will end around July 1st. We will be meeting in the National Portrait Gallery Atrium. To stay up to date with events and discuss meetings or books, you can join our Discord group. Please message me to get added.

We will be meeting in the Wilson Room. For June, we will be reading Excellent Women by Barbara Pym. A paperback version runs 231 pages. It was published in 1952. The GoodReads blurb is One of Barbara Pym’s richest and most amusing high comedies, *Excellent Women* has at its center Mildred Lathbury, a clergyman’s daughter and a mild-mannered spinster in 1950s England. She is one of those “excellent women,” the smart, supportive, repressed women who men take for granted. As Mildred gets embroiled in the lives of her new neighbors—anthropologist Helena Napier and her handsome, dashing husband, Rocky, and Julian Malory, the vicar next door—the novel presents a series of snapshots of human life as actually, and pluckily, lived in a vanishing world of manners and repressed desires.

This is the sign you've been waiting for. Come write with us Sunday at 7:30 am at Kaldi's Social House in Arlington. Kaldi's opens at 7. Grab a coffee and join the group! We generally have 10 to 14 writers attend each week, and new folks are welcome to drop in anytime. Intros start at 7:30 am. We will write for one hour. After writing, feel free to debrief, share thoughts or get advice. Our meetups are a safe space for writers to work on their craft. No one will read or critique your writing. Kaldi's Social House website: https://www.kaldissocialhouse.net/ \* Resource \* Many thanks to Justin for putting together a shared file of resource discussed at the meetings. Feel free to add to it! [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13LONNjZvsO5hEXM7NsBnWCgy3GgPgjAbQxE0lPxp7hc/edit?usp=sharing](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13LONNjZvsO5hEXM7NsBnWCgy3GgPgjAbQxE0lPxp7hc/edit?usp=sharing)

We will meet outside as long as the weather is nice. If not, we will move inside. Look out for a comment the morning of each meeting with our exact location. As we are meeting in person, please remember to bring something to read as we usually spend some time sharing our current reads and/or reading when meeting in person. As a reminder, there is no assigned reading; please bring whatever you are currently working on. This group is super casual, sometimes we read and sometimes we talk the whole time. **** NO SHOW POLICY: Due to the high number of members on the waitlist recently we are having to reinstate our no-show policy. If you sign up and no-show to 2 events you will be removed from the group. Reminders are provided weekly to change your RSVP to allow those on the waitlist a chance to come to the meet-up, no 3rd chances with be given. Please be considerate to your fellow members. Thank you! I look forward to reading you!

Weather Permitting. Please RSVP the number of corgis attending only. Great walk with views of DC and Georgetown. It is an island so you can't get too lost! Please be mindful of the parking situation there as when it's busy you have to park up in Rosslyn and cross the bridge over the GW parkway. Meet at the bridge on the island side by 10 am. We will go left and walk the upland trail and finish up at the monument for a group photo. For those with swimmers we can follow up with a dip overlooking Georgetown at the point marked 10 on the cartoon map. For those interested in Kayaking after around the island please be prepared to move the party across the river to get a rental at Fletchers or Georgetown boathouse if you don't BYOK/SUP. Remember to bring a doggie life jacket too since this is a real river paddle.

is is an In-Person Writing Event at Three This is an In-Person Writing Event at Kaldi's Social House in Clarendon! Please join us. This is not a critique session or discussion event. If you're interested in attending one of our regular meetings to discuss the art and craft of writing or to review another's work, please join us for a regular meeting on Wednesdays from 7p-9p.

Welcome, readers! Our June read is ***Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible*** ***Voyage*** **by Alfred Lansing.** A work of nonfiction, and one of the most astonishing survival stories in history, we follow Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew after their ship is crushed by Antarctic ice. Stranded in one of the harshest environments on Earth, the men endure months of isolation, freezing temperatures, and near starvation—yet refuse to give up hope. Lansing brings their ordeal to life through vivid detail and firsthand accounts, capturing both the brutality of nature and the resilience of the human spirit. At its core, the story is a powerful testament to leadership, perseverance, and the unbreakable will to survive against impossible odds. Looking forward to discussing with everyone! We will meet at Zaftig Brewing Co in their event room in the back. We are welcome to bring in our own food, but **all** **drinks must be purchased at the bar.** Happy reading! 📖

Join us for an hour of writing! We’ve discovered that it’s strikingly helpful to write with other writers. See if it’s true for you at 7:00pm on Wednesday, February 11 at Streetlight Guild. Be it a book, blog, script, essay, dissertation, resume, melody, poem or just plain work stuff, you are invited to write it with us. No one will see what you've written or give you unsolicited advice. Instead of just thinking about writing, come and get some real writing done. **SCHEDULE:** 6:45ish - Quick introductions 7:00 - Timer starts: write for 1 hour 8:00 - The End **OPTIONAL SOCIALIZING** happens before and after the writing hour. Writing is very solitary. Connecting (and sometimes even commiserating) with other writers is a cool thing. **BEING LATE IS OKAY:** just show up and get settled! If you were on time, please be willing to make room for the friendly latecomer. Happy writing & I look forward to seeing you at Streetlight Guild! **WHAT SHOULD I BRING?** Whatever you need to be able to write! You're welcome to bring earplugs/headphones if noise will bother you! **OTHER IMPORTANT DETAILS:** * **RSVP:** Please RSVP by 6:00pm the evening of the meeting. This helps me know how many to expect, and if we'll need additional space! * **COVID:** While masks are not required, please be mindful of the other writers around you and their comfort levels. * **WIFI/OUTLETS:** Outlets are limited, so please ensure your devices are charged when you come! But Streetlight Guild does have free WiFi! Yay! * **PARKING:** There is free public parking at Streetlight Guild.

June is Fantasy month! • The book we will be discussing is The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab. (determined by votes from May Book Club. Message me your e-mail if you'd like a free digital copy of the book) • This event will be at the Dublin library (Room 3). Feel free to come whether or not you've started or finished the book. • Small snacks will be provided. You're welcome to bring your own snacks & drinks too! Let me know if you’d like to volunteer to bring snacks or drinks for the group. Please try to update your attendance if anything changes so we have an accurate head count for print outs and snacks :)

We'll meet at The Capital One Café, 167 Easton Town Center, Space A-103. This is in the main mall where the Microsoft store used to be, on your left if you're standing at the bottom of the AMC Theater escalator. Join us on Saturday for an hour of uninterrupted wordmaking! • What we'll do Join us for an hour of writing! We’ve discovered that it’s strikingly helpful to write with other writers. See if it’s true for you at 10AM on Saturday mornings. Be it a book, blog, script, essay, dissertation, resume, melody, poem or just plain work stuff, you are invited to write it with us. No one will see what you've written or give you unsolicited advice. Instead of just thinking about writing, come and get some real writing done. SCHEDULE: 10:00 - SESSION 1: quick intros. 10:10 - timer starts: write for 1 hour. 11:10 - chat / take off / keep writing. OPTIONAL SOCIALIZING happens at 11A-11:30ish. Writing is very solitary. Connecting (and sometimes even commiserating) with other writers is a cool thing. BEING LATE IS OKAY: just show up and get settled, then check-in with me after the session. (I’ll be the person with the Shut Up & Write! sign.) If you were on time, please be willing to make room for the friendly latecomer. Happy writing and I look forward to seeing you! • What to bring Whatever you need to be able to write! Bring earbuds/earplugs if you want to block noise or the occasional conversation by other patrons. Electrical outlets are limited, so charge your devices before whenever possible. See you at The Café on Saturday!