"Sunday Matinee" Book Signing With Actress Brooke Smith

Join us Friday, December 9th from 6-8pm at The Last Bookstore as we welcome actress, author and photographer Brooke Smith to celebrate her new photography book "Sunday Matinee"! Brooke will be discussing "Sunday Matinee" with one of the best-known names in public radio, Renee Montagne of NPR Morning Edition.

Every ticket comes with 1 signed copy of "Sunday Matinee" and the opportunity to meet Brooke Smith at the signing after the Q&A portion of the event.

Please note that all sales are final. If you cannot attend the event we will ship the book to you and you will need to pay the shipping cost of the book or come by and pick up the book after the event has concluded.

About Brooke Smith and "Sunday Matinee."

If the name Brooke Smith is known to the general public, it is from her acting on television shows such as Grey’s Anatomy and Ray Donovan or her role as Catherine Martin in Silence of the Lambs. But prior to all that, Brooke was a participant in the New York Hardcore scene of the 1980s, photographing bands at CBGB’s notorious Sunday afternoon gigs and hanging out on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

In 2010 when Brooke was moving, a box was unearthed of the photos she’d taken during that heady time in her life. A year later, these pictures were exhibited at the Primary Gallery in New York City under the appropriate title, Sunday Matinee. Soon after the exhibit closed, Smith began combing through the thousands of pictures she had snapped in the hopes of editing them down into a book.

Now, after years of painstaking assembly, the book Sunday Matinee will finally see the light of day through Radio Raheem Records. Made up of live shots of Bad Brains, Agnostic Front, Cro-Mags, Murphy’s Law, and Underdog as well as candid photography of the colorful characters who made up the New York Hardcore scene, Sunday Matinee documents all the thrill and excitement of a Sunday afternoon on the Bowery in the 1980s and gifts it to you from the safety of the present day.

Sunday Matinee contains over 140 images, both color and black & white, spread across 160 pages in a clothbound 11"x11" book.

About Renee Montagne Of NPR

Renee Montagne, one of the best-known names in public radio, is a special correspondent and host for NPR News.

Montagne's most recent assignment was a yearlong collaboration with ProPublica reporter Nina Martin, investigating the alarming rate of maternal mortality in the U.S., as compared to other developed countries. The series, called "Lost Mothers," was recognized with more than a dozen awards in American journalism, including a Peabody Award, a George Polk Award, and Harvard's Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Journalism. The series was also named a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.

From 2004 to 2016, Montagne co-hosted NPR's Morning Edition, the most widely heard radio news program in the United States. Her first experience as host of an NPR newsmagazine came in 1987, when she, along with Robert Siegel, were named the new hosts of All Things Considered.

After leaving All Things Considered, Montagne traveled to South Africa in early 1990, arriving to report from there on the day Nelson Mandela emerged from 27 years in Pr*son. In 1994, she and a small team of NPR reporters were awarded an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for their coverage of South Africa's historic elections that led to Mandela becoming that country's first black president.

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Montagne has made 10 extended reporting trips to Afghanistan. She has traveled to every major city, from Kabul to Kandahar, to peaceful villages, and to places where conflict raged. She has profiled Afghanistan's presidents and power brokers, but focused on the stories of Afghans at the heart of that complex country: school girls, farmers, mullahs, poll workers, midwives, and warlords. Her coverage has been honored by the Overseas Press Club, and, for stories on Afghan women in particular, by the Gracie Awards.

One of her most cherished honors dates to her days as a freelance reporter in the 1980s, when Montagne and her collaborator, the writer Thulani Davis, were awarded "First Place in Radio" by the National Association of Black Journalists for their series "Fanfare for the Warriors." It told the story of African-American musicians in the military bands from WW1 to Vietnam.

Montagne began her career in radio pretty much by accident, when she joined a band of friends, mostly poets and musicians, who were creating their own shows at a new, scrappy little San Francisco community station called KPOO. Her show was called Women's Voices.

Montagne graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California, Berkeley. Her career includes teaching broadcast writing at New York University's Graduate Department of Journalism (now the Carter Institute).

Host or Publisher The Last Bookstore