Chatham celebrated a big edible book milestone this spring with our 10th International Edible Book Festival event! The JKM Library has been partnering with Chatham's food studies program since 2012 to host this celebration of food and literature. After a three-year hiatus during the heights of COVID-19, the tradition was revived in 2024, and on March 31st, 2025 we celebrated our 10th event!

To make this year extra special, we welcomed additional collaborators to help grow the festival. Chatham's Student Success and the Academic Success Center hosted an Essential Needs Item Drive to benefit Chatham's Essential Needs Corner. Anyone who donated to the item drive was entered into a raffle for a $100 gift certificate to Mad Mex.
The PA Hunger Free Campus Task Force hosted a silent auction (sans real money) for kitchenware kits, funded by the PA Department of Education. Students were given five tickets that they could use to bid on the specific kits they were interested in. There were five kits auctioned off.
And in addition to those amazing activities, we also had honey tasting and education provided by the Eden Hall Apiary. Attendees could taste honey from different seasons and learned a bit about how the flowers from each season alter the flavor profile of the honey created by the area bees.

This year's edible book contest was judged by our amazing volunteer faculty members: returning judges Heather McNaugher and Barbara Ann McMonigal, and new judge Laura Livingston. Thank you to our judges for their time and taste buds!
Winners of the 10th International Edible Book Festival are:
People's Choice Award: "Pete the Cat: I Love My White Choux" submitted by Maggie Vargo and Evelyn Fay


Best Tasting: "Franks 'N' Brine" submitted by Anne St. Jean


Most Creative Literary Interpretation: "Demon Copperhead" submitted by Karin Chipman


The Rachel Carson Award: "Pete the Cat: I Love My White Choux" submitted by Maggie Vargo and Evelyn Fay

Grand Prize: "The Masque of the Red Death" submitted by Kate Emory


A huge thank you to Chatham’s food studies program, Alice Julier and Rebecca Nathan in particular, for their sponsorship and support and enthusiasm in planning. Thank you to the Academic Success Center, Chatham Student Success, the PA Hunger Free Campus Task Force, and the Essential Needs Corner for their help growing this event this year. And thanks to all of our ‘edible book’ contestants!
With the recent passing of one of my idols, Bill Moyers, I am compelled to share my connection, albeit via electronic means only, to someone who was part of my daily existence during one of the most meaningful periods in my life.
As an art student in NYC in the 1980s-1990s, I had the priviledge of meeting a few famous people: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, to name two; with the latter being a lecturer-in-residence at my school (Pratt Institute) as I was tasked with ‘handling his slide carousels’ (ask your parents, or grandparents).
But the highlight of my time as a graduate student supervisor in the Media Library was circulating, viewing, and analyzing a multi-series program on VHS tape (with the master on Beta - ask your great-grandparents) entitled “Joseph Campbell and the power of myth”, a set of tapes that we would regularly have to review and re-master in order to manage their playback quality.
The buzz in the academic art world (and others I suppose) was to “read Joseph Campbell,” but as a visual artist, me and many of my classmates, including little Bobby Mapplethorpe (he grew about a foot right after he dropped-out and became famous with his whips and such) lined up, patiently awaiting the rewinding of a tape so we could watch the magic interactions between Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, sharing insights, questions, and interpretations between the myth and reality of idols, icons, gods and goddesses.
As an anti-social art-punk trying to learn how to conduct an adult conversation - let alone a librarian interview - these guys -these 2 guys- were full frontal in my daily analog memory glands of how words talk mouth use to… (sic)
Not only a gateway to the fabulous writings of Joseph Campbell, such as The Hero with a Thousand Faces among others, the videos were thought provoking and packed with enough subject matter to last any art student multiple semesters of imagery.
Beyond the melancholy I can see Bill and Joseph flowing alongside in the the Golden Bough, perhaps with Keith, Jean-Michel and Robert, but back on Earth we can celebrate a great series of moments recorded on film, video, or copied to DVD (as allowed by Section 110 (1) of the Copyright Act of 1976).
I'm sure one could easily locate a stream or YouTube clip, but below are links to the library holdings of the video series as as well as books authored by these two beautiful entities.
Joseph Campbell and the power of myth [videorecording] : with Bill Moyers / a production of Apostrophe S Productions, Inc., in association with Alvin H. Perlmutter, Inc., Public Affairs Television, Inc.
Media Shelves - 291.13 C15P (6 DVDs)
Other works in our library by-or-about:
Bill Moyers
https://chatham.bywatersolutions.com/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?idx=&q=an%3A35883&sort_by=popularity_dsc&count=20
Joseph Campbell
https://chatham.bywatersolutions.com/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?idx=&q=an%3A68570&sort_by=popularity_dsc&count=20
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