Barnes & Noble’s Acclaimed “Upstairs at the Square” Series Debuts 2010 Season with Patti Smith on January 19th and Vampire Weekend and Kwame Dawes on January 21st

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, today announced the new season of its hit series, “Upstairs at the Square” – recommended by The New Yorker, New York, Time Out New York, The Village Voice, Flavorpill, WWD Scoop, Time Out London, Vice and more – at the Union Square Barnes & Noble in Manhattan (33 East 17th Street at Union Square). Guests discuss and perform their work in conversation with cultural journalist Katherine Lanpher. Admission is free.

On Tuesday, January 19th, at 7 p.m.: Patti Smith, author of Just Kids (HarperCollins, January 19). Says Smith, “Before his untimely death on March 9, 1989, I promised my great friend Robert Mapplethorpe that I would write our story that began when we were both twenty.”

On Thursday, January 21st, at 7 p.m.: Vampire Weekend, whose new album is Contra (XL Recordings, January 12) and Kwame Dawes, who will discuss his body of work and preview the forthcoming poetry anthology, So Much Things To Say (Akashic Books, July 2010).

ARTIST BIOS:

Patti Smith (www.pattismith.net) is a writer, performer, and visual artist. Her seminal album Horses, bearing Robert Mapplethorpe’s renowned portrait, has been hailed as one of the top 100 albums of all time. She has recorded twelve albums. Smith had her first exhibit of drawings at the Gotham Book Mart in 1973 and has been represented by the Robert Miller Gallery since 1978. In 2002, the Andy Warhol Museum launched Strange Messenger, a retrospective exhibit of her drawings, silk screens, and photographs. Her drawings, photographs, and installations were shown in a comprehensive exhibit in 2008 at the Fondation Cartier Pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris. Her books include Witt, Babel, Woolgathering, The Coral Sea, and Auguries of Innocence. In 2005, the French Ministry of Culture awarded Smith the prestigious title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, the highest honor awarded to an artist by the French Republic. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.

2008 was quite a year for Vampire Weekend (www.vampireweekend.com.) After the release of their eponymous debut album in January, the New York quartet graced the cover of Spin, played on almost every television program from Saturday Night Live to David Letterman, and toured the world several times over including stops at the Coachella and Bonnaroo festivals. They regrouped in early 2009 to begin the recording of their second album, Contra. Vampire Weekend’s music and lyrics serve to both construct and deconstruct a world around them. “It’s sadder than the first one, a bit more sentimental,” says singer Ezra Koenig. Like the first album, and primarily recorded in New York with a springtime sojourn to Mexico, Contra was produced by keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij and sees the band stretching out and adding new textures, instrumentation, and rhythms into their sound. With this album, Vampire Weekend have staked out an alien territory – literate, crackling, alive – that’s unmistakably their own.

Born in Ghana in 1962, Kwame Dawes (www.kwamedawes.com) spent most of his childhood and early adult life in Jamaica. He is a writer of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays. As a poet, he is profoundly influenced by the rhythms and textures of that lush place, citing in a recent interview his “spiritual, intellectual, and emotional engagement with reggae music.” His book Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius remains the most authoritative study of the lyrics of Bob Marley. Dawes has published fifteen collections of poetry, most recently Back of Mount Peace (2009) and Hope's Hospice (2009). He has published two novels: Bivouac (2009) and She's Gone (2007, Akashic Books), winner of the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. His essays have appeared in journals including Bomb Magazine, The London Review of Books, Granta, Essence, World Literature Today, and Double Take Magazine. In 2009, Dawes won an Emmy for LiveHopeLove.com, based on Kwame Dawes's Pulitzer Center project, HOPE: Living and loving with HIV in Jamaica. Dawes is Distinguished Poet in Residence, Louis Frye Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts and founder and executive director of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative. He is the director of the University of South Carolina Arts Institute and the programming director of the Calabash International Literary Festival, which takes place in Jamaica in May of each year. His forthcoming anthology, So Much Things to Say (Akashic Books, July 2010), includes Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott and many others. Akashic Books (www.akashicbooks.com), is a Brooklyn-based independent company founded by Girls Against Boys bassist Johnny Temple for the purpose of “reverse-gentrification of the literary world.”

Katherine Lanpher (www.katherinelanpher.com) is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist, host of TIME Financial Toolkit on Time.com, contributing editor to More magazine, and substitute host for “The Takeaway,” a collaboration of WNYC, PRI, the BBC and The New York Times. Springboard Press published her essay collection, Leap Days.

“Upstairs at the Square,” which celebrated three years in June, has featured authors such as Nick Cave, William Gibson, Tom Wolfe, David Lynch, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Anna Gavalda, Kurt Andersen, Min Jin Lee and musicians including Regina Spektor, Duncan Sheik and members of the cast of Spring Awakening, Japanther, Badly Drawn Boy, Au Revoir Simone, Aimee Mann and more. An archive of recordings is available on Barnes & Noble.com (www.bn.com/upstairs), where “Upstairs at the Square” is enjoyed by listeners around the world.

About Barnes & Noble, Inc.

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller and a Fortune 500 company, operates 775 bookstores in 50 states. Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Barnes & Noble, also operates 636 college bookstores serving nearly 4 million students and over 250,000 faculty members at colleges and universities across the United States. Barnes & Noble is the nation’s top bookseller brand for the sixth year in a row, as determined by a combination of the brand’s performance on familiarity, quality, and purchase intent; the top bookseller in quality for the second year in a row and the number two retailer in trust, according to the EquiTrend® Brand Study by Harris Interactive®. Barnes & Noble conducts its online business through Barnes & Noble.com (www.bn.com), one of the Web’s largest e-commerce sites, which also features hundreds of thousands of titles in its eBookstore (www.bn.com/ebooks). Customers can buy and read eBooks on a wide range of platforms, including the iPhone and iPod touch, BlackBerry® smartphones, as well as most Windows® and Mac® laptops or full-sized desktop computers.

General information on Barnes & Noble, Inc. can be obtained via the Internet by visiting the company’s corporate website: www.barnesandnobleinc.com.

Social Media Links:

Follow B&N on Twitter: www.bn.com/twitter

Become a fan of our Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/barnesandnoble

Subscribe to our channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/BNStudio