Authors Event: Rebecca Rotert & Bud Shaw

On Saturday evening, October 7, 2017 from 5:30 to 7:00 we feature two great writers: Rebecca Rotert and Bud Shaw. We hope you will join us in welcoming them.

Rotert’s book is Last Night at the Blue Angel, and Shaw’s book is Last Night in the OR: A Transplant Surgeon's Odyssey.

Last Night at the Blue Angel

Rotert tells a poignant story of a beautiful and magnetic woman, Naomi, a jazz singer in a Chicago night club, who is nearly swallowed by her ambition, and of her sensitive 10 year old daughter, Sophia, who looks out for her. Told from the alternating perspectives of Sophia and Naomi, their powerful and wrenching story unfolds in layers, revealing Sophia’s struggle for her mother’s love with Naomi’s desperate journey to stardom and the colorful cadre of close friends who shaped her along the way. Last Night at the Blue Angel is an unforgettable tale about what happens when our passion for the life we want is at sharp odds with the life we have. It is a story ripe with surprising twists and revelations, and an ending that is bound to break your heart.

Last Night in the OR: A Transplant Surgeon's Odyssey

Shaw’s work is nonfiction. Last Night in the OR is an exhilarating, fast-paced, and beautifully written memoir, one that will captivate readers with its courage, intimacy, and honesty. The 1980s marked a revolution in the field of organ transplants, and Bud Shaw, M.D., was on the front lines. Now retired from active practice, Dr. Shaw relays gripping moments of anguish and elation, frustration and reward, despair and hope in his struggle to save patients. He reveals harshly intimate moments of his medical career: telling a patient's husband that his wife has died during surgery; struggling to complete a twenty-hour operation as mental and physical exhaustion inch closer and closer; and flying to retrieve a donor organ while the patient waits in the operating room. Within these more emotionally charged vignettes are quieter ones, too, like growing up in rural Ohio and being awakened late at night by footsteps in the hall as his father, also a surgeon, slipped out of the house to attend to a patient in the ER.

About the Authors

An internationally renowned transplant surgeon by age 35, Shaw started the transplant program at the University of Nebraska and guided it to become one of the most respected transplant centers in the world. His prize-winning essay, "My Night With Ellen Hutchinson," published in Creative Nonfiction Magazine, was nominated for a 2013 Pushcart Prize and received Special Mention. The father of three adult children, Shaw lives with his wife, novelist Rebecca Rotert in the wooded hills north of Omaha, Nebraska.

Rebecca Rotert’s award-winning poetry and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and journals. Her essay, Proteus on the Vasa was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Last Night at the Blue Angel received an award from the Friends of American Writers. In November of 2015, it received the Nebraska Book Award and was recently longlisted for the Dublin International Literary Award. She was previously the recipient of the Academy of American Poets prize. Rotert is a teaching artist with the Nebraska Writers Collective and she lives in Omaha, NE with her husband, physician and writer Bud Shaw.