Excellence in independent publishing will be celebrated Saturday at the 35th annual Midwest Book Awards gala at Frey Theater, St. Catherine University, 2004 Randolph Ave., St. Paul. The awards, presented by Midwest Independent Publishers Association, recognize creativity in content and execution, overall book quality and the book’s unique contribution to its subject area.

Winners from MIPA’s 12-state Midwest region will be honored in 32 categories during a program hosted by Kansas City media personality Cherayla Haynes that will include a tribute to MIPA founder Sybil Smith, who died in 2024. A 6 p.m. reception will allow guests to network and peruse displays of this year’s finalist books, followed by 7 p.m. announcements of the Gold winners. Tickets are $56.25 to $75. Advance registration is required. Go to mipa.org.

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A technological revolution is unfolding — one that will transform our world in ways we can barely comprehend. As artificial intelligence rapidly evolves and corporate America’s investment in AI continues to explode, we stand at a crossroads that will determine not just America’s future but humanity’s as well.

Many leading experts agree that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is within sight. There is a growing consensus that it could be here within the next two to five years. This is a fundamental shift that will lead to scientific and technological advances beyond our imagination. Some have referred to the development of advanced AI as the Second Industrial Revolution, but the truth is that it will be more significant than that — perhaps incomprehensibly so — and we are not prepared.

The potential benefits of AGI are extraordinary. It could discover cures for diseases we have battled for generations, find solutions to the most difficult mathematical and physics problems, and create trillions of dollars in new wealth.

However, there is real cause for concern that we are racing toward an unprecedented technological breakthrough without considering the many dangers it poses. This includes dangers to our labor force, U.S. national security, and even humanity’s very existence. As Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently suggested, AI could lead to a “bloodbath” for job-seekers trying to find meaningful work, and that is just one threat.

The same technology that could eradicate cancer may also create bioweapons of unprecedented lethality. Systems designed to optimize energy distribution could be weaponized to destroy critical infrastructure. As countries sprint to develop advanced AI, the one conversation we are not having is about the possibility that the same tools that might solve our greatest challenges could create catastrophic and even existential risks.

Back in 2014, Stephen Hawking warned, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” More recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed, “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there will be great companies.” According to Bill Gates, not even doctors and lawyers are safe from AI replacement.

AI advancement is developing at warp speed without any brakes. We are unprepared to deal with those risks.

For this reason, we are launching The Alliance for Secure AI, with a mission to ensure advanced AI innovation continues with security and safety as top priorities. We have no interest in stifling critical technological advancement. America can continue to lead the world in AI development while also establishing the necessary safeguards to protect humanity from catastrophe.

Safeguards begin with effective communication across political lines. We will host strategy meetings with coalition partners across the technology, policy and national security sectors, ensuring that conversations are informed about the dangers of AGI.

Beyond the halls of Congress, this will require a public education push. Most Americans are unaware of the unprecedented threats that AI may pose. Our educational efforts will make complex AI concepts accessible for everyday Americans who must understand that their livelihoods are at risk.

By convening AI experts, policymakers, journalists, and other key stakeholders, we can connect leaders who must work together to get this right for America, and humanity. We have no choice but to build a community committed to responsible AI advancement.

I am profoundly optimistic about AI’s potential to improve our lives. And yet, alongside its potential benefits, AGI will introduce serious and dangerous problems that we will all need to work together to solve.

The advanced AI revolution will be far more consequential than anything in history. Daily activities for everyday Americans will be forever changed. AGI will impact the economy, national security, and the understanding of consciousness itself. Google is already hiring for a “post-AGI” world where AI is smarter than the smartest human being in all cognitive tasks.

It is critical that the U.S. maintains its technological leadership while ensuring AI systems align with human values and American principles. Without safeguards, we risk a future in which the most powerful technology ever created could threaten human liberty and prosperity.

This is about asking fundamental questions: What role should AI play in society? What are the trade-offs we need to consider? What limits should we place on autonomous systems?

Finding the answers to these questions requires broad public engagement — not just from Big Tech, but from every single American.

Brendan Steinhauser is the CEO of The Alliance for Secure AI, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating the public about the implications of advanced artificial intelligence. He wrote this column for the New York Daily News.

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Despite its importance to water quality, the infrastructure that filters and treats stormwater before it runs off into lakes is often invisible. These systems are usually moved into underground pipes or tucked alongside neighborhood ponds.

But a new Woodbury park is doing things differently.

At Hasenbank Park, which officially opened June 12, the South Washington Watershed District and city of Woodbury collaborated on public art and a unique design, aimed at bringing stormwater treatment into the open and encouraging neighbors to feel engaged in water-quality efforts, said Kyle Axtell, a project manager with the watershed district. An interactive online tool helps visualize how stormwater moves through the park.

“Flowing Roots,” a sculpture by Aaron Dysart at the new Hasenbank Park in Woodbury, resembles large plant roots made of plumbing fixtures, topped with a purple coneflower. The work highlights the overlap between nature and industrial design and is meant to encourage park-goers to think more deeply about water flow. (Courtesy of the South Washington Watershed District)

In addition to a connected series of water basins that filter runoff, the park also contains several large-scale sculptures: “Gears,” by Christopher Harrison, is a pathway of gear-shaped stepping stones over the water, and “Flowing Roots” and “Branching Out,” by Aaron Dysart, are a massive root structure and tree form, respectively, built larger-than-life with plumbing pipes.

“We’ve got stormwater management that people can see — it’s not just underground or hidden, and we wanted this to be a property and park space that the public would engage with,” Axtell said. “And what better way to help tell that story than through the use of art?”

Around 2018, the watershed district became concerned that water runoff from the Dancing Waters development, which drains into the Fish Lake wetlands off Valley Creek Road, would threaten the very high water quality in nearby Powers Lake.

Aaron Dysart’s sculpture “Branching Out” stands behind flowing water at the new Hasenbank Park in Woodbury on June 12, 2025. The sculpture, along with several other public art installations and design features, is meant to highlight the park’s active role in filtering stormwater to avoid polluted runoff into Powers Lake. (Courtesy of the South Washington Watershed District)

Separately, the watershed district was spearheading the restoration of Hasenbank Woods, a city-owned property that had become overgrown with invasive species and ash trees suffering from emerald ash borer infestations. The woods happen to be between the wetlands and Powers Lake, water officials realized, and the property also contained a small field the city had no plans for — so maybe two goals could be accomplished at once.

“It really came together as a win-win across the board,” Axtell said. “And in order to have healthy water, which is of course our primary mission at the watershed district, you’ve got to have healthy land.”

And the public art installations are more than decorative, he said — they’re a vital part of the park’s mission to pique people’s interest and encourage them to think about and learn about water-quality protection.

“It’s a way to engage the public that’s not just interpretive language on a panel,” he said. “We’re interested in showing people, more than telling people. Getting people to think about what we’re doing out here and why, as opposed to, oh, just read this paragraph and move on.”

South Washington Watershed District project manager Kyle Axtell, left, and artist Aaron Dysart, second left, talk with attendees during the rainy grand opening for the new Hasenbank Park in Woodbury on June 12, 2025. (Courtesy of the South Washington Watershed District)

This is how artist Dysart sees it, too. He’s well-known within the Twin Cities public art scene and was formerly St. Paul’s city artist, and has been working for several years on developing his two sculptures in Hasenbank Park. (He also created the F. Scott Fitzgerald sculpture in Cathedral Hill that was stolen earlier this year.)

“We’ve realized that you can have all the facts and data and pie charts in the world, but if you don’t have culture and connection, you’re not going to reach people,” he said. “To me, artwork and art as a visual language communicates in a different way — maybe not as direct, but more passionate, or bringing interest in learning a little more about what’s underneath your feet.”

Much of Dysart’s work looks at the intersection between natural wilderness and manufactured objects, he said, so the idea of a stormwater treatment park was particularly interesting to him. And his two pieces are meant to work together in highlighting the water cycle: Trees bring water from the ground into the air, he said, and roots move water from the air back into the ground. And using plumbing fixtures and pipes felt both apt and playful.

“I try my best to situate my work in the realm of throwing people off a little bit,” he said. “Not in a malicious way but in a joyful way, so that they can peel back the onion layers and start to dive in a little deeper.”

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An involving story about movies and queer life in San Francisco decades ago, another about an immigrant who conflates gender-bending sex with colonialism, and a lighthearted romcom are today’s very different reading experiences.

“Midnight at the Cinema Palace”: by Christopher Tradowsky (Simon & Schuster, $28.99)

(Courtesy of Simon & Schuster)

But that was the thing in SF, one night you might be the life of the block party, the queen of the night dancing high on a stoplight, and by the next morning, you’d have vanished without a trace… he wondered, again, if he would ever know how it felt to have sex without the angel of death hanging over him. — from “Midnight at the Cinema Palace”

What a journey we take into San Francisco in 1993 in this quirky, thoughtful debut novel by a St. Paul resident who teaches art history and mentors in the Augsburg University MFA program.

At the height of the AIDS epidemic, Walter moves from the Midwest to San Francisco where he knows nobody. Newly out of the closet, he’s soon captivated by a queer couple; Cary, a woman, and her stylish partner Sasha, a male who could be taken for a woman. The couple, who Walter thinks are straight out of film noir, bond with him over mutual love of cinema and classics from Hollywood’s golden age. They take Walter under their wings and the trio join other young queer people moving from hot clubs to drag parades to making friends like Lawrence, a former child actor and filmmaker living with HIV. Cary and Walter try to write a film script, but mostly quibble over details like a name for their non-existent production.

Although AIDS hangs over this story, there is also a sort of frenetic joy in it, as though the characters know instinctively their scene is coming to an end. So, too, might Walter’s friendship with Cary and Sasha, as he realizes what the couple’s gender bending means to their relationships. And there’s humor, as when sometimes-clueless Walter is knocked over by a drag queen dressed as Queen Elizabeth who falls from a lamp post.

Christopher Tradowsky (Courtesy of Simon & Schuster)

Tradowsky, who drew inspiration for his novel from living in San Francisco in the ’90s, told his publisher he wrote this book at a “dark time” when we were in pandemic lockdown and his teaching job was precarious — “In reaching for joy, I realized that an entire novel could be a love letter to my obsessions, to the things I love best: to San Francisco, to queerness, to the cinematic experience, and above all, to friendship… how to live beyond social conventions, openly, playfully, messily, (sometimes haphazardly), beautifully, deeply, queerly.”

Involving, tender, madcap, filled with references to sometimes-obscure films, this is a big novel you can lose yourself in for a long summer read.

Tradowsky will introduce his book at 7 p.m. on Thursday, June 26, at Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls.

“The Perfect Match”: by M. E. Bakos (Independently published, $14.95)

She looked devastated when I shoved the paper at her, and I felt guilty. There was a spark, too. Animal attraction. She wore that danged cute jeans jacket again, and her tousled hair fell around her face. —  from “The Perfect Match”

(Courtesy of the author)

Merry is having trouble with her landlord in this debut romance from the author of the Home Renovator mystery series. She has returned to her little Minnesota hometown of Reindeer Falls after a divorce along with Fido, the faithful dog she adopted after her breakup. As soon as she moves into her new apartment she’s scolded by Joel, the manager, who thinks dogs bark and poop too much. This testy relationship continues although Joel is becoming increasingly charmed by Merry, who does notice his wavy brown hair and dimple. Merry has her own problems. Her aunt is a matchmaker, sending her to blind dates that do not end well. And her ex-husband makes an appearance asking for forgiveness. Told in the voices of Joel and Merry, this romance, set around the Christmas holidays, is just right for fans who know from the beginning these two are made for each other.

Bakos will sign books from 10 a.m. to noon Friday, June 27 at Lake Country Booksellers, 4766 Washington Ave., White Bear Lake.

“The Seers”: by Sulaiman Addonia (Coffee House Press, $18)

(Coffee House Press)

This edgy, frank and complex account of an Eritrean young woman’s conflating of her sexual desires and her emotions after fleeing to London is not for everyone, but those with an open mind to literature will see asylum seekers in a new way as they follow Hannah, who has escaped war in her home country and ended up in England. Told in 120 pages as one long chapter, with no paragraphs or quotation marks, we see Hannah in limbo in a foster home, unable to work or go to school until the Home Office accepts her. The narrative moves from that foster home, where she experiences racial taunts from the man across the street, to later living under a tree in a park. She often tells her thoughts to her boyfriend, BB, even when he’s not there. With her sex partners, male or female, she finds a home in their bodies:

“BB, we are not in Europe on a quest to find alternatives to our countries lying in ruins but to construct our own in the island of our lust, I said. I don’t understand, Hannah, he said. Are you equating sex to a country? I didn’t know whether his question was genuine or had a hint of mockery about it. But who are we, I thought, if we don’t savour our ridiculousness, our madness, in the way we embrace sanity?”

Racism, colonialism, memories of war-torn countries from which these characters came, are all woven into this imaginative look into an immigrant woman’s experiences.

Addonia is an Eritrean-Ethiopian-British author living in Belgium. His previous acclaimed novels are “The Consequences of Love” and “Silence Is My Mother Tongue.”

“The Seers” is one of seven titles by authors from around the world being produced and published by Minneapolis-based Coffee House through a $35,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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