Free Library Podcast

In conversation with Mike Sielski A staff writer at The Atlantic, Jennifer Senior won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for ''Twenty Years Gone,'' an account of a family still reeling from the loss of a loved one on 9/11. Her critically acclaimed 2015 book All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood spent eight weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, and in 2014 she deliver...

In conversation with Pia Sarkar A former longtime columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, Vanessa Hua has written about Asia and the diaspora from countries such as China, Burma, and South Korea, and has contributed articles to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She is the author of the bestselling novel A River of Stars, the award-winning story collection Deceit and Oth...

In conversation with Shane Claiborne Alex Mar is the author of Seventy Times Seven, a chronicle of the brutal 1985 Indiana murder of an elderly white woman by a fifteen-year-old Black girl.  ''A probing examination of the intersection of race, crime, and punishment (Kirkus), it delves into the crime's reverberating effects across the world and the victim's grandson's campaign to spare the perpetra...

Angela Saini is the author of Superior, an ''easy-to-read blend of science reporting, cultural criticism, and personal reflection'' (Slate) that explores the resurgence of the harmful and faulty study of race science. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed Inferior, a new portrait of women's minds, bodies, and evolutionary roles gained through an investigation of how science has failed...

In conversation with Laura McGrath, Assistant Professor of English at Temple University A ''soul-quaking'' (Los Angeles Review of Books) meditation on the everyday miracles we take for granted set amongst the travels and travails of a Shakespearean acting troupe in the years following a global plague,  Emily St. John Mandel 's bestselling Station 11 was a finalist for the National Book Award and t...

In conversation with award-winning chef and restauranteur Michael Solomonov Ari Shapiro is the cohost of NPR's All Things Considered, the most listened-to radio news program in the country. Formerly NPR's White House correspondent and international correspondent based in London, he has earned two Edward R. Murrow awards, the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize, and recognition from the American Bar Ass...

In conversation with Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.  Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Endowed Lecture A professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School for more than 40 years,  Judith Lewis Herman , M.D., is one of the United States' foremost experts on the treatment of post-traumatic stress and incest. ''One of the most important psychiatry works to be published since Freud'' (The New York Times), her...

Featuring magician, Justin Gilmore A staff writer at The New Yorker for more than three decades, Adam Gopnik is the author of Paris to the Moon, The Table Comes First, At the Strangers' Gate, and A Thousand Small Sanities, a ''witty, humane, learned'' (The New York Times) defense of liberalism amidst the dogmatic divisions of our time. He is also a sought-after public speaker, widely anthologized...

In conversation with Tamala Edwards, anchor, 6abc Action News morning edition The former longtime CEO of Black Entertainment Television (BET), Debra Lee currently serves on the boards of several of the world's leading corporations, including Proctor & Gamble, Warner Bros. Discovery, Revlon, Burberry Group Plc, and Marriott International. She is the founder and chairwoman of Leading Women Defined F...

Sandra Shaber Memorial Lecture In conversation with award-winning journalist and broadcaster Tracey Matisak The Sum of Us, Heather McGhee's 2021 odyssey across the American landscape of inequality, won wide acclaim for its empathetic and incisive imagining of a future that could offer more than our current racial paradigm. A New York Times bestseller, longlisted for the National Book Award, and na...

In conversation with Marc Lamont Hill British American journalist Mehdi Hasan hosts the eponymously titled The Mehdi Hasan Show, a news and politics program that airs on MSNBC and NBC's streaming channel Peacock. He is also the fill-in host for The Rachel Maddow Show, All in with Chris Hayes, and The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, among other programs. A former presenter on Al Jazeera English,...

In conversation with Sharon G. Flake Camonghne Felix is the author of Build Yourself a Boat, ''an exquisite and thoughtful'' (Bustle) poetry collection that was longlisted for the National Book Award in poetry and shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award, among other honors. A contributing writer at The Cut, her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming in numerous places, including The New Yorker...

Veteran United States Secret Service Officer  Leth Oun  has protected presidents and vice presidents in four administrations in almost every state and more than a dozen countries. A political refugee who survived the genocidal Killing Fields of Cambodia, he arrived in America in 1983, became a citizen in 1990, earned a college degree from Widener University in 1998, and went to work for the federa...

In conversation with Airea D. Matthews A ''powerful work of lyric art'' and ''tour de force indictment of the carceral industrial state'' (The New York Times Book Review), Reginald Dwayne Betts ' poetry collection Felon won the NAACP Image Award, the American Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Also the author of two other poetry collections and a memoir, he r...

Paul Harding  won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Tinkers, ''an astringent meditation on loss, family ties, and the presence of the past'' (The Guardian) in which a dying elderly man wanders through the rooms of his life's large and quiet moments. He is also the author of the novel Enon and is an accomplished musician. The director of the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook...

Jamila Minnicks' debut novel Moonrise Over New Jessup tells the story of a 1950s-era, all-Black Alabama town that is resistant to desegregation and the opposing political viewpoints that threaten a young couple's burgeoning romance. Praised by Barbara Kingsolver for its dive into the ''deep complexity of the American Civil Rights movement'' by way of ''compelling characters and a heart-pounding pl...

In conversation with Elias Rodriques Referred to by Carmen Maria Machado as ''all blood and nerve and near-unbearable beauty,'' Joseph Earl Thomas ' Sink is a coming-of-age memoir that chronicles the author's escape from an upbringing of deprivation and abuse to a geek culture in which he could build a family and community on his own terms. An excerpt of this work won the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Pri...

In conversation with Marc Lamont Hill Professor emeritus of Music at the University of Pennsylvania, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. is a celebrated musicologist, composer, pianist, and music historian. He is the author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop and The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History and the Challenge of Bebop, the founder of the music blog Musiquology.com, and the...

In conversation with Jennifer Weiner Acclaimed for their explorations of marital fidelity, friendship, and the difficulties of connecting in modern life,  Sadeqa Johnson 's novels include And Then There Was Me, Second House from the Corner, and Yellow Wife, the harrowing tale of an enslaved woman forced to barter love and freedom while living in one of the Antebellum South's most infamous slave ja...

In conversation with Mark Bowden A Los Angeles Times columnist for the past 22 years and former columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Steve Lopez is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, and is the winner of the H.L. Mencken, the Ernie Pyle, and Mike Royko Awards for his contributions to journalism. He is also the author of the One Book, One Philadelphia selection The Solo...

In conversation with Michael Simmons and Robert Saleem Holbrook Dan Berger  is the author of the James A. Rawley Prize winning Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era, an ''illuminating'' (The Nation) reevaluation of 20th century African American activism through the prism of mass incarceration. A professor of comparative ethnic studies and associate dean for faculty develo...

A professor of education, philosophy, and political science at the University of Pennsylvania, Sigal R. Ben-Porath is the co-author of Making Up Our Mind: What School Choice Is Really About, and is the author of Free Speech on Campus and Citizenship Under Fire: Democratic Education in Times of Conflict, among other works. She is an executive committee member of the Andrea Mitchell Center for the S...

In conversation with award-winning journalist and broadcaster Tracey Matisak ''A public intellectual with much to offer about teaching (and unlearning) history'' (The Washington Post),  Clint Smith , in his bestselling book How the Word Is Passed, takes the reader on a tour of monuments and landmarks that tell an intergenerational story about the continuing legacy of slavery in the United States....

In conversation with Tamala Edwards, anchor, 6abc Action News morning edition Ibram X. Kendi  is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University and the founding director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a CBS News correspondent. He is the author of many books including Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History...

In conversation with Robert Kolker John Hendrickson  is the author of a 2019 Atlantic article titled ''What Joe Biden Can't Bring Himself to Say.'' An account of the President's-and his own-lifelong experience with stuttering, it was read by more than two million people, including multitudes of stutterers who responded with stories of their own journeys. Life on Delay is a memoir born from that ar...