Library Talks

Historian and author Heather Cox Richardson sits down with Andrew Delbanco to discuss her most recent book,  Democracy Awakening.

The iconic feminist poet Judy Grahn re-explores the traditions of lesbian poetry from Sappho to Pat Parker and beyond.

Prize-winning author Vauhini Vara sits down with Leslie Jamison to discuss her first collection of short stories, This Is Salvaged .

Authors Ayana Mathis, author of The Unsettled , and Justin Torres, author of Blackouts , speak about their award-winning novels.

In this episode of Library Talks, author Kliph Nesteroff sits down with comedian Marc Maron to discuss his new book, Outrageous , which chronicles the controversies of American show business and the ongoing attempts to change what we watch, read, and hear.

Politicians and activists discuss the continuing push to revive the much-contested Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).

Mary Beard returns to the Library to talk with Tim Gunn about her new book, Emperor of Rome , her long-awaited follow up to the international bestseller SPQR .

In this episode of Library Talks, C Pam Zhang sits down with Padma Lakshmi to discuss her latest novel Land of Milk and Honey , which tells the story of climate disaster and a young chef discovering pleasure at the end of the world. Zhang is the winner of the Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award and the Asian/Pacific Award for Literature, a Booker Prize nominee, and a finalist for numerous...

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Matthew Desmond's latest book, Poverty, by America , reimagines the American debate on poverty, making an original and ambitious argument about why it persists here: because too many of us benefit from it. In this episode of Library Talks, Desmond speaks with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Andrea Elliot to discuss his new ways of thinking around this morally urgent...

Acclaimed scholar and writer Alondra Nelson leads a discussion on the transnational impacts of artificial intelligence and the need for global collaboration. Speakers include Karen Kornbluh, Maria Ressa, Olatunbosun Tijani, Tim Wu

The new novel by award-winning author Luis Alberto Urrea, Good Night, Irene , tells an overlooked story of women's heroism in World War II, inspired by the experiences of his own mother. Urrea speaks about his "moving and graceful tribute to heroic women" that asks whether a friendship forged on the front lines of war defines a life forever.

Sasha Velour is an iconic queen. Turns out she's also a historian! In this episode of Library Talks , Velour sits down with drag historian Joe E. Jeffreys to discuss her new book, The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag , a treasure trove of revelations about radical queer expressions throughout time. The revered entertainer and winner of RuPaul's Drag Race weaves together gender theory,...

Welcome back! The Library presents conversations with an incredible array of authors, performers, activists, and thinkers, and our Library Talks podcast brings some of those conversations to you. Today we are relaunching the show with Sherrilyn Iffill delivering the annual Robert B. Silvers Lecture, titled How America Ends and Begins Again . Within this dangerous period of accelerated democratic u...

The Stonewall Riots were a flash point in LGBTQ history. After the riots that took place at the Stonewall Inn in June 1969, the LGBTQ civil rights movement went from handfuls of pioneering activists to a national movement mobilizing thousands. On this special episode we'll hear what happened over the nights of the riots through archival audio of iconic transgender rights activists Sylvia Rivera, M...

Aidan Flax-Clark welcomes co-host Jason Baumann, Assistant Director for Collection Development and Coordinator of Humanities and the Library's LGBTQ Initiative , for a special episode about queer life before the Stonewall Riots.  Frank Collerius, Manager of the Jefferson Market branch at NYPL, interviews writer and curator Hugh Ryan about his new book ' when brooklyn was queer .' We also hear a re...

Marlon James is a Jamaican novelist and winner of the Man Booker Prize. His recent book  Black Leopard, Red Wolf  is the first in a epic trilogy that blends myth, fantasy, and history—what James has described as "African Game of Thrones." He spoke with fellow fantasy and comic book fan, Kevin Young, who is a poet and the Director for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. They talked...

The Gay Liberation Front was an organization recognized for publishing the first gay liberation newspaper in the world,"Come Out!". It provided openly queer media exposure for many activists, writers, and artists. In conjunction with the NYPL exhibition Love & Resistance: Stonewall 50, founding members of the GLF, Perry Brass and Karla Jay, speak with media and activism scholar Michael Bronski, an...

Documentary filmmaker Erin Lee Carr remembers her father, legendary journalist David Carr, in a moving new memoir, "All That You Leave Behind." Erin Lee Carr, went looking for support and comfort in the lifetime of correspondence that they had shared. She was also looking for clues—advice the famous mentor, journalist, and father might have to offer on how to cope with her devastating loss, and co...

At age 83, Robert Caro pulls back the curtains on his process, in his new book "Working." He also answers the question he is asked most often: why does it take him so long to write his books? Caro is the author of the Robert Moses biography "The Power Broker" and "The Years of Lyndon Johnson," The biographer, who has spent much time doing what he does best in the Allen Room of The New York Public...

Dr. Carla Hayden is the 14th Librarian of Congress, the first African American and the first woman to hold this position. Tracy K. Smith is the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States, and Director and Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University. In a conversation with Schomburg Director, Kevin Young they discussed their work, the future of Black librarianship and the democratization of ...

The former executive editor of "The New York Times" tells the story of the news industry in  her new book " Merchants of Truth ."  Jill Abramson traces the past ten years of four major news outlets and their prospective futures in the face of rapidly changing technologies, shifting business models, and a president who almost daily assails the mainstream media as fake news. She spoke with long-time...

Journalist, Eliza Griswold just won a Pulitzer Prize and a Bernstein Award for her recent book,"Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America." Even at its most basic level, the book is a fascinating story about the energy boom's relationship to the natural land. But it's also a moving portrait of a family—a resolute mother trying to care for her two children, sickened by the frac...

Going undercover as a prison guard in Winnifield, Louisiana, journalist  Shane Bauer  exposes the brutality of for-profit private prison systems, and this country's history of outsourcing criminal punishment in his book "American Prison." This stunning work recently won NYPL's 2019 Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. In this conversation with  Aidan Flax-Clark , Bauer discusses the makin...

In the search for meaningful criminal justice reform, are prosecutors one of the keys to change? In her new book, "Charged," journalist  Emily Bazelon argues that prosecutors play an "outsize role" in mass incarceration -- from choosing the charge to setting bail to determining the plea bargain. To discuss the issue, Bazelon was joined by Stacey Abrams, a lawyer, novelist and politician who in 201...

G. Willow Wilson is a critically acclaimed novelist and co-creator of the first Muslim superhero with their own Marvel comic book series. Wilson's new book, The Bird King, is the story of a fantastical quest through the Iberian peninsula at the height of the Spanish Inquisition. She read from the novel and spoke with Hugo award-winning writer N. K. Jemisin about the power of imagining different wo...