Free Library Podcast

In conversation with Dr. Jason Karlawish In partnership with the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society The clinical consulting director of support groups at The CaringKind (formerly The Alzheimer's Association), Dasha Kiper has an MA in clinical psychology from Columbia University. For the past decade she has worked with dementia patients, counseled caregivers, led support groups, trained and supervised mental health professionals, and counseled former caregivers who now lead support groups. Informed by her work as both a counselor and work as a caregiver herself, Travelers to Unimaginable Lands employs a wide range of compassionate stories to combat the myth of the so-called perfect caregiver. These ''moving and often surprising'' (The Wall Street Journal) case histories meld science and storytelling to show that caregivers don't just witness cognitive decline in their loved ones with dementia-they are its invisible victims. Dr. Jason Karlawish is the author of The Problem of Alzheimer's: How Science, Culture, and Politics Turned a Rare Disease into a Crisis and What We Can Do About It. A Professor of Medicine, Medical Ethics and Health Policy, and Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, he is Co-Director of the Penn Memory Center, where he cares for patients. He also serves on the board of directors for The Greenwall Foundation, a grant-based organization dedicated to expanding bioethics knowledge. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Forbes, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, among other places. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 4/30/2024)

In conversation with Beth Kephart A ''master of illusion, and one of the best storytellers around'' (NPR), Amy Tan is the author of the beloved novels The Joy Luck Club, a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, for which she also co-wrote the film adaptation screenplay; The Kitchen God's Wife; The Hundred Secret Senses, and The Valley of Amazement. Her prolific body of work also includes the memoir Where the Past Begins, several other novels and works of nonfiction, two children's books, and essays and stories that appeared in scores of periodicals and anthologies. In The Backyard Bird Chronicles, Tan pecks out a thoughtful ode to birding and the hidden beauty that lives around us, nested together with her own soaring illustrations. Renowned for her ability ''to generalize from her personal experience to the greater human one'' (The Washington Post), Beth Kephart is the author of more than 30 books across a wide range of genres, including poetry, young adult fiction, and, most notably, the memoir. These works include the award-winning how-to-guide Handling the Truth; A Slant of Sun, a National Book Award finalist; Love, an ode to all things Philly; and Wife | Daughter | Self, an interlocking essay collection about her various identities. A writing professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the co-founder of Junction workshops, she is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, a Pew Fellowship, and the Speakeasy Poetry Prize, among other honors. Her latest book is an illustrated memoir, My Life In Paper. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 4/29/2024)

In 2006, Bakari Sellers defeated a twenty-six-year incumbent State Representative to become the youngest member of the South Carolina state legislature and the youngest African American elected official in the nation. The state's 2014 Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, he currently heads the strategic communication and public affairs team at the Strom Law Firm in Columbia, South Carolina and works as a CNN political analyst. Recently named to TIME's ''40 Under 40'' list, he is the author of the New York Times bestseller My Vanishing Country, a memoir and historical analysis of the lives of America's often-overlooked black working-class, and hosts the Bakari Sellers Podcast, a twice-weekly show that addresses a variety of cultural and political topics. In The Moment, Sellers examines the politics and policies that most affect the future of Black Americans, including inequities in education, healthcare, and policing. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 4/25/2024)

In conversation with Robert E. Hamilton, Head of Eurasia Research - Eurasia Program, Foreign Policy Research Institute Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Endowed Lecture The White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times, David E. Sanger has been a member of three Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist teams, including in 2017 for international reporting. His bestselling books include The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power; Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power; and The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age, which was adapted into an award-winning HBO documentary. Sanger is also a regular contributor to CNN and teaches national security policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. In New Cold Wars, he offers an in-depth account of the United States' high-stakes struggles against two very dissimilar adversaries-Xi Jinping's China and Vladimir Putin's Russia. Colonel (Retired) Robert E. Hamilton, Ph.D., is the Head of Research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute's Eurasia Program and an Associate Professor of Eurasian Studies at the U.S. Army War College. In a 30-year career in the U.S. Army, spent primarily as an Eurasian Foreign Area Officer, he served overseas in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Germany, Belarus, Qatar, Afghanistan, the Republic of Georgia, Pakistan and Kuwait. He is the author of numerous articles and monographs on conflict and security issues, focusing principally on the former Soviet Union and the Balkans. He is a graduate of the German Armed Forces Staff College and the U.S. Army War College and holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the United States Military Academy, a Master's Degree in Contemporary Russian Studies and a Ph.D. in Political Science, both from the University of Virginia. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 4/18/2024)

In conversation with Patrick Behrer, Research Economist, Development Economics, World Bank How the subtle but significant consequences of a hotter planet have already begun-from lower test scores to higher crime rates-and how we might tackle them today. In Slow Burn, R. Jisung Park draws upon vast amounts of raw data and novel economics to examine the consequences of climate change on an astonishing array of social groups and institutions. An assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, environmental and labor economist he holds positions in the School of Social Policy and Practice and the Wharton School of Business. He has spent more than a decade investigating and writing about economic inequalities and outcomes created by climate change. A Rhodes Scholar, a research affiliate at the Institute of Labor Economics, and a faculty fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, Park has consulted with such organizations as the World Bank and the New York City Departments of Education and Health. Patrick Behrer is an Economist in the Sustainability and Infrastructure team of the World Bank's Development Research Group. Behrer's work focuses on the economics of air pollution, climate change, and climate adaptation. His work has focused on the impacts of air pollution and climate change on human capital formation and the relationship between agriculture and air pollution. His work leverages big data from online and administrative sources and recent advances in satellite remote sensing technology. Prior to joining the World Bank in 2021, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in 2020 from Harvard University in Public Policy. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 4/17/2024)

Dennis Yi Tenen is an associate professor of English at Columbia University, where he also serves as co-director of the Center for Comparative Media. Affiliated with Columbia's Data Science Institute, he is a former fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and worked as a Microsoft engineer in the Windows group, where he wrote code that runs on millions of personal computers around the world. His articles, which span topics ranging from literary theory to computational narratology, can be found in such journals as Amodern, New Literary History, and boundary2. In Literary Theory for Robots, Tenen takes readers on a centuries-spanning trip through automation to explore the relationship between writers and emerging technologies. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 4/11/2024)

In conversation with award-winning journalist and broadcaster Tracey Matisak Acclaimed for her study of the intersections of pop music, contemporary Black U.S. culture, and sex and gender, sociologist Tricia Rose is the author of Longing to Tell, The Hip Hop Wars, and, most notably, Black Noise, which is considered a foundational text for the academic study of hip hop. She is the Chancellor's Professor of Africana Studies and the director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University, and she has presented seminars and workshops on a wide range of topics to scholarly and general audiences. The recipient of grants and fellowships from the Mellon, the Robert Wood Johnson, the Ford, and the Rockefeller Foundations, Rose has been widely profiled and featured on several national media outlets. In Metaracism, she presents a definitive map of the vast and often obscured practices, policies, and beliefs that proliferate systemic racism in the United States. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 4/10/2024)

Praised for her ''darkly funny and painfully sharp'' (Los Angeles Times) fiction, Lydia Millet is the author of the novel A Children's Bible, shortlisted for the National Book Award and a New York Times Top 10 book of 2020; the story collection Love in Infant Monkeys, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and the novel Dinosaurs, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her other honors include awards from PEN Center USA and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a longtime editor and staff writer at the Center for Biological Diversity. We Loved It All, named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by Oprah Daily and Literary Hub, is a memoir that ponders the richness of the human experience amidst the environmental calamities that threaten life on Earth. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 4/9/2024)

Barbara Gohn Day Memorial Lecture In conversation with Rebeca L. Hey-Colón, Professor of Latinx Studies, Temple University Awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Obama in 2013, poet, essayist, and fiction writer Julia Alvarez is renowned for her lyrical, poignant, politically insightful books. These many works include How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, which details the lives of four sisters before and after their exile from the Dominican Republic; In the Time of the Butterflies, a million-copy bestseller that was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts for its national Big Read program; and Afterlife, a novel that explores the notion of keeping faith with our fellow humans in a broken world. Alvarez's many awards include the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature, a Latina Leader Award in Literature from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, and the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature. In The Cemetery of Untold Stories, Alvarez explores the very nature of storytelling in the tale of a fiction writer who finds that her buried untold stories have taken on lives of their own. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 4/4/2024)

In conversation with award-winning journalist and broadcaster, Tracey Matisak Introduced by State Rep. Donna Bullock Stacey Abrams is the Ronald W. Walters Endowed Chair for Race and Black Politics at Howard University. After serving eleven years in the Georgia House of Representatives-seven as minority leader-she became the 2018 Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia, where she won more votes than any Democrat in the state's history. Dedicated to civic engagement, she is the creator of multiple nonprofit organizations devoted to democracy protection, voting rights, and effective public policy. Abrams has also co-founded successful companies, including a financial services firm, an energy and infrastructure consulting firm, and a media company, Sage Works Productions, Inc. Her books include the New York Times nonfiction bestsellers Lead from the Outside and Our Time Is Now, and a thriller, titled While Justice Sleeps. Her latest thriller, Rogue Justice, follows the continuing intrigues of While Justice Sleeps' protagonist, Supreme Court law clerk Avery Keene, as she unravels a conspiracy involving a slew of federal judges. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 4/5/2024)

''A fountain of observations'' (The Boston Globe), Sloane Crosley is the author of three New York Times bestselling essay collections, How Did You Get This Number, Look Alive Out There, and I Was Told There'd Be Cake, which was a finalist for the 2009 Thurber Prize for American Humor. Exploring various aspects of life's disappointments, morality, and modern love, her novels Cult Classic and The Clasp were named best books of the year by numerous publications. Crosley is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, a former editor of The Best American Travel Writing series, and her other work has appeared in The New York Times, Bon Appetit, The Village Voice, McSweeney's, Vice, and Smithsonian. In Grief Is for People, she offers an elegiac examination of loss in the aftermath of her close friend's death by suicide. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 4/3/2024)

In conversation with Herman Beavers M. Nzadi Keita is the author of the poetry collection Brief Evidence of Heaven, a finalist for the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Prize that explored the life of Anna Murray Douglass, Frederick Douglass' first wife. Her other poems and essays have appeared in such publications as A Face to Meet the Faces: A Persona Poetry Anthology, Killens Review of Arts and Letters, and Poet Lore. She formerly taught creative writing, American literature, and Africana studies at Ursinus College, and was an adviser to the award-winning documentary BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez and to Mural Arts Philadelphia. Keita's latest collection of poetry, Migration Letters, is a reflection on Black working-class identity and culture from the 1960s to now. A professor of English and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Herman Beavers teaches 20th Century and Contemporary African American literature and poetry writing. He is the author of the scholarly monograph Geography and the Political Imaginary in the Novels of Toni Morrison, the poetry chapbook Obsidian Blues, and his poems have appeared in Cleaver Magazine, Versadelphia, and The American Arts Quarterly, among other publications. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 4/2/2024)

Pine Tree Foundation Endowed Lecture Fareed Zakaria is the host of CNN's flagship domestic and international affairs program Fareed Zakaria GPS, which has aired around the world since its debut in 2008. Also a weekly columnist for the Washington Post, he formerly served as editor of Newsweek International, managing editor of Foreign Affairs, a Time magazine columnist, an analyst for ABC News, and the host of PBS's Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria. He is the author of four New York Times bestsellers, including Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World, The Post-American World, The Future of Freedom, and In Defense of a Liberal Education. In Age of Revolutions, Zakaria melds historical study with contemporary analysis to map the ways in which societal upheavals and political paradigm shifts define our current culture of polarization. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 3/28/2024)

In conversation with Airea Dee Matthews Hanif Abdurraqib is the author of A Little Devil in America, a sweeping look at Black music, art, and culture that won the Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burns Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His other works include the essay collection They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, which was named a best book of 2017 by Esquire, the Chicago Tribune, and NPR, among other outlets; Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, a New York Times bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle Award and Kirkus Prize finalist; and the poetry collection A Fortune for Your Disaster, winner of the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. His other essays, poems, and criticism have been published in a wide array of media. In There's Always This Year, Abdurraqib offers an emotional and historical meditation on basketball-who makes it, who we think should be successful in the game, and the very notion of role models. Airea D. Matthews is the 2022–23 Philadelphia Poet Laureate and directs the poetry program at Bryn Mawr College. Her collection Simulcra won the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Best American Poets, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, and VQR, among other journals. Matthews' other honors include a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, a 2020 Pew Fellowship, and the 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. Her latest work, Bread and Circus, addresses themes of income inequality, commodification, and conventional economic theories through poetry, prose, and imagery. The book was nominated for an LA Times Poetry Book Prize. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 3/27/2024)

Rahul Mehta's debut poetry collection, Feeding the Ghosts, explores the solace to be found in the everyday beauty sometimes overshadowed by larger calamity, as well as the author's identities, relationships, and culture. Also the author of the novel No Other World and the short story collection Quarantine, Mehta has contributed work to an array of publications, including the Kenyon Review, The Sun, the Massachusetts Review, and the New York Times Magazine. A creative writing teacher at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and named to Out magazine's 2011 ''Out 100'' list of inspiring individuals, they have earned a Lambda Literary Award and an Asian American Literary Award. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 3/26/2024)

In conversation with Jo Piazza Acclaimed for her ''knack for writing beautiful stories that speak to the anxiety of forging a new road for oneself'' (Bustle), Rebecca Serle is the New York Times bestselling author of One Italian Summer, In Five Years, The Dinner List, and the young adult novels The Edge of Falling and When You Were Mine. Serle also adapted her YA book series Famous in Love into a hit television series of the same name and her book When You Were Mine was the basis of the 2022 film Rosaline. A tale of romantic aspiration and exasperation, Expiration Dates is a novel in which for each potential partner she meets, a woman magically receives a slip of paper that lists his name and the amount of time that they will be together. Jo Piazza is the international bestselling author of twelve books, including the Good Morning America Book Club pick We Are Not Like Them with Christine Pride. She's also the host of the critically acclaimed Under the Influence podcast. Her work has been featured in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. Her new book is The Sicilian Inheritance. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 3/25/2024)

In conversation with Lexy Bloom ''A delicious new Gilded Age family drama-almost a satire-set in the leafy enclaves of Brooklyn Heights'' (Vogue), Jenny Jackson's Pineapple Street tells the story of three women navigating the shoals of forbidden love, gender expectations, family money, and too much tennis. A New York Times bestseller and a Good Morning America Book Club Pick, it was named a best book of 2023 by numerous publications and media outlets, including Time, NPR, Town & Country, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, and the BBC. A vice president and executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf, Jackson is a graduate of Williams College and the Columbia Publishing Course. Lexy Bloom is Editorial Director at Knopf Cooks and Senior Editor at Alfred A. Knopf, where she works with writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Haruki Murakami, Orhan Pamuk, Deb Perelman, Hetty McKinnon, Bill Buford, and many more Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 3/21/2024)

In conversation with author and Pennsylvania State Senator, Nikil Saval In Solidarity, Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix offer a comprehensive look at not just the popular and ethereal idea of solidarity, but how it can be used by political organizing movements to affect real societal change. Also a lively history of such movements from Ancient Roman revolts to Occupy Wall Street and BLM, it reveals the nuts-and-bolts methods through which solidarity is built and sustained. Leah Hunt-Hendrix earned a PhD in Religion, Ethics, and Politics from Princeton University, where she wrote her dissertation on the Ethics of Solidarity. In 2012 she co-founded Solidaire, a nationwide network of philanthropists who fund progressive movements; and in 2017, she co-founded Way to Win, an organization devoted to electoral strategy. A Senior Advisor at the American Economic Liberties Project and a member of the Board of Directors of the Solutions Project, she is an advisor to her family foundation, the Sister Fund. The cofounder of the Debt Collective, a union of debtors, Astra Taylor is the director of several documentaries and the author of The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, Democracy May Not Exist But We'll Miss It When It's Gone, and The People's Platform, winner of an American Book Award. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and n+1, among other publications. She sits on the editorial board of Hammer & Hope and is an advisor to Lux Magazine. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees. (recorded 3/19/2024)

In conversation with Kim Kelly A labor journalist who regularly contributes to In These Times magazine and The Guardian, Hamilton Nolan has written about inequality, politics, and class war for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Gawker, and Splinter, among other publications. He also regularly contributes articles about boxing to Defector. A member of the Writers Guild of America, East, Hamilton led the 2015 effort to unionize Gawker Media, where he was the longest-serving writer in the organization's history. In The Hammer, he offers a comprehensive overview of the contemporary American labor movement and highlights specific actions and organizations where politics and workers combine to affect change. Kim Kelly has worked as a labor columnist for Teen Vogue since 2018, and her writing on labor, class, and politics has appeared in The New Republic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Esquire, among other places. Also a video correspondent for More Perfect Union, The Real News Network, and Means TV, she formerly served as the heavy metal editor at VICE's ''Noisey'' imprint. She was an original member of the VICE union, is a member of the Industrial Workers of the World's Freelance Journalists Union, and is a member and elected councilperson for the Writers Guild of America, East. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees. (recorded 3/18/2024)

In conversation with Airea Dee Matthews Referred to by Nick Cave as ''exquisitely crafted fire bombs of incandescent rage,'' Nam Le's 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem is a debut collection of verse that both honors and shatters the tropes of diasporic literature. Le is also the author of The Boat, a short story collection that takes readers to such places as New York City, Tehran, his birth country of Vietnam, and Australia, where he was raised and now lives. Winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Award, and a Pushcart Prize, this work has been widely anthologized, translated, and taught. Le has also contributed writing to a wide array of publications, including Zoetrope, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Bomb, Boston Review, and One Story. Airea Dee Matthews is the 2022–23 Philadelphia Poet Laureate and directs the poetry program at Bryn Mawr College. Her collection Simulcra won the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Best American Poets, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, and VQR, among other journals. Matthews' other honors include a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, a 2020 Pew Fellowship, and the 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. Her latest work, Bread and Circus, addresses themes of income inequality, commodification, and conventional economic theories through poetry, prose, and imagery. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees. (recorded 3/14/2024)