Free Library Podcast

In conversation with Laura McGrath, Assistant Professor of English at Temple University ''Among our greatest contemporary writers'' (The Miami Herald), Claire Messud is the author of The Emperor's Children, a cutting portrait of life among Manhattan's junior intelligentsia that was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Her other acclaimed and bestselling novels include When the World Was Steady, The Hunters, The Last Life, The Woman Upstairs, and The Burning Girl. A PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, the recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe fellowships, and the winner of the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Messud teaches writing at Harvard University. Named one of the most anticipated books of 2024 by The Guardian, Oprah Daily, and New York magazine, This Strange Eventful History follows the seven-decade arc of an itinerant French Algerian colonial family born on the wrong side of history and forced to reckon with their interpersonal and larger political legacies. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 5/15/2024)

''His generation's most gifted writer of love's complicated, contradictory power'' (Los Angeles Times), Colm Tóibín is the author of an impressive list of novels, short stories, essays, plays, poetry, and criticism. His novels The Master, The Testament of Mary, and Brooklyn were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and the last was adapted into a popular BAFTA Award-winning film of the same name. The Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, Tóibín earned an Irish PEN Award and was named the Laureate for Irish Fiction for 2022–2024 by the Arts Council of Ireland, among scores of other honors. Set 20 years after the events of the international bestseller Brooklyn, Long Island finds the enigmatic émigré protagonist of that book alone in her marriage and facing the travails of middle age and unfulfilled dreams. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 5/13/2024)

In conversation with Annie Duke An ''unflappable and genial point-person'' (The New York Times), Jen Psaki served as the thirty-fourth White House Press Secretary under President Biden until May 2022. Currently the host of MSNBC's Sunday afternoon and Monday evening program, Inside with Jen Psaki, she spent the previous twenty years in public service. This includes stints as White House Communications Director under President Obama, as the spokesperson for the State Department under then Secretary of State John Kerry, work on three presidential campaigns, and numerous other campaign and communication roles. In Say More, Psaki employs her trademark wit and clearheaded analysis to reveal the surprising lessons she learned in the press room and from America's top leaders. Annie Duke is the bestselling author of Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away and Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts. A former professional poker player, she won a World Series of Poker bracelet and is the only woman to have won the World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions. She currently works with First Round Capital Partners, a seed stage venture fund, and teaches executive education at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2023 she completed her PhD in cognitive psychology. Duke is also the co-founder of The Alliance for Decision Education, a nonprofit whose mission is to improve lives by empowering students through decision skills education. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 5/10/2024)

In conversation with Karen Heller, former national features writer and current contributor for The Washington Post, formerly a metro and features columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and a finalist for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in commentary. A journalist at The New York Times for more than 25 years, Frank Bruni has been the paper's Rome bureau chief, head restaurant critic, White House correspondent, and staff writer for its Sunday magazine, among other positions. In 2011 he became the Times' first openly gay op-ed columnist. His bestselling books include Ambling into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush; Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater; Where You Go is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania; and The Beauty of Dusk, a memoir about adjusting to suddenly losing sight in his right eye. Also currently a professor of public policy at Duke University and the writer of a popular weekly Times newsletter, Bruni formerly worked as a Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer for the Detroit Free Press. In The Age of Grievance, he examines the ways in which the blame game has come to define American politics and culture. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 5/9/2024)

In conversation with award winning broadcaster and journalist, Tracey Matisak. ''America's most compelling popular historian'' (The Christian Science Monitor), Erik Larson is the bestselling author of eight critically acclaimed books, including The Splendid and the Vile, a chronicle of Winston Churchill and London during the Blitz; In the Garden of Beasts, the story of the first American ambassador to Nazi Germany; The Devil in the White City, a history of the serial killer who stalked attendees of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago; and Dead Wake, the tale of the 1915 sinking of the RMS Lusitania. A former features writer for The Wall Street Journal and a contributing writer for Time magazine, he has contributed articles to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper's, among other publications. In The Demon of Unrest, Larson delves into the five pivotal months preceding the Civil War to expose the controversies, crises, and personalities that led America into its bloodiest war. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 5/5/2024)

Featuring: Lydia Abarça, Sheila Rohan, Marcia Sells, Karlya Shelton, and Khadija Tariyan (daughter of Gayle McKinney Griffith) In conversation with Shelly Power, The Dr. Carolyn Newsom Executive Director, Philadelphia Ballet Karen Valby's The Swans of Harlem tells the remarkable and-until now-rarely written about true story of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, a trailblazing troupe of Black men and women who performed some of ballet's most iconic works for the such audiences as the Queen of England, the White House, and Stevie Wonder. This history focuses on five foundational members of the group and their enduring bond, including Lydia Abarça, the first Black prima ballerina with a major international dance company, the first Black ballerina on the cover of Dance magazine, and an Essence cover star; and her equally accomplished friends, Gayle McKinney, Sheila Rohan, Marcia Sells, and Karlya Shelton. Valby is a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair, and has also published work in The New York Times, O Magazine, Glamour, Fast Company, and EW, where she spent fifteen years writing about culture. Shelly Power brings to Philadelphia Ballet, formerly Pennsylvania Ballet, her experiences in various artistic and executive leadership roles at Prix de Lausanne in Switzerland and Houston Ballet Academy. Since joining Philadelphia Ballet in 2018, Ms. Power has restructured the organization's administrative functions with new, innovative partnerships, with the goal of promoting that ballet is for everyone. Ms. Power received a Bachelor of Science in Interdisciplinary Studies, with a focus on business, psychology, and fine arts from the University of Houston. She furthered her education at Rice University's Leadership Institute for Non-Profit Executives and Case Western Reserve University's Weatherhead School of Management's Advanced Certification in Non-Profit Management. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 5/2/2024)

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)