Fresh off this summer’s Olympics in Rio, "renaissance runner" Alexi Pappas takes a break with ALOUD to discuss her far-reaching talents and interests. Beyond representing Greece’s Olympic team in the 10,000 meters race, Pappas writes poetry, essays and makes and stars in films, including a semi-autobiographical movie, Tracktown, which recently premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival. A celebrity in the Twitter-sphere—even her signature top bun has its own Twitter account—Pappas will team up with fellow tweeter extraordinaire Sharon Ann Lee of @culturebrain, to muse on the life of a runner, training with men, eating infinite bowls of pasta, and balancing many forms of self-expression on and off the track.

Greenland's ice sheet is now shedding ice so fast (five times faster than it did in the 1990s) that scientists have labeled Greenland's seasonal sea ice "a rotten ice regime." For 20 years, writer Gretel Ehrlich has traveled with Inuit hunters in Greenland, listening to their narratives and observing changes in their traditional hunting. This past spring, she went with some Inuit hunters to Paris with plans to speak at the climate talks, which were dashed when terrorists struck the city. In conversation with award-winning NPR journalist Neal Conan, Ehrlich reports on her experience in Greenland and Paris and discusses the challenge of climate change—how can we move from "it's too late…" to "there's much we can do"?

Join us for a live broadcast (on KPFK 90.7 FM) dedicated to the voice of the author and civil rights activist James Baldwin. Brian DeShazor, host of From the Vault radio program, will air rare recordings of Baldwin from 1963-1968, including an oration called the Artist’s Struggle for Integrity, a reading from Giovanni’s Room; Baldwin’s fiery speech after the murder of four girls in Birmingham, Alabama; and his introduction of Dr. Martin Luther King (taped in the home of Marlon Brando) weeks before King’s assassination. DeShazor is joined by two writers who’ve thought deeply about Baldwin’s work—novelist Nina Revoyr and Melvin L. Rogers, Associate Professor of Political Science and African-American Studies at UCLA—to reflect on Baldwin’s impact on literature and society.

Co-presented with Pacifica Archives

For twenty years, groundbreaking poets Eileen Myles (Chelsea Girls; I Must be Living Twice) and Maggie Nelson (National Book Critics Circle Award, The Argonauts) have been friends, mutual influences, and interlocutors on the experiences of living in a poetry and gender-inflected writing world. Myles’ latest work—a collection of old and new poems—refracts a radical world and a compelling life. Nelson’s genre-bending memoir, The Argonauts, calls for radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking. Together on stage to read both poetry and prose, these two ground-breaking writers then will join in conversation to, as Myles says, "let thoughts rip."

In partnership with PEN Center USA, ALOUD presents the culminating event of PEN’s 2016 Emerging Voices Fellowship to mark the program’s 20th anniversary. Revisit this evening of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction with readings from the 2016 Fellows: Marnie Goodfriend, Jian Huang, Wendy Labinger, Natalie Lima, and Chelsea Sutton, featuring an introduction from this year’s Emerging Voices mentors: Carmiel Banasky, Claire Bidwell Smith, Patrick O’Neil, Mike Padilla, and Alicia Partnoy. The Emerging Voices Fellowship is a literary mentorship program aiming to provide new writers who are isolated from the literary establishment with the tools, skills, and knowledge they need to launch a professional writing career.

For three years, award-winning journalist Ben Ehrenreich has been traveling to and living in the West Bank, living with Palestinian families in its largest cities and smallest villages. Placing readers in the footsteps of ordinary Palestinians, Ehrenreich’s new book, The Way to the Spring, offers some of the most empathetic reporting ever to emerge from the turbulent region. With a keen eye for detail, he paints a vivid portrait of life in three Palestinian villages, interspersed with crash-course history lessons on the Israel-Palestine conflict. In conversation with Amy Wilentz, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author and former Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker, Ehrenreich discusses the journalist’s mission to listen and understand the complexities of human experience.

Like dreams, poetry and song enter our lives by way of a mystery—unrecognized and often uninvited. Both represent the speaking of the otherwise unspeakable: the place where real truth is unencumbered by fact, time is made elastic, and narrative emerges from the abstract to tell us something of who we are. Listen in for a special evening of music and conversation with two leading voices as songwriters and authors Rosanne Cash and Joe Henry, both multi-GRAMMY Award winners, reflect on the transcendence of language through poetry and song.

Hailed as "an inspiration" by writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing, traces 300 years of history and family lineage through a sweeping account of the many descendants of two half-sisters born in 18th century Ghana. From the beginnings of slavery to the Harlem Renaissance to 21st century California, the novel captures with stunning immediacy how the memory of captivity was inscribed on the soul of a nation. Join as Gyasi takes the ALOUD stage for a discussion with comparative mythologist and scholar Ayana A.H. Jamieson.

How does one become a writer? For acclaimed novelist Judith Freeman—born the sixth child of eight in a devout Mormon household, married at seventeen, and divorced  at twenty-two with a young child—it was an unlikely path. In her arresting, lyrical memoir set in the patriarchal cloister of Utah in the 1950s and 1960s, she explores the circumstances and choices that informed her course through a thicket of profound difficulties towards becoming. Joined by L.A. native and novelist Michelle Huneven, Freeman visits ALOUD to share her illuminating portrait of resilience and self-discovery.

Chef, food personality, bestselling author of Fresh Off the Boat, and inspiration behind the hit television show of the same name, Eddie Huang made his ALOUD debut with a brash new memoir about love, meaning, and returning to your ancestral homeland. Double Cup Love takes readers on a cultural romp from Williamsburg dive bars to the skies of Mongolia, from Michelin-starred restaurants to street-side soup peddlers in Chengdu. Listen as Fresh Off the Boat star Constance Wu—who plays Eddie’s unforgettable mother—interviews Huang about family, food, and broken hearts.

Co-presented with the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center.