Like writing, cities are all about process, the back-and-forth between our aspirations and our abilities; we walk to discover them and to discover ourselves. In this dialogue, moderated by Los Angeles native Louise Steinman, Vivian Gornick and David L. Ulin investigate the role of the city as both literary and psychic landscape. For Gornick, who was born and raised in the Bronx and is the author of the new memoir of self-discovery, The Odd Woman and the City, New York is the city that provokes. While for Ulin, as a Manhattan-raised Southern California transplant and author of the compelling inquiry, Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, L.A. is the terrain that inspires. What do their journeys have in common? What sets these two cities, and their literature, apart?

Visionary writer Maxine Hong Kingston has been writing about war and peace since her landmark 1976 book The Woman Warrior. Her lifelong efforts on this theme often touched on the Vietnam War, from China Men to The Fifth Book of Peace. These works influenced award-winning novelist and critic Viet Thanh Nguyen as he dealt with the war in both fiction (The Sympathizer) and scholarship (Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War). Both writers will share the ALOUD stage to discuss their own personal histories with the war, and the responsibility of literature in depicting war machines and peace movements.

New Yorker writer William Finnegan leads a counter life as an excessively compulsive surfer. In his deeply lyrical self-portrait Barbarian Days, Finnegan chronicles his lifelong adventures from a young man chasing waves all over the world to becoming a distinguished writer and war reporter. Part coming-of-age story, part thriller, part cultural study, Finnegan’s vivid memoir explores the gradual mastering of a little understood art. Join Finnegan as he returns to the Pacific coast to discuss his revelatory pursuit of the perfect wave with David Rensin, author of All For a Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki Dora.

From the Watts Towers in Los Angeles to the Forbidden City in Beijing, Geoff Dyer’s newest collection of essays, White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World, explores what defines place: where do we come from, what are we, where are we going? The elegant, witty, and always inquisitive Dyer returns to ALOUD to reflect on his unexpected findings with Jonathan Lethem—celebrated for his novels, essays, and short stories—to illuminate the questions we ask when we step outside ourselves.

Award-winning poet and rapper Kate Tempest’s electrifying debut novel takes us into the beating heart of London in this multi-generational tale of drugs, desire, and belonging. The Bricks That Built the Houses explores a cross-section of contemporary urban life with a powerful moral microscope, giving us intimate stories of ordinary lives, and questions how we live with and love one another. Heralded by critics and fans alike for her powerful performances, Tempest takes the ALOUD stage to present her dynamic new work.

Our third annual gathering unites students from five Southland graduate writing programs—CalArts, Otis College, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, and USC—to share recent work and tune our ears to the future of language. What are the ideas, forms, questions, syntaxes, images, and narratives of our immediate future? Who better as our compass in the wilds of the now than emerging writers?

Juan Felipe Herrera grew up the son of Mexican immigrants in the migrant fields of California, and became the first Latino Poet Laureate of the United States. Exuberant and socially engaged, reflective and healing, wildly inventive and unpredictable, the award-winning poet will discuss his life’s work as it ranges from Aztlan to Paris, San Bernardino to Florida and back; from Larry King and Oprah, to the Janis Joplin days in the City by the Bay. Join us for a brimming, wide-open evening as Herrera blazes the endless chasms of culture on the “Laureate Trail.”

Best-selling author, prize-winning historian, and Mother Jones co-founder Adam Hochschild offers a sweeping new history of the Spanish Civil War. Spain In Our Hearts is a nuanced international tale of idealism and heartbreaking suffering told through a dozen characters, including Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, who reveal the full tragedy and importance of the war. Hochschild returns to ALOUD to explore the complicated conflict that would galvanize Americans in their pursuit of democracy across the world just before the opening battle of World War II.

Through the etymology of words, the OED exhibits the shape-shifting nature of language across time, reflecting how it bends to the task of describing our evolving human experience. But is all change good? What is the role of the dictionary in reporting, recording, and refereeing language variation and change?Linguist, political commentator and author of The Power of Babel and Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, John McWhorter talks with genre-busting author of House of Leaves Mark Z. Danielewski about whether dictionaries support or inhibit the idiosyncratic use of language as a means of creative expression. Presented as part of the Library Foundation’s project, "Hollywood is a Verb: Los Angeles Tackles the Oxford English Dictionary".

The best-selling author of the National Book Critics Circle Award-Winner How to Live, a spirited account of twentieth century intellectual movements and revolutionary thinkers, delivers a timely new take on the lives of influential philosophers Sartre, De Beauvoir, Camus, and others. At The Existentialist Café journeys to 1930s Paris to explore a passionate cast of philosophers, playwrights, anthropologists, convicts, and revolutionaries who would spark a rebellious wave of postwar liberation movements. From anticolonialism to feminism and gay rights, join Bakewell as she discusses with David L. Ulin what the pioneering existentialists can teach us about confronting questions of freedom today.