Jose Antonio Vargas is a journalist, filmmaker, and author of the book Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen. He came to the US from the Philippines when he was twelve years old, and he didn’t discover he was undocumented until he was sixteen. We talk with him about his unique perspective on America and what it means to be a citizen.

Show notes:

• How many books have you read? Check out BPL’s full list of 250 books that influenced America, then check out our booklist with all the titles Jose mentioned in this episode.
• Read the 2011 New York Times essay in which Jose came out as undocumented and learn more about his organization, Define American.
• Watch the rest of Angela Davis’s talk at BPL’s 2026 Kahn Humanities series. 
• Want more interviews with authors on BPL’s 250 for 250 list? We talked to Maia Kobabe (author of Gender Queer), Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States), Art Spiegelman (author of Maus), N.K. Jemisin (author of The Fifth Season), and George M. Johnson (author of All Boys Aren’t Blue). 

Today we’re bringing you a really interesting episode from our friends at This Guy Sucked, a podcast hosted by historian and writer Claire Aubin about the worst people in history. Each episode, Claire sits down with an expert to pull back the scholarly curtain on a terrible person from their research. Because, as they say on the show, it’s never too late to have haters, and you can’t libel the dead.

This particular episode is about the early 20th century filmmaker D. W. Griffith whose 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation” led to the resurgence of the KKK among other cultural repercussions we’re still feeling today. Africana studies scholar Kellie Carter Jackson joins the episode to tell us exactly why this guy sucked.

If you like what you hear, you can listen to the rest – and dozens of other great episodes – by searching for “This Guy Sucked” wherever you find podcasts.

Guest

Our guest Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College and host of This Day from Radiotopia. Her book We Refuse is available here. 

Sensitive Themes & Topics

Racism and racial violence, slavery, sexual violence

Credits

- Host & Executive Producer: Claire E Aubin. 

- Editor: Julia Schifini. 

- Music: Marshall Dean Williams

- Multitude: multitude.productions

Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist, climate scientist and activist. Recently, she sat down with Jordan Kisner, of the Thresholds podcast, to talk about our climate future. You may have heard clips of their conversation in our last episode about Silent Spring. Today, we're playing the full interview as a partnership with Thresholds, a show about about the messiness, overlap, u-turns, revelations, and friction points in the lives and work of artists.

If you like what you hear, head on over to thisisthresholds.com to find more great episodes and subscribe!

When Silent Spring came out in 1962, it was an instant best-seller and led to the establishment of the EPA, as well as the ban of harmful pesticides such as DDT. But Rachel Carson’s seminal work also shifted our way of thinking about nature. For the first time, the environment was not just something out there that could be tracked and measured, but something that lived inside all of us. 

You can read a transcript of this episode on our website, and visit learn more about the topics brought up in this episode.

• Check out our booklist with books recommended for this episode.
• This episode was a collaboration with the podcast Thresholds. You can listen to Jordan Kisener’s full interview with Ayana Elizabeth Johnson here. And check out Johnson’s new book, What If We Get It Right? 
• Read Bob Musil’s book, Rachel Carson and Her Sisters, and learn more about the Rachel Carson Council. 
• Read Rachel Frazin’s book, Poisoning the Well, which she co-wrote with Sharon Udasin.
• Watch Rachel Carson’s full speech to the National Women’s Democratic Club in 1962.

Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer who documents the extremes, from nightclubs to war zones. She’s also the author of several books, including Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun, a memoir of the Syrian War co-written with Marwan Hisham. We sat down with Crabapple to talk about the difference between words and images, making art in the world, and the power of cartoonists to disrupt fascism.

You can read a transcript of this episode here. And check out the following links:

• Check out our booklist with books recommended for this episode.
• Read Molly Crabapple’s Drawing Blood, and you can pre-order her new book about the Jewish Labor Bund.
• See Molly’s drawings and articles about the Dallas Six and the NYC taxi driver strike. You can also read Molly’s interview with Art Spiegelman.
• Art Spiegelman’s comic collaboration with Joe Sacco was published in The New York Review of Books earlier this year. You can check out Sacco’s Palestine and his more recent War on Gaza from the library.

Art Spiegelman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the graphic novel Maus, the story of his parents’ experience during the Holocaust. We got to sit down with Spiegelman at Brooklyn Public Library’s recording studio earlier this month to talk about Maus almost forty years after it first came out, about censorship, about the war in Gaza, and about what it means to stand up for others.

You can read a transcript of this episode on our website, and check out these further resources:

• Check out our booklist with books recommended by Art Spiegelman, and more.
• Art Spiegelman’s comic collaboration with Joe Sacco was published in The New York Review of Books earlier this year. You can check out Sacco’s Palestine and his more recent War on Gaza from the library.
• Watch Art Spiegelman discuss MetaMaus with Dan Nadel at Brooklyn Public Library.

Art Spiegelman’s Maus almost single-handedly elevated comics from throw-away inserts in newspapers to a serious literary art worthy of winning the highest award in book publishing. But it’s not an accident that this book is coming back to us now. Maus was swept once again into the public eye three years ago, when the conservative movement to target marginalized stories took aim at the beloved graphic novel. In this episode, we examine how comic book censorship in the 1950s led to the creation of Maus, and eventually shifted the way we tell stories about resistance, memory, and authoritarianism.

You can read a transcript of this episode on our website. Further resources:

• Check out our booklist with books recommended by Art Spiegelman, and more.
• Read Amy Kurzweil’s Flying Couch and Molly Crabapple’s Drawing Blood. You can read more about both of them on their websites.
• Art Spiegelman’s comic collaboration with Joe Sacco was published in The New York Review of Books earlier this year. You can check out Sacco’s Palestine and his more recent War on Gaza from the library.
• Learn more about the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and the history of comic book censorship.
• Listen to our interviews with Maia Kobabe, author of Gender Queer, and Mike Curato, author of Flamer from our previous series, Borrowed and Banned.
• Watch Art Spiegelman discuss MetaMaus with Dan Nadel at Brooklyn Public Library.

This episode comes to us from our friends at Book Riot! In this segment, you'll hear Book Riot’s Erica Ezeifedi speak with Rodney Freeman, a librarian and producer of the forthcoming documentary, Are You a Librarian? The Untold Story of Black Librarians. This is part of their Reading and Resistance series, which looks at the relationship between reading and the pursuit of freedom in America. 

Subscribe to Book Riot: The Podcast wherever you listen!

Matt de la Peña is the Newbery Medal-winning author of seven Young Adult novels and five picture books. We talked with him about writing small stories and what it means to write a book that is, as he calls it, “Diversity 2.0.”

You can read a transcript of this episode on our website.

• Check out our booklist with books by Matt de la Peña and more!
• Learn more about de la Peña on his website, and see more illustrations by Christian Robinson.
• Protect the freedom to read by getting involved with Books Unbanned.

Meg Medina is an award-winning author of books for kids and young adults, and she was the 2023-2024 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. We talked to her about what it meant to be the first Latinx author in that role, about the need for more diverse kids books, and the importance of reading in families.

You can read a transcript of this episode on our website.

• Check out our booklist with books by Meg Medina and more!
• Learn more about the We Need Diverse Books movement. 
• Read about the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature at the Library of Congress.