Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

Leslie Jamison is in conversation with Adam Kaplin, MD, PhD, of the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

With its deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage, The Recovering turns our understanding of the traditional addiction narrative on its head, demonstrating that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the train wreck itself. Leslie Jamison deftly excavates the stories we tell about addiction--both her own and others'--and examines what we want these stories to do and what happens when they fail us. All the while, she offers a fascinating look at the larger history of the recovery movement, and at the complicated bearing that race and class have on our understanding of who is criminal and who is ill.

Leslie Jamison is the author of the essay collection The Empathy Exams, a New York Times bestseller, and the novel The Gin Closet, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and her work has appeared in publications including The Atlantic, Harper's, the New York Times Book Review, the Oxford American, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the novelist Charles Bock, and their two daughters. 

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund. 

Recorded On: Thursday, January 17, 2019

Embracing Sisterhood is a thought-provoking examination of black women’s intersecting challenges, tensions, and issues of class in the twenty-first century.  In this purported era of high-profile, mega-successful black women and growing socioeconomic diversity, Embracing Sisterhood seeks to determine where contemporary black women’s ideas of black womanhood and sisterhood merge with social class. 

Katrina Bell McDonald is Associate Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, Co-director of the Center for Africana Studies at the Johns Hopkins University and an Associate of the Hopkins Population Center.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.

Recorded On: Tuesday, January 15, 2019

Elizabeth Spires (born in 1952 in Lancaster, Ohio) is the author of seven poetry collections: Globe, Swan’s Island, Annonciade, Worldling, Now the Green Blade Rises, The Wave-Maker, and, newly published,  A Memory of the Future. She has also written six books for children, including The Mouse of Amherst and I Heard God Talking to Me: William Edmondson and His Stone Carvings. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and other magazines and anthologies.  She lives in Baltimore and is a professor at Goucher College where she co-directs the Kratz Center for Creative Writing.

David Yezzi’s most recent books of poems are Birds of the Air and Black Sea, both from Carnegie Mellon. His verse play, Schnauzer, is forthcoming later this year from Exot Books. He is chair of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and editor of The Hopkins Review.​

Read "The Streaming" by Elizabeth Spires.
Read "Crane" by David Yezzi.

Recorded On: Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Using gut-wrenching reportage, on-the-ground research, and personal accounts garnered from interviews with over 100 police and government officials around the country, Horace presents an insider's examination of police tactics, which he concludes is an "archaic system" built on a "toxic brotherhood" in The Black and the Blue: A Cop Reveals the Crimes, Racism, and Injustice in America's Law Enforcement. He dissects some of the nation's most highly publicized police shootings and crimes to explain how these techniques have had detrimental outcomes to the people that they serve. Horace provides fresh analysis on communities experiencing police brutality and disparate imprisonment rates due to racist policing such as Ferguson, New Orleans, Baltimore, and Chicago. 

Matthew Horace is a law enforcement and security contributor to CNN and The Wall Street Journal, and an internationally-recognized leadership expert in the field. http://matthewhorace.com/

Ron Harris is a former reporter and editor for the Los Angeles Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Currently, he is a professor at Howard University.

The Brown Lecture Series is supported by the Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Family Foundation.

Recorded On: Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Nic Stone will be in conversation with Rashad Staton, Youth Engagement Specialist for Baltimore City Public Schools.

One Book Baltimore is a new initiative that provides opportunities for Baltimore City 7th and 8th graders, their families, and community members to connect through literature by reading the same book. This year’s book is New York Times bestseller Dear Martin by Nic Stone. 

Nic Stone is a native of Atlanta and a Spelman College graduate. After working extensively in teen mentoring and living in Israel for a few years, she returned to the United States to write full-time. Dear Martin, her first novel, is loosely based on a series of true events involving the shooting deaths of unarmed African American teenagers. Shaken by the various responses to these incidents—and to the pro-justice movement that sprang up as a result—Stone began Dear Martin in an attempt to examine current affairs through the lens of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s teachings.

Rashad Staton is a proud product of Baltimore City Public Schools, graduate of Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, and alumn of Morgan State University. Rashad is a passionate leader who prides himself in knowing that he has the ability to spark and mold the minds of students and future young leaders. As a Youth Engagement Specialist for Baltimore City Public Schools, Rashad leads an innovative engagement initiative called YOU(th) UP -NEXT!, that upholds and promotes the importance of Student Wholeness, Literacy, and Leadership for City School's Middle and High School population. 

Find out more about One Book Baltimore

One Book Baltimore is generously supported by T. Rowe Price.

Recorded On: Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Drawing on path-breaking work in which she and her colleagues isolated significant communication effects in the 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns, the eminent political communication scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson marshals the troll posts, unique polling data, analyses of how the press used the hacked content, and a synthesis of half a century of media effects research to argue that, although not certain, it is probable that the Russians helped elect the 45th president of the United States. 

Jamieson explains how by changing the behavior of key players and altering the focus and content of mainstream news, Russian hackers reshaped the 2016 electoral dynamic. While the goal of these hackers was division and not necessarily focused on a particular outcome, the data suggests that many voters’ opinions were altered by Russia’s wide-ranging and coordinated campaign.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson is the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Pennsylvania and Director of its Annenberg Public Policy Center. Among her award winning Oxford University Press books are Packaging the Presidency, Eloquence in an Electronic Age, Spiral of Cynicism (with Joseph Cappella), and The Obama Victory (with Kenski and Hardy).

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund. 

Recorded On: Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Are you interested in screenwriting? Do you want tips and tricks on how to break into the screenwriting industry? Have you considered marketing strategies to become a successful screenwriter? Then join us for an exciting networking event and panel discussion with Q&A featuring local professors and screenwriters. Don’t forget to bring a pen and paper for notes, as well as business cards for networking!

Panelists include:

Joe Tropea, Curator of Films & Photographs and Digital Projects Coordinator at the Maryland Historical Society; former journalist, videographer, and editor for Baltimore¹s City Paper; co-creator of the documentaries Hit & Stay (2013) and Sickies Making Films (2018);

Dina Fiasconaro, creator of the feature documentary Moms and Meds (2015), available on Amazon; co-founder of the Baltimore Chapter of Film Fatales; recipient of the “Generation Next” screenwriting grant; currently teaches Film & Moving Image at Stevenson University;

David Warfield, feature credits include writer/director of Rows (2015), writer/co-producer Linewatch and Kill Me Again; member, WGAW; an American Film Institute fellow; currently an Associate Professor of screenwriting, film, and media arts at Morgan State University;

Jimmy George, co-writer and co-producer of WNUF Halloween Special (2013); co-writing and co-producing What Happens Next Will Scare You; awarded “Best Screenplay” at the 2013 Killer Film Fest;

Recorded On: Saturday, November 17, 2018

Porochista Khakpour's debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects was a New York Times Editor's Choice, one of the Chicago Tribune's Fall's Best, and the 2007 California Book Award winner in the 'First Fiction' category. Her second novel The Last Illusion was a 2014 "Best Book of the Year" according to NPR, Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Popmatters, Electric Literature, and many more. Among her many fellowships is a National Endowment for the Arts award. Her nonfiction has appeared in many sections of The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Elle, Slate, Salon, and Bookforum, among many others.

Sick is Khakpour's grueling, emotional journey - as a woman, an Iranian-American, a writer, and a lifelong sufferer of undiagnosed health problems - in which she examines her subsequent struggles with mental illness and her addiction to doctor prescribed benzodiazepines, that both aided and eroded her ever-deteriorating physical health. A story of survival, pain, and transformation, Sick candidly examines the colossal impact of illness on one woman's life by not just highlighting the failures of a broken medical system but by also boldly challenging our concept of illness narratives.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of a memoir and three novels, and the editor of five nonfiction anthologies. Her memoir, The End of San Francisco, won a Lambda Literary Award, and her most recent anthology, Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, was an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book. Mattilda's new novel, Sketchtasy, is out in October.

Sketchtasy brings 1990s gay culture startlingly back to life, as Alexa, an incisive twenty-one-year-old queen, and her friends grapple with the impact of growing up at a time when desire and death are intertwined. With an intoxicating voice and unruly cadence, this is a shattering, incandescent novel that conjures the pain and pageantry of struggling to imagine a future.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.

Recorded On: Wednesday, November 7, 2018

Joelle Biele's newest book is Tramp (LSU Press, 2018);  she is also the author of White Summer and Broom and the editor of Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence. A Fulbright professor in Germany and Poland, she has received awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Poetry Society of America. Her essays and fiction appear in American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Black Warrior Review, Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, and New England Review. She has taught American literature and creative writing at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland, Goucher College, the University of Oldenburg, Germany, and Jagiellonian University, Poland. She served as the 2017-2018 Howard County Poetry and Literature Society Writer-in-Residence.

Ann Bracken is an activist with a pen. She has started over more times than she can count and believes that she possesses a strong gene for reinvention driving her desire for change. Ann’s changed her job and her mind, but never wavers from her commitment to family, friends, writing, and social justice. She’s authored two poetry collections — The Altar of Innocence and No Barking in the Hallways: Poems from the Classroom. Ann currently serves as a contributing editor for Little Patuxent Review and runs poetry and writing workshops in libraries, community centers, and prisons. Her poetry and interviews have been published in numerous anthologies and journals. Please visit annbrackenauthor.com.

Ann Quinn’s poetry was selected by Stanley Plumly as first-place winner in the 2015 Bethesda Literary Arts Festival poetry contest, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work is published in Potomac Review, Little Patuxent Review, Beechwood Review, Haibun Today, and Snapdragon, and is included in the anthology Red Sky: Poetry on the Global Epidemic of Violence Against Women. Ann lives in Maryland with her family where she teaches music and plays clarinet with the Columbia Orchestra. Her degrees are in music performance;  she fell in love with poetry in midlife. Her chapbook, Final Deployment, is published by Finishing Line Press. Please visit online at www.annquinn.net.

Read "When You Were at Children's I Wanted to Go Back to When" by Joelle Biele.
Read "Walking by the School Yard" by Ann Bracken.
Read "Ma" by Ann Quinn.

Recorded On: Thursday, November 1, 2018

Recruited by the U.S. Army and Navy from small towns and elite colleges, more than ten thousand women served as codebreakers during World War II. While their brothers and boyfriends took up arms, these women moved to Washington and learned the meticulous work of code-breaking. Their efforts shortened the war, saved countless lives, and gave them access to careers previously denied to them. A strict vow of secrecy nearly erased their efforts from history; now, through dazzling research and interviews with surviving code girls, bestselling author Liza Mundy brings to life this riveting and vital story of American courage, service, and scientific accomplishment.

Liza Mundy is the New York Times bestselling author of The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love and Family and Michelle: A Biography. She was a long-time reporter at the Washington Post and has contributed to numerous publications including TheAtlantic, TIME, The New Republic, Slate, Mother Jones, and Politico. She is a frequent commentator on prominent national television shows, radio, and online news outlets. A senior fellow at New America, Mundy is one of the nation's foremost experts on women and work issues.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.

Recorded On: Thursday, October 18, 2018