Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

Curtis Black is no stranger to scandal. Throughout the decades, he has done much in the public eye, both good and evil. But what most people don't realize is that Curtis has been hiding a horrific childhood that has affected him in countless, unspeakable ways.

Kimberla Lawson Roby is the New York Times bestselling author of the highly acclaimed Curtis Black series. She lives with her husband in Rockford, Illinois.

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

Recorded On: Wednesday, August 8, 2018

What makes a pink-haired queer raise his hand to enlist in the military just as the nation is charging into war? In his memoir, Out of Step, Anthony Moll tells the story of a working-class bisexual boy running off to join the army in the midst of two wars and the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" era. Set against the backdrop of hypermasculinity and sexual secrecy, Moll weaves a queer coming-of-age story. 

Out of Step traces Moll’s development through his military service, recounting how the army both breaks and builds relationships, and what it was like to explore his queer identity while also coming to terms with his role in the nation’s ugly foreign policy. From a punk, nerdy, left-leaning, poor boy in Nevada leaving home for the first time to an adult returning to civilian life and forced to address a world more complicated than he was raised to believe, Moll’s journey isn’t a classic flag-waving memoir or war story—it’s a tale of finding one’s identity in the face of war and changing ideals.

Anthony Moll is a Baltimore-based writer and educator. His creative work has appeared in Gertrude Journal, Assaracus, jubilat, and more. Moll holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts and has taught writing at both public and private universities.

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

Recorded On: Tuesday, July 31, 2018

In The Voting Rights War, Gloria Browne-Marshall examines voter laws posing challenges to American voters -- especially African Americans -- from slavery through current controversies of voter suppression, including grandfather clauses, literacy tests, felony disenfranchisement and photo identification requirements. She focuses on the NAACP's century-long struggle to achieve voting equality through efforts on the ground and in court, and the organization's often contentious relationship with the Supreme Court. Browne-Marshall tells the story of the civil rights attorneys who fought in court as well as the brave foot soldiers that paid for voting rights with their lives.

Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is an associate professor of constitutional law at John Jay College of the City University of New York and a civil rights attorney. She reports on the U.S. Supreme Court in her award-winning syndicated newspaper column and hosts the weekly radio program "Law of the Land with Gloria J. Browne-Marshall." She is the author of Race, Law, and American Society.

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

Recorded On: Thursday, April 19, 2018

Kevin Shird traveled from Baltimore to Montgomery, Alabama, to meet 84-year-old Nelson Malden. In Malden's barbershop, leaders of the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King, Jr., gathered to organize protests and boycotts and to write the speeches that would help criminalize racial segregation and discrimination.

Shird and Malden talked about the significance of recent racially motivated events and how the demonstrations in Charlottesville, Ferguson, Baltimore and around the country help us understand today's second-wave civil rights movement and the urgent actions necessary for racial equality and change.

Kevin Shird is an activist, national youth advocate, public speaker and author of two previous books: Lessons of Redemption and Uprising in the City. Marc Steiner, radio and podcast host, will moderate the conversation with Kevin Shird.

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

Recorded On: Tuesday, April 17, 2018

The struggle to desegregate America’s schools was a grassroots movement, and young women were its vanguard. In the late 1940s, parents began to file desegregation lawsuits with their daughters, forcing Thurgood Marshall and other civil rights lawyers to take up the issue and bring it to the Supreme Court. After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, girls far outnumbered boys in volunteering to desegregate formerly all-white schools.

In A Girl Stands at the Door, historian Rachel Devlin tells the remarkable stories of these desegregation pioneers. She also explains why black girls were seen, and saw themselves, as responsible for the difficult work of reaching across the color line in public schools. Highlighting the extraordinary bravery of young black women, this bold revisionist account illuminates today’s ongoing struggles for equality.

Rachel Devlin is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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

Recorded On: Tuesday, June 12, 2018

Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity and Some Say the Lark, which was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Nation, Poetry, and A Public Space, and she has published essays on poetry and poetics in The Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, and The Volta. She co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman, an organization that supports Asian American writers, and teaches creative writing and literature at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017). Her honors include a 2015 Whiting Award and a 2016-17 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism, New England Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and at the Rainier Writing Workshop's MFA Program. 

Read "Again a Solstice" by Jennifer Chang.
Read "In the Dream" by Jenny Johnson.

Recorded On: Wednesday, June 13, 2018

When Darnell Moore was fourteen years old, three boys from his neighborhood tried to set him on fire. They cornered him while he was walking home from school, harassed him because they assumed he was gay, and poured a jug of gasoline on him. He escaped, but just barely. It wasn't the last time he would face death.

Darnell Moore will be in conversation with Hashim K. Pipkin.

Darnell L. Moore is an editor-at-large at CASSIUS (Urban One), a columnist at LogoTV.com and NewNextNow.com, and a contributor at Mic, where he hosted their widely viewed digital series The Movement. He writes regularly for Ebony, Advocate, Vice, and Guardian. Moore was one of the original Black Lives Matter organizers, organizing bus trips from New York to Ferguson after the murder of Michael Brown. Moore is a writer-in-residence at the Center of African American Religion, Sexual Politics, and Social Justice at Columbia University, has taught at NYU, Rutgers, Fordham, and Vassar, and was trained at Princeton Theological Seminary. In 2016, he was named one of The Root 100, and in 2015 he was named one of Ebony magazine's Power 100 and Planned Parenthood's 99 Dream Keepers. He divides his time between Brooklyn and Atlanta.

Hashim K. Pipkin is a content strategist and educator. He has led communications and engagement strategy for DC Government, the United Negro College Fund, and several start-ups in Silicon Valley. He is also a researcher who is interested in the interplay between sexual politics and social ethics in Black culture and the theological "slippages" in American political discourse. His writing has been featured in Mic, HuffPost, The Feminist Wire, and Ebony. He began his career as an elementary reading teacher. He is an honors graduate of Georgetown University and Vanderbilt University and recipient of the Robert W. Woodruff Fellowship at Emory University. He is at work on his first collection of essays, Surely Free: Courage and Black Love. 

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

Recorded On: Tuesday, June 5, 2018

As people consider how to respond to a resurgence of racist, xenophobic populism, A Mouth Is Always Muzzled tells an extraordinary story of the ways art brings hope in perilous times. Weaving disparate topics from sugar and British colonialism to attacks on free speech and Facebook activism and traveling a jagged path across the Americas, Africa, India and Europe, Natalie Hopkinson argues that art is where the future is negotiated.

Part post-colonial manifesto, part history of the British Caribbean, part exploration of art in the modern world, A Mouth is Always Muzzled is an analysis of the insistent role of art in contemporary politics and life. It documents the artistic legacy generated in response to white supremacy, brutality, domination, and oppression. In well-honed prose, Natalie Hopkinson knits narratives of culture warriors: painter Bernadette Persaud, poet Ruel Johnson, historian Walter Rodney, novelist John Berger, and provocative African American artist Kara Walker.

A former staff writer, editor and culture critic at the Washington Post and The Root, Natalie Hopkinson is an assistant professor in Howard University's graduate program in communication, culture and media studies and a fellow at the Interactivity Foundation. She is the author of Go-Go Live and Deconstructing Tyrone (with Natalie Y. Moore).

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

Recorded On: Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Between 1963 and 1972 America experienced over 750 urban revolts. Considered collectively, they comprise what Peter Levy terms a 'Great Uprising'. Levy examines these uprisings over the arc of the entire decade, in various cities across America. He challenges both conservative and liberal interpretations, emphasizing that these riots must be placed within historical context to be properly understood.

By focusing on three cities as case studies -- Cambridge and Baltimore, Maryland, and York, Pennsylvania -- Levy demonstrates the impact which these uprisings had on millions of ordinary Americans. He shows how conservatives profited politically by constructing a misleading narrative of their causes, and also suggests that the riots did not represent a sharp break or rupture from the civil rights movement. Finally, Levy presents a cautionary tale by challenging us to consider if the conditions that produced this 'Great Uprising' are still predominant in American culture today.

Peter B. Levy is a professor of history at York College of Pennsylvania where he teaches U.S. history. He is the author of Civil War on Race Street: The Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland.

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

Recorded On: Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Nadine Strossen's new book, HATE, dispels misunderstandings plaguing our perennial debates about "hate speech vs. free speech," showing that the First Amendment approach promotes free speech and democracy, equality, and societal harmony.

U.S. law allows government to punish hateful or discriminatory speech in specific contexts when it directly causes imminent serious harm, but government may not punish such speech solely because its message is disfavored, disturbing, or vaguely feared to possibly contribute to some future harm. When U.S. officials formerly wielded such broad censorship power, they suppressed dissident speech, including equal rights advocacy. Likewise, current politicians have attacked Black Lives Matter protests as "hate speech."

"Hate speech" censorship proponents stress the potential harms such speech might further: discrimination, violence, and psychic injuries. However, there has been little analysis of whether censorship effectively counters the feared injuries. Citing evidence from many countries, Strossen shows that "hate speech" laws are at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive. Their inevitably vague terms invest enforcing officials with broad discretion; predictably, regular targets are minority views and speakers.

Therefore, prominent social justice advocates in the U.S. and beyond maintain that the best way to resist hate and promote equality is not censorship, but rather, vigorous "counterspeech" and activism.

Nadine Strossen is professor of constitutional law at New York Law School and the first woman national President of the American Civil Liberties Union, where she served from 1991 through 2008. A frequent speaker on constitutional and civil liberties issues, her media appearances include 60 Minutes, CBS Sunday Morning, Today, Good Morning America, and The Daily Show.

Strossen will be in conversation with Danielle Citron & Dwight Ellis.

Danielle Keats Citron is the Morton & Sophia Macht Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law where she teaches and writes about information privacy, free expression, and civil rights. Professor Citron is an internationally recognized information privacy expert and the author of the book Hate Crimes in Cyberspace (Harvard University Press) and more than 25 law review articles.  Professor Citron is an Affiliate Scholar at the Stanford Center on Internet and Society, Affiliate Fellow at the Yale Information Society Project, and Senior Fellow at the Future of Privacy, a privacy think tank. Professor Citron has advised federal and state legislators, law enforcement, and international lawmakers on privacy and free speech issues. Professor Citron works closely with tech companies on issues involving online safety and privacy. She serves on Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council and has presented her research at Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. In addition, Professor Citron is the Chair the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Board of Directors. She is a member of the American Law Institute and serves as an adviser to the American Law Institute’s Restatement Third Information Privacy Principles Project.

An experienced media professional in advancing social equity initiatives and strategies in the realms of government, business and education, Dwight Ellis is in his 11th year as full-time Lecturer in the Communications department of Bowie State University in Maryland and occasional consultant to the U.S. Department of State. Prior to his 25 years as vice president with the National Association of Broadcasters, he served as staff chief to Congresswoman Cardiss Collins (D-IL). A graduate of George Mason University Law School, Ellis’s professional record includes many affiliations, accomplishments, publications and recognitions.

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

Recorded On: Tuesday, May 8, 2018