Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

Seventy per cent of all Americans say they favor spanking, but African American culture seems to have a special attachment to it. The overwhelming majority of black parents see corporal punishment as a reasonable, effective way to protect their children from street violence, incarceration, or worse. But Dr. Stacey Patton's extensive research suggests corporal punishment is a crucial factor in explaining why black folks are subject to disproportionately high rates of child abuse, foster-care placements, school suspensions and expulsions, and criminal prosecutions -- all of which funnel traumatized children into our prison systems and away from their communities.

By examining all the layers of corporal punishment -- race, religion, history, popular culture, science, policing, the psychology of individual and cultural trauma, and personal testimonies with parents and children -- Dr. Patton encourages parents, teachers, clergy, and child-welfare providers to consider a wider range of tools for raising and disciplining black children. Spare the Kids is part of a growing national movement to provide positive, nonviolent discipline practices to those rearing, teaching, and caring for children of color.

Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-wining journalist, author, and child advocate. She serves as assistant professor of multimedia journalism at Morgan State University. She is the author of That Mean Old Yesterday.

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

Recorded On: Wednesday, April 12, 2017

What I Learned in the Midst of KAOS is, in part, a coming-of-age story about how Dr. LaMarr Darnell Shields responded to the chaos in his life, first as a young man and student growing up on the South Side of Chicago, then as a college student and community leader, and finally as a man who became an Ubuntu teacher. The stories juxtapose his years as a high-risk male, growing up in gang territory, expelled from school, with his years as a Teach for America corps member and classroom teacher.

The book, co-authored by Dr. Marina V. Giilmore, reveals specific strategies that Dr. Shields and his team have been using to motivate, uplift, and empower boys of color for decades. These include how to tap in to their natural competitiveness and peer-sensitivity, how to structure rituals that mimic their instinctual need for hierarchy and brotherhood, and how to empower educators to find points of connection and relevancy.

Dr. LaMarr Darnell Shields is a social entrepreneur, inspirational speaker, and educator who loves to create and build with purpose. As the Co-Founder and Senior Director of Education and Innovation at the Cambio Group, and former professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, Dr. Shields has dedicated his life to inspiring adults and youth alike to pursue a higher purpose. As the Special Advisor to the Blue Ribbon Commission on Educational Equity, recipient of the 2015 Social Innovator Award, and 2016 Open Society Institute Fellow, Dr. Shields has been studying, writing about, and implementing change in schools and non-profit organizations for years.

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

Recorded On: Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Brian Gilmore, Washington, D.C., poet and longtime public-interest lawyer, is the author of three collections of poetry including his latest, We Didn't Know Any Gangsters (Cherry Castle Publishing, 2014), which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and a Hurston/Wright Award. He is a Cave Canem Fellow and Kimbilio Fellow and twice recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award (2001 and 2003). He currently teaches social justice law at Michigan State University. His blog on Medium is called bumpy's blues.

Joseph Ross is the author of three books of poetry: Ache (2017), Gospel of Dust (2013), and Meeting Bone Man (2012). His poems appear in many places including the Los Angeles Times, Poet Lore, Tidal Basin Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and Drumvoices Revue. He has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations and won the 2012 Pratt Library / Little Patuxent Review Poetry Prize. He recently served as the 23rd Poet-in-Residence for the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society in Howard County, Maryland. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C., and writes regularly at www.JosephRoss.net.

Read "philadelphia" by Brian Gilmore.

Recorded On: Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Eric Goodman's new novel, Womb, reveals how easily life can be lost and, just as easily, how life can be celebrated. Penny is reluctant to tell her husband, Jack, that she's pregnant. With dead-end jobs and unfulfilled lives, she believes that they're not ready to support a child. When Jack finds out the truth about their child's conception, Penny must reevaluate the priorities in her life. With unpredictable twists and thought-provoking fetus commentary, the narrator shares his bumpy journey to birth from the all-knowing perspective of the womb.

Eric D. Goodman is the author of Tracks: A Novel in Stories and the children's book, Flightless Goose. His short fiction, travel stories, and nonfiction have been widely published. A California native, Goodman has lived in Baltimore for nearly 20 years.

Gregg Wilhelm, founder of CityLit Project, introduces the event.

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

Recorded On: Tuesday, March 28, 2017

When Ellen Johnson Sirleaf won the 2005 Liberian presidential election, she demolished a barrier few thought possible, obliterating centuries of patriarchal rule to become the first female elected head of state in Africa's history. Madame President is the inspiring, often heartbreaking, story of Sirleaf's evolution from an ordinary Liberian mother of four boys to international banking executive, from a victim of domestic violence to a political icon, from a post-war president to a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Helene Cooper deftly weaves Sirleaf's personal story into the larger narrative of the coming of age of Liberian women. The highs and lows of Sirleaf's life are filled with indelible images, and her personality shines throughout this riveting biography.

Helene Cooper is the Pentagon correspondent for the New York Times, having previously served as White House correspondent, diplomatic correspondent, and the assistant editorial page editor. Before joining the Times, she spent 12 years as a reporter and foreign correspondent at the Wall Street Journal. She is the author of the bestselling memoir, The House at Sugar Beach.

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

Recorded On: Thursday, March 16, 2017

From the moment he was arrested for trespassing at a McDonald's in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 13, 2014, Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery found himself in a unique position from which to cover police brutality in America and the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement. In They Can't Kill Us All, Lowery goes behind the barricades of #blacklivesmatter -- telling the story of the young men and women who are calling for a new America.

After hundreds of interviews with victims' families, local activists, and officials conducted over a year of on-the-ground reporting, Wesley Lowery has brought a new understanding of life inside America's most heavily policed cities. Drawing on his own experience growing up biracial in suburban Cleveland, Lowery probes killings that have shaken America to the core: Trayvon Martin in Florida, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Walter Scott in North Charleston, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore. Grappling with decades of racially biased policing in segregated neighborhoods with failing schools, crumbling infrastructure, too few jobs, and threadbare community services, Lowery examines how these factors have all contributed to our national crisis.

Wesley Lowery is a national reporter for the Washington Post who covers law enforcement and justice. He was a member of the team awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for coversage of police shootings. 

DeRay Mckesson, an activist, educator, leader in the Black Lives Matter movement, and interim Chief Human Capital Officer for Baltimore City Public Schools, will introduce the program.

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

Recorded On: Tuesday, March 7, 2017

A compilation of essays, stories, poems, parables, and art, The Long Loneliness in Baltimore depicts nearly fifty years worth of experiences in Southwest Baltimore (“Sowebo”). Through the establishment of Viva House, Brendan Walsh and Willa Bickham are able to restore hope to the hopeless. Viva House, the temporary home and soup kitchen for those living in Sowebo, provides love and community to many. This eye-opening book gives insight into what is it really like to be one of the “powerless” constantly oppressed by the “powerful.” Coming out in a turbulent time for Baltimore City, this book exposes social injustices while promoting the message that hope will prevail.

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

Recorded On: Tuesday, January 24, 2017

In At Mama's Knee, April Ryan looks at race and race relations through the lessons that mothers transmit to their children. As a single African American mother in Baltimore, Ryan has struggled with each gut-wrenching, race-related news story to find the words to convey the right lessons to her daughters.

To better understand how mothers transfer to their children wisdom on race and race relations, April Ryan reached out to prominent political leaders, celebrities, and others, like Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon Martin's mother. At a time when Americans still struggle to address racial division and prejudice, their stories remind us that attitudes change from one generation to the next and one child at a time.

April Ryan has been the White House correspondent for 20 years for American Urban Radio Networks (AURN), covering three U.S. presidents who have called on her by name. As the Washington Bureau Chief for AURN, she hosts the daily feature "The White House Report," which is broadcast to AURN's nearly 300 affiliated stations nationwide. She is the author of The Presidency in Black and White.

The Brown Lecture Series is supported by a generous grant from the Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Foundation.

Recorded On: Thursday, January 19, 2017

The Pratt Library's annual King Commemorative Lecture presented by Dr. Julianne Malveaux, founder and president of Economic Education.

Dr. Malveaux is a labor economist, author and commentator on issues such as race, culture, gender and their economic impacts. Her writing has appeared in USA Today, Black Issues in Higher Education, Ms. Magazine, Essence and many other publications. Her weekly columns, syndicated through King Features, appeared in newspapers across the country from 1990 to 2003. She has hosted television and radio programs and appeared as a commentator on all the major networks.

Since receiving her Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1980, Dr. Malveaux has been a contributor to academic life. She has been on the faculty or visiting faculty of the New School for Social Research, San Francisco State University, the University of California (Berkeley), Michigan State University, and Howard University, and she served as president of Bennett College for Women.

Recorded On: Saturday, January 14, 2017

Milt Diggins tells the story of Thomas McCreary, a slave catcher from Cecil County, Maryland. Reviled by some, proclaimed a hero by others, McCreary first drew public attention in the late 1840s for a career that peaked a few years after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Living and working as he did at the midpoint between Philadelphia, an important center for assisting fugitive slaves, and Baltimore, a major port in the slave trade, his story illustrates in raw detail the tensions that arose along the border between slavery and freedom just prior to the Civil War. McCreary and his community provide a framework to examine slave catching and kidnapping in the Baltimore-Wilmington-Philadelphia region and how those activities contributed to the nation's political and visceral divide.

Milt Diggins is an independent scholar, public historian, and lecturer. He is a former editor of the Cecil Historical Journal and a frequent contributor to local publications.

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

Recorded On: Wednesday, January 11, 2017