Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

Audrey Clare Farley is in conversation with Carrie Callaghan about her work and her newest book, The Unfit Heiress.

For readers of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and The Phantom of Fifth Avenue, The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt is a page-turning drama of fortunes, eugenics and women's reproductive rights framed by the sordid court battle between Ann Cooper Hewitt and her socialite mother.

Audrey Clare Farley is a writer, book reviewer, and historian of twentieth-century American fiction and culture. Having earned a PhD in English from University of Maryland, College Park in 2017, she occasionally lectures in history and literature at local universities. Her essay on Ann Cooper Hewitt, published in July 2019 in Narratively, was the publication’s second most-read story of the year. Her writing on the eugenics movement and other topics has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Public Books, Lady Science, Longreads, and Marginalia Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor. She lives in Hanover, Pennsylvania.

Carrie Callaghan is the author of the historical novels A Light of Her Own (2018) and Salt the Snow (2020). Her short stories have been published in multiple literary journals, and she is a senior editor with the Washington Independent Review of Books. She lives in Maryland with her family and three ridiculous cats. She loves seasons of all kinds, history, and tea.

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

Recorded On: Thursday, May 6, 2021

Presented in partnership with CityLit Project.

Morgan Jerkins is in conversation with Teri Henderson about her work. In this talk, Jerkins discusses her literary journey, culminating in the release of her newest work, Caul Baby.

Following the critical and popular success of her first two books of nonfiction, New York Times bestselling author Morgan Jerkins returns with her electrifying fiction debut, Caul Baby, a family saga filled with secrets, betrayal, intrigue, and magic.

Desperate to be a mother after multiple pregnancies have ended in heartbreak, Laila turns to the Melancons, an old and powerful Harlem family known for their caul, a precious layer of skin that is the secret source of their healing power. When the deal for Laila to acquire a piece of caul to protect her baby falls through and her child is stillborn, she is overcome with grief and rage and blames the family for the loss.

What she doesn’t know is that she has another connection to the Melancons: her niece, Amara, an ambitious college student, soon secretly delivers a baby girl she names Hallow and gives her to the Melancons to raise as one of their own.

Hallow is special, born with a caul, and the Melancons’ matriarch believes she will restore the family’s waning prosperity. As a child, Hallow is sheltered in the Melancons’ decrepit brownstone, but as she grows up, she to become suspicious of the Melancon women, particularly wondering about Josephine, the woman she calls mother, and the matriarch, Maman, who only seems to care about Hallow’s caul.

As the Melancons’ desperation to maintain their status grows, Amara, now a successful lawyer running for district attorney, looks for a way to avenge her longstanding grudge against the family for their crime against her beloved aunt Laila.

When mother and daughter finally cross paths, Hallow must decide where her loyalty lies.

Morgan Jerkins is the author of Wandering in Strange Lands and the New York Times bestseller This Will Be My Undoing and a Senior Culture Editor at ESPN’s The Undefeated. Jerkins is a visiting professor at Columbia University and a Forbes 30 Under 30 leader in media, and her short-form work has been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Elle, Esquire, and the Guardian, among many other outlets. She is based in Harlem.

Teri Henderson (b. Fort Worth, TX, 1990) is a curator, co-director of WDLY, and writer. Henderson holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Texas Christian University. She formerly held a curatorial internship at Ghost Gallery in Seattle, Washington. During that time she also helped launch the social media campaign for the non-profit access to justice platform PopUpJustice!. She also previously served as the Art Law Clinic Director for Maryland Volunteer Lawyers For The Arts. She was published in the St. James Encyclopedia of Hip Hop Culture. Her work as co-director of WDLY addresses shrinking the gap between the spaces that contemporary artists of color inhabit and the resources of the power structures of the art world through the curation and artistic production of events. Henderson recently founded the Black Collagists Arts Incubator. Henderson is currently a staff writer for BmoreArt as well as the Connect+Collect gallery coordinator.

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

Recorded On: Tuesday, May 4, 2021

Join us for readings and discussion inspired by the Washington Writers' Publishing House's new anthology, This Is What America Looks Like: Poetry and Fiction from DC, Maryland, and Virginia, 111 works by 100 writers. Editor Kathleen Wheaton describes this anthology as "a picture of our time, our shared losses, our shared life."

The event features a panel of writers representing the anthology.

Poet Sarah Browning’s books are Killing Summer and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden. She co-founded and for 10 years directed Split This Rock. Her fellowships include ones from the Lillian E. Smith Center, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Yaddo, Mesa Refuge, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Adirondack Center for Writing.

Hayes Davis is the author of Let Our Eyes Linger (Poetry Mutual Press, 2016). His work appears in many journals and anthologies. He was a member of Cave Canem’s first cohort of fellows. A high-school English teacher, he lives in Silver Spring with his wife, poet Teri Ellen Cross Davis.

Caron Garcia Martinez is a writer, teacher, and former diplomat who grew up in Los Angeles. A graduate of Williams College, the London School of Economics and Political Science (MS, Psychology), and George Mason University (MFA), Caron has taught at American University since 2008. Caron's published work is in short fiction and essays, and her current writing project is a novel set in Mexico in 1910, built on family stories recalled by her abuela, Celia.

Adam Schwartz’s debut collection of stories, The Rest of the World, won the Washington Writers' Publishing House 2020 prize for fiction. His stories have won prizes sponsored by Poets & Writers, Philadelphia Stories, and Baltimore City Paper and appeared in numerous literary journals. He has stories forthcoming in Raritan and Gargoyle. He has an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. For 23 years, he has taught high school in Baltimore.

Panel moderator Kathleen Wheaton grew up in California, studied at Stanford University, and worked for 20 years as a journalist in Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Bethesda, Maryland. Her fiction has appeared in many journals and three anthologies, and she is a five-time recipient of Maryland State Arts Council grants. Her collection, Aliens and Other Stories, won the 2013 Washington Writers' Publishing House Fiction Prize. Since 2014, she has served as president and managing editor of the Washington Writers’ Publishing House.

The anthology's poetry editor, Jona Colson, and fiction editor, Caroline Bock, will also feature in this event.

Learn more about This Is What America Looks Like.

Recorded On: Wednesday, April 21, 2021

Do spirits return, and can we communicate with the dead? Baltimore’s Spiritualists thought so, but magicians worked to disprove them. Learn about spirit mediums, the Ouija Board, and Baltimore’s group of amateur magicians, the Demons Club.

Presented by Maryland Department librarian Julie Saylor. Q and A with Julie Saylor and Mike Rose. Mike Rose is a local magician, magic historian, and author of Maryland's Ambassador of Magic: Phil Thomas and the Yogi Magic Mart.

Recorded On: Monday, March 15, 2021

Poets Joseph Ross and Michael Torres read from and discuss their new books.

Joseph Ross is the author of four books of poetry: Raising King (2020), Ache (2017), Gospel of Dust (2013), and Meeting Bone Man (2012). His poems appear in many places including The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, Poet Lore, Xavier Review, Southern 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.

Michael Torres was born and brought up in Pomona, California, where he spent his adolescence as a graffiti artist. His debut collection of poems, An Incomplete List of Names (Beacon Press, 2020), was selected by Raquel Salas Rivera for the National Poetry Series. His honors include awards and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the McKnight Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CantoMundo, VONA Voices, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, and the Loft Literary Center. Currently he’s an Assistant Professor in the MFA program at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and a teaching artist with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. Visit him at: michaeltorreswriter.com.

Read "On John Coltrane's 'After the Rain'" by Joseph Ross.
Read "Stop Looking at My Last Name Like That" by Michael Torres.

Recorded On: Wednesday, March 10, 2021

CityLit Project joins the Enoch Pratt Free Library in presenting the CityLit Festival - Reimagined: a virtual celebration of the literary arts

In an exhilarating tale of colliding worlds, Emily St. John’s The Glass Hotel paints a breathtaking portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives. In Jenny Offill’s funny and urgent Weather, the foreboding sense of doom commands a family and presents a nation in crisis, and how we weather it. The authors will be in a conversation moderated by Marion Winik, author of The Big Book of the Dead.

Jenny Offill is the author of the novels Last Things (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the L.A. Times First Book Award); Dept. of Speculation, which was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Pen Faulkner Award and the International Dublin Award; and most recently Weather, an instant New York Times Bestseller. She lives in upstate New York and teaches at Syracuse University and in the low residency program at Queens University.

Emily St. John Mandel's five novels include The Glass Hotel and Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award and has been translated into thirty-two languages. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

University of Baltimore professor Marion Winik is the author of The Big Book of the Dead and winner of the 2019 Towson Prize for Literature. Among her ten other books are First Comes Love and Above Us Only Sky. Her award-winning Bohemian Rhapsody column appears monthly at Baltimore Fishbowl, and her essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, and elsewhere. A board member of the National Book Critics Circle, she writes book reviews for People, Newsday, The Washington Post, and Kirkus Reviews; she hosts The Weekly Reader podcast at WYPR. She was a commentator on NPR for fifteen years; her honors include an NEA Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction. More info at marionwinik.com.

The Writer's Room is a new Festival highlight designed to engage festival attendees, who are also writers, in an informal conversation with the featured guest authors.

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

Recorded On: Tuesday, March 2, 2021

Are you interested in getting your writing published? Do you want tips and tricks on how to become a published author of Africanfuturistic novels or short stories? Or learn how to self-publish in the genre?

Then join us for a panel discussion and Q&A on how the genre reflects the societal and cultural struggles of African people and their descendants here and abroad. Come along on a journey to explore how to get this type of work published in a world where black and brown people are still seen as the “other”.

Panelists include: Nnedi Okorafor, Jalynn Harris, Saida Agostini, and Afua Richardson.

Nnedi Okorafor is a Nigerian-American author of Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism for children and adults. Her works include WHO FEARS DEATH (in development at HBO into a TV series), the BINTI novella trilogy, THE BOOK OF PHOENIX, the AKATA books and LAGOON. She is the winner of Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Locus and Lodestar Awards and her debut novel ZAHRAH THE WINDSEEKER won the prestigious Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature. Her next novel, IKENGA, will be in stores August 2020.

Nnedi has also written comics for Marvel, including BLACK PANTHER: LONG LIVE THE KING and WAKANDA FOREVER (featuring the Dora Milaje) and the SHURI series, an Africanfuturist comic series LAGUARDIA (from Dark Horse) and her short memoir BROKEN PLACES AND OUTER SPACES. Nnedi is also cowriter the adaptation of Octavia Butler’s WILD SEED with Viola Davis and Kenyan film director Wanuri Kahiu. Nnedi holds a PhD (literature) and two MAs (journalism and literature). She lives with her daughter Anyaugo and family in Illinois.

Saida Agostini is a queer Afro-Guyanese poet whose work explores the ways that Black folks harness mythology to enter the fantastic. Saida’s poetry is featured and/or forthcoming in Plume, Barrelhouse Magazine, the Black Ladies Brunch Collective's anthology, Not Without Our Laughter, amongst other publications. Her first collection of poems, just let the dead in, was a finalist for the Center of African American Poetry & Poetics’ 2020 Book Prize, as well as the New Issues Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, STUNT (Neon Hemlock Press, October 2020) explores the history of Nellie Jackson, a Black woman entrepreneur who operated a brothel for sixty years in Natchez, Mississippi.

A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow and Pushcart Prize nominee, Saida has been awarded honors and support for her work by the Watering Hole and Blue Mountain Center, as well as a 2018 Rubys Grant funding travel to Guyana to support the completion of her first manuscript. She lives online at saidaagostini.com

Jalynn Harris is a poet, educator, and book designer from Baltimore, MD. She founded SoftSavagePress for the sole purpose of promoting visual and literary works by Black people. She earned her MFA from the University of Baltimore, where she was the inaugural recipient of Michael F. Klein fellowship for social justice. Her work has been featured in Transition Magazine, Little Patuxent Review, Scalawag, and elsewhere. Exit Thru the Afro, queer museum in verse, is her first poetry chapbook.

Recorded On: Thursday, February 18, 2021

The event is also part of OSI-Baltimore’s Talking About Race Series.

Lawrence T. Brown is in conversation about his book, The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America. Presented in partnership with AARP Maryland and OSI-Baltimore Fellows Advisory Board.

The world gasped in April 2015 as Baltimore erupted and Black Lives Matter activists, incensed by Freddie Gray's brutal death in police custody, shut down highways and marched on city streets. In The Black Butterfly—a reference to the fact that Baltimore's majority-Black population spreads out on both sides of the coveted strip of real estate running down the center of the city like a butterfly's wings—Lawrence T. Brown reveals that ongoing historical trauma caused by a combination of policies, practices, systems, and budgets is at the root of uprisings and crises in hypersegregated cities around the country.

Putting Baltimore under a microscope, Brown looks closely at the causes of segregation, many of which exist in current legislation and regulatory policy despite the common belief that overtly racist policies are a thing of the past. Drawing on social science research, policy analysis, and archival materials, Brown reveals the long history of racial segregation's impact on health, from toxic pollution to police brutality. Beginning with an analysis of the current political moment, Brown delves into how Baltimore's history influenced actions in sister cities like St. Louis and Cleveland, as well as its adoption of increasingly oppressive techniques from cities like Chicago.

But there is reason to hope. Throughout the book, Brown offers a clear five-step plan for activists, nonprofits, and public officials to achieve racial equity. Not content to simply describe and decry urban problems, Brown offers up a wide range of innovative solutions to help heal and restore redlined Black neighborhoods, including municipal reparations. Persuasively arguing that because urban apartheid was intentionally erected it can be intentionally dismantled, The Black Butterfly demonstrates that America cannot reflect that Black lives matter until we see how Black neighborhoods matter.

Lawrence T. Brown is a researcher and visiting associate professor with the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and a former associate professor at Morgan State University in the School of Community Health and Policy. He is a racial equity consultant and the cofounder of the lead poisoning awareness initiative #BmoreLEADfree. He was a 2012 OSI-Baltimore Community Fellow and a founding member of the Fellows Advisory Board.

Jean Accius is senior vice president for AARP Thought Leadership and International Affairs. His areas of expertise include aging, caregiving and long-term care policy.

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

Recorded On: Wednesday, February 17, 2021

On the anniversary of Lucille Clifton’s passing, join Enoch Pratt Free Library and the Clifton House in a celebration of her generous spirit and writing. Our esteemed featured speaker is Natasha Trethewey.

Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, Monument (2018), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award; Thrall (2012); Native Guard (2006), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002); and Domestic Work (2000), which was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. She is also the author of the memoir Memorial Drive (2020). Her book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, appeared in 2010. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. At Northwestern University she is a Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. In 2012 she was named Poet Laureate of the State of Mississippi and and in 2013 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Recorded On: Saturday, February 13, 2021

Join us for a conversation about the life and legacy of Elijah Cummings between Dr. Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, book collaborator James Dale, and moderator Dr. Freeman Hrabowski. Presented in partnership with the Reginald F. Lewis Museum.

Part memoir, part call to action, We’re Better Than This is the story of our modern-day democracy and the threats that we all must face together, as well as a retrospective on the life and career of one of our country’s most inspirational politicians. We’re Better Than This reminds people that in this country we don’t elect kings, and we cannot afford four more years of this false one.

Dr. Maya Rockeymoore Cummings is a social entrepreneur, speaker, writer, and strategist who’s on a mission to drive society toward inclusion. After a quarter of a century of working on innovative public policy and multimillion-dollar social change initiatives in the government, nonprofit, and private sectors, Maya is a policy and political expert who understands how to build and sustain cross-sector collaborations, diverse coalitions, dynamic diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies, and effective education campaigns. An accomplished public speaker and author, Maya has appeared in a variety of media outlets such as CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and BET and her writings have been published in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, and the Washington Post among other publications. She has served on numerous boards including the National Association of Counties Financial Services Corporation, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and the National Academy of Social Insurance. She is the recipient of multiple honors such as the Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellowship Award and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Fellowship Award and has been a candidate for Maryland governor and the U.S. Congress. A former chair of the Maryland Democratic Party, Maya earned her B.A. in political science from Prairie View A&M University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in political science, with an emphasis in public policy, from Purdue University. She is the widow of the late Congressman Elijah E. Cummings and lives in West Baltimore with her dog Andy.

James Dale has been author-collaborator on a number of books on topics including business, medicine, and life lessons. His works include The Power of Nice with agent-negotiator Ron Shapiro; Just Show Up with Hall of Fame baseball player Cal Ripken Jr.; and The Q Factor with Super Bowl–winning coach Brian Billick.

Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, has served as President of UMBC (The University of Maryland, Baltimore County) since 1992. His research and publications focus on science and math education, with special emphasis on minority participation and performance. He chaired the National Academies’ committee that produced the 2011 report, Expanding Underrepresented Minority Participation: America’s Science and Technology Talent at the Crossroads. He was named in 2012 by President Obama to chair the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans. His 2013 TED talk highlights the “Four Pillars of College Success in Science.” A child-leader in the Civil Rights Movement, Hrabowski was prominently featured in Spike Lee’s 1997 documentary, Four Little Girls, on the racially motivated bombing in 1963 of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Born in 1950 in Birmingham, Alabama, Hrabowski graduated from Hampton Institute with highest honors in mathematics. He received his M.A. (mathematics) and Ph.D. (higher education administration/statistics) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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

Recorded On: Wednesday, February 10, 2021