Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

Recorded On: Tuesday, February 9, 2016

In her new book, Fracture: Barack Obama, the Clintons, and the Racial Divide, MSNBC national correspondent, Joy-Ann Reid looks at the history of race relations in the U.S. while tracing the political shifts in the Democratic party. She examines the complicated relationship between Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton and how their varied approaches to the race issue parallel the challenges facing the Democratic party itself.

Joy-Ann Reid was the host of MSNBC's "The Reid Report" and managing editor of theGrio.com. She served as a press aide in the final stretch of Barack Obama's Florida campaign in 2008. Reid graduated from Harvard University and was a 2003 Knight Center for Specialized Journalism fellow.

Recorded On: Thursday, January 21, 2016

Sandra Beasley is author of three poetry collections: Count the Waves; I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize. Honors for her work include a 2015 NEA Literature Fellowship, the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Prize, and two DCCAH Artist Fellowships. She is also the author of the memoir Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life. She lives in Washington, D.C., and is on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program at the University of Tampa.

Leslie Harrison is the author of Displacement, published by Mariner Books, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, in 2009. She holds graduate degrees from the Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Irvine. Her poems have appeared in journals including Poetry, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, FIELD, Subtropics, Pleiades, and Orion. Harrison has held a scholarship and fellowship at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a fellowship at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. In 2011 she was awarded a fellowship in literature from The National Endowment for the Arts. She was the 2010 Philip Roth resident in poetry at Bucknell University, and then a visiting assistant professor in poetry and creative nonfiction at Washington College. In the fall of 2012 she joined the full-time faculty at Towson University. In 2014 The Maryland State Arts Council awarded her an Individual Artist Award in poetry.

Read "Grief Puppet" and "Parable" by Sandra Beasley.
Read "[That]" and "Autobiography--As a Vase" by Leslie Harrison.

Recorded On: Wednesday, January 20, 2016

DNA has been a master key unlocking medical and forensic secrets, but its genealogical life has also been notable. Genealogy is the second most popular hobby in the U.S., and the outpouring of interest in it from the African American community has been remarkable.

After studying this phenomenon for more than a decade, Alondra Nelson realized that genetic testing is being used to grapple with the unfinished business of slavery. It is being used for reconciliation, to establish ties with African ancestral homelands, to rethink citizenship, and to make unprecedented legal claims for slavery reparations based on genetic ancestry. Arguing that DNA offers a new tool for enduring issues, Nelson shows that the social life of DNA is affecting and transforming 21st century racial politics.

Alondra Nelson is professor of sociology and Dean of Social Science at Columbia University, where she has served as director of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.  She is the author of Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination.

Recorded On: Tuesday, January 19, 2016

In Naomi Jackson's debut novel, two sisters, ages 10 and 16, are exiled from Brooklyn to Bird Hill in Barbados after their mother can no longer care for them. The young Phaedra and her older sister Dionne live for the summer of 1989 with their grandmother, Hyacinth.

Dionne spends the summer in search of love, testing her grandmother's limits, and wanting to go home. Phaedra explores Bird Hill, where her family has lived for generations, accompanies her grandmother in her role as a midwife, and investigates their mother's mysterious life. 

This coming-of-age story builds to a crisis when the father they barely know comes to Bird Hill to reclaim his daughters, and both Phaedra and Dionne must choose between the Brooklyn they once knew and loved or the Barbados of their family.

Naomi Jackson was born and raised in Brooklyn by West Indian parents. She studied fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was awarded the Maytag Fellowship for Excellence in Fiction. Jackson travels to South African on a Fulbright scholarship, where she received an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. 

Recorded On: Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Like many black Americans of the mid-twentieth century, Phyllis Lawson's parents moved from their hometown of Livingston, Alabama to the big city in search of a better life. However, it wasn't long before hardships left them unable to provide, and four-year-old Phyllis was sent to live with her grandmother Lulu on an Alabama farm with no electricity, plumbing, or running water.

Thanks to the unconditional love of Grandma Lulu and the healing powers of an old tattered quilt, young Phyllis was able to adjust to her new life. In Quilt of Souls, Lawson documents her childhood growing up with the incredible woman who raised her and the powerful family heirloom that served as the cloth that would forever stitch their lives together.

Now a Florida resident, Phyllis Lawson worked as a professional counselor for the State of Maryland and the Commonwealth of Virginia.

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

Recorded On: Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Andy and Don is a lively and revealing biography of Andy Griffith and Don Knotts, celebrating the powerful real-life friendship behind one of America's most-iconic television programs.

Andy and Don -- fellow Southerners born into poverty and raised among scofflaws, bullies, and drunks -- captured the hearts of Americans across the country as they rocked lazily on the front porch. But behind this sleepy, small-town charm, deVise reports explosions of violent temper, bouts of crippling neurosis, and all-too-human struggles with the temptations of fame. Although Andy and Don ended their Mayberry partnership in 1965, they remained best friends for the next half-century, with Andy visiting Don at his death bed.

Daniel deVise, Don Knotts' brother-in-law, is an author and journalist who has worked at the Washington Post, the Miami Herald, and other newspapers in a 25-year career. He shared a 2001 Pulitzer Prize.

Recorded On: Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Understanding Mass Incarceration describes in plain English the many competing theories of criminal justice -- from rehabilitation to retribution, from restorative justice to justice reinvestment. Author James Kilgore illuminates the difference between prisons and jails, probation and parole, laying out key concepts and policies such as the War on Drugs, broken-windows policing, three-strikes sentencing, the school-to-prison pipeline, recidivism, and prison privatization. He also addresses the rapidly increasing incarceration of women, Latinos and transgender people; the growing imprisonment of immigrants; and the devastating impact of mass incarceration on communities.

James Kilgore is a writer, educator and social justice activist who teaches and works at the University of Illinois. He spent six years in prison, during which time he drafted his three published novels.

Recorded On: Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Thurgood Marshall brought down the separate-but-equal doctrine, integrated schools, and not only fought for human rights and human dignity but also made them impossible to deny in the courts and in the streets. In this new biography, award-winning author Wil Haygood details the life and career of one of the most transformative legal minds of the past 100 years.

Using the framework of the dramatic, contentious five-day Senate hearing to confirm Marshall as the first African-American Supreme Court justice, Haygood creates a provocative and moving look at Marshall's life as well as the politicians, lawyers, activists and others who shaped -- or tried to stop -- the civil rights movment of the 20th century.

Wil Haygood is currently the Wiepking Visiting Distinguished Professor in the department of media, journalism and film at Miami University (Ohio). For nearly three decades he was a journalist, serving as a national and foreign correspondent at the Boston Globe, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and then at the Washington Post, where he wrote the story "A Butler Well Served by this Election," which became the basis for the award-winning motion picture The Butler, directed by Lee Daniels. He is also the author of biographies of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Sammy Davis Jr., and Sugar Ray Robinson.

Wil Haygood's appearance at the Pratt Library is sponsored by Congressman Elijah E. Cummings.

Recorded On: Thursday, November 5, 2015

Rita Gabis comes from a family of Eastern European Jews and Lithuanian Catholics. She was close to her Catholic grandfather as a child and knew one version of his past: prior to immigration he had fought the Russians, whose brutal occupation of Lithuania destroyed thousands of lives before Hitler's army swept in.

Five years ago, Gabis discovered that from 1941 to 1943, her grandfather had been the chief of security police under the Gestapo in the Lithuanian town of Svencionys, near the killing field of Poligon, where 8,000 Jews were murdered over three days in the fall of 1941. Gabis felt compelled to find out the complicated truth of who her grandfather was and what he had done.

Built around interviews in four countries, A Guest at the Shooters' Banquet is a history and family memoir, documenting "the holocaust by bullets."

Rita Gabis is the author of two books of poetry and co-author of a book on the craft of writing. She teaches creative writing at Hunter College.

The Schapiro Lecture Series is sponsored by a bequest from Mrs. Gloria L. Schapiro.

Recorded On: Monday, November 2, 2015