Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

Carl Phillips reads from his poetry and discusses it with Lia Purpura.

Carl Phillips is the author of 15 books of poetry, most recently Pale Colors in a Tall Field (FSG, 2020). His other books include Wild Is the Wind (FSG, 2018), winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called it “haunting and contemplative as the torch song for which the collection is named.” His selected poems, Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006, was published by FSG in 2007. Other books include The Tether (FSG, 2002), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Double Shadow (FSG, 2012), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Silverchest (FSG, 2014), a finalist for the Griffin Prize. He recently published a chapbook, Star Map with Action Figures (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019). A four-time finalist for the National Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, his other honors include the Lambda Literary Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Award, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets, for which he served as Chancellor from 2006-2012.

Lia Purpura is the author of nine collections of essays, poems, and translations. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, her awards include Guggenheim, NEA, and Fulbright Fellowships, as well as four Pushcart Prizes, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Nonfiction, and others. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, Agni, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore, MD, where she is Writer in Residence at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Recorded On: Tuesday, February 2, 2021

Join us for the annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day Lecture featuring Eddie Glaude. Presented in partnership with the Reginald F. Lewis Museum and Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts.

In the story of Baldwin’s crucible, Glaude suggests, we can find hope and guidance through our own after times, this Trumpian era of shattered promises and white retrenchment. Mixing biography–drawn partially from newly uncovered interviews–with history, memoir, and trenchant analysis of our current moment, Begin Again is Glaude’s attempt, following Baldwin, to bear witness to the difficult truth of race in America today. It is at once a searing exploration that lays bare the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we all must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America.

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton University and author of Democracy in Black.

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

Recorded On: Saturday, January 16, 2021

Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections, will be in conversation with Laura van den Berg. Presented in partnership with CityLit Project.

Danielle Evans is widely acclaimed for her blisteringly smart voice and x-ray insights into complex human relationships. With The Office of Historical Corrections, Evans zooms in on particular moments and relationships in her characters’ lives in a way that allows them to speak to larger issues of race, culture, and history. She introduces us to Black and multiracial characters who are experiencing the universal confusions of lust and love, and getting walloped by grief—all while exploring how history haunts us, personally and collectively. Ultimately, she provokes us to think about the truths of American history—about who gets to tell them, and the cost of setting the record straight.

Danielle Evans is the author of the story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, winner of the PEN America PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Paterson Prize, and a National Book Foundation "5 under 35" selection. Her stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories. She teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Laura van den Berg is the author of the story collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us,The Isle of Youth, and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, which was named a Best Book of 2020 by TIME. and the novels Find Me and The Third Hotel, which was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and named a Best Book of 2018 by over a dozen publications. She is the recipient of a Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bard Fiction Prize, a PEN/O. Henry Prize, a MacDowell Colony fellowship, and is a two-time finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Born and raised in Florida, Laura splits her time between the Boston area and Central Florida, with her husband and dog.

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

Recorded On: Tuesday, December 15, 2020

This year's program features readings by Evie Shockley and Steven Leyva, and local Cave Canem fellows:

Saida Agostini
Abdul Ali
Teri Cross-Davis
Hayes Davis
Raina Fields
Linda Susan Jackson
Bettina Judd
Alan King
Kateema Lee
Hermine Pinson

Hosted by Reginald Harris from Poets House, New York City. Presented in partnership with CityLit Project.

Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 2 Bridges Review, Scalawag, Nashville Review, jubilat, Vinyl, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Poetry 2020. He is a Cave Canem fellow and author of the chapbook Low Parish and author of The Understudy’s Handbook which won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from Washington Writers Publishing House. Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an assistant professor in the Klein Family School of Communications Design.

Evie Shockley is a poet and scholar. Her most recent poetry collections are the new black (Wesleyan, 2011) and semiautomatic (Wesleyan, 2017); both won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the latter was a finalist for the Pulitzer and LA Times Book Prizes. She has received the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Stephen Henderson Award, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Cave Canem. Shockley is Professor of English at Rutgers University.

Founded by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady in 1996 to remedy the under-representation and isolation of African American poets in the literary landscape, Cave Canem Foundation is a home for the many voices of African American poetry and is committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of African American poets.

Recorded On: Sunday, December 6, 2020

Join us for a conversation and short tour with C. Fraser Smith.

C. Fraser Smith was a reporter for the Jersey Journal and the Providence Journal before his decades-long affiliation with the Baltimore Sun as a reporter and then Sunday op-ed columnist. In addition, while in Baltimore, he became a commentator for WYPR, the Baltimore affiliate of National Public Radio, as well as a weekly columnist for The Daily Record, a regional business newspaper based in Baltimore.

The Daily Miracle, A Memoir of Newspapering is his fourth book.

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

Recorded On: Thursday, December 3, 2020

Join us for a conversation and short tour with Ron Cassie to launch his book, If You Love Baltimore, It Will Love You Back: 171 Short but True Stories. The conversation will be moderated by Rafael Alvarez.

Ron Cassie is a senior editor at Baltimore magazine, where he’s won national awards for his coverage of the death of Freddie Gray, sea-level rise on the Eastern Shore, and the opioid epidemic in Hagerstown. He reported from Haiti in the days following the tragic earthquake, New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and from Uganda as part of a humanitarian relief effort. His work has appeared as a notable selection in The Best of American Sports Writing, in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center, at CityLab, Newsweek, Huffington Post, Grist, The New York Daily News,The Baltimore Sun, several alternative weeklies, including Baltimore City Paper, and Urbanite, where he served as editor-in-chief before coming to Baltimore. He has been a finalist for the Folio and City and Regional Magazine Association Writer of the Year awards. He is a two-time Religion Writer of the Year runner-up. He teaches writing at Towson University and holds masters degrees from The Johns Hopkins University and Georgetown University, where he is pursuing a doctorate degree. Prior to becoming a full-time journalist, he spent almost two decades swinging a hammer, riding a bike, and pouring drinks for a living.

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

Recorded On: Wednesday, December 2, 2020

Join us for a conversation and tour with Kate Wyer, Girl, Cow & Monk, and Kate Reed Petty, True Story.

Kate Reed Petty's debut novel, True Story, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her short fiction and essays have been published online by Electric Literature, American Short Fiction, Blackbird, Nat. Brut, the Los Angeles Review of Books blog, and Ambit, and her short films have appeared on Narrative magazine and at the 2019 Maryland Film Festival. Kate lives in Baltimore.

Kate Wyer is the author of the novels Black Krim and Land Beast. Her work has appeared in West Branch, The Rupture, Necessary Fiction, Hobart, Unsaid and other journals. She works in the public mental health system of Maryland. She is also a somatics teacher and a registered yoga teacher.

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

Recorded On: Tuesday, December 1, 2020

As a novelist who wrote and published in a time when authorship for women was frowned upon, Jane Austen knew from experience what it was like to be highly talented and constrained by circumstances. Her masterpiece Emma, recently (and beautifully) adapted to the screen by Autumn de Wilde, illuminates how characters find their own happiness amidst limitations. Come discuss Emma the novel, Emma the film, and Jane Austen generally with Juliette Wells, a professor at Goucher College who created a 200th-anniversary reader-friendly edition of Emma for Penguin Classics.

Learn more about Juliette Wells.

Recorded On: Thursday, April 23, 2020

Virtually celebrate the Senator Barbara A. Mikulski Room in the Central Library with Senator Barbara Mikulski and Ambassador Wendy Sherman in conversation, moderated by Meghan McCorkell.

The people of Maryland elected Senator Barbara A. Mikulski to be their U.S. Senator because she was a fighter – looking out for the day–to–day needs of Marylanders and the long–range needs of the nation. She was not only the Senator from Maryland, but also the Senator for Maryland.

Determined to make a difference in her community, Mikulski became a social worker in Baltimore. Her work evolved into community activism when Mikulski worked with a diverse coalition of communities across Baltimore City to successfully organize against the building of a 16–lane highway through Baltimore’s ethnic enclaves and predominantly Black-owned neighborhoods.

Mikulski’s community organizing took her to Baltimore’s City Council in 1971, the United States House of Representatives in 1976, and then the United States Senate in 1986. Retiring in 2017, Mikulski has stated that it is not how long she served that matters, but rather how well she served her state and nation.

A trailblazer, Mikulski was the first Democratic woman Senator elected in her own right. As a Senator, she focused on issues of science, technology, the economic and health security of women, as well as jobs and justice. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama in 2015. And a supernova was named in her honor in 2012 by Nobel Prize winner Dr. Adam Reiss.

She is currently a Homewood Professor of Public Policy at John Hopkins University, where she is dedicated to preparing the next generation of change-makers and innovators.

Wendy R. Sherman is a professor of the practice of public leadership and director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. In addition, she is a Senior Fellow at the School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Ambassador Sherman is Senior Counselor at Albright Stonebridge Group and former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. She is currently an MSNBC global affairs contributor and on the USA TODAY Board of Contributors.

This program is part of 2020 Women's Vote Centennial Initiative conversations at the Pratt Library.

Recorded On: Thursday, November 19, 2020

Join us for a discussion with Erica Green, Tawanda Jones, Brandon Soderberg, and Baynard Woods. Presented in partnership with OSI Baltimore. They discuss overlapping themes in Five Days and I Got a Monster, including whose stories are valued in the public discourse, the role and responsibility of the press, the narrative of a city, and the pursuit of justice. West Wednesday will be honored during the program.

The conversation is moderated by Maryland State Senator Jill P. Carter.

Maryland State Senator Jill P. Carter represents the state’s 41st legislative district, which falls within the municipal boundaries of Baltimore City. She previously represented the district as a member of the House of Delegates for 14 years, from 2003 to 2016. Senator Carter is the daughter of the late Walter P. Carter, a revered civil rights activist and a central figure of Maryland’s civil rights movement in the ‘60s and early ‘70's. Her mother, Zerita Joy Carter, was a public school teacher who specialized in Early Childhood Education. Senator Carter is a graduate of Western High School. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Loyola University and a J.D. from the University of Baltimore School of Law.

Erica Green is a correspondent in Washington who covers the U.S. Department of Education and Secretary Betsy DeVos, focusing on federal policy, educational equity and civil rights enforcement in the nation’s K-12 schools. Ms. Green's education coverage at The New York Times won first place in the beat reporting category at the Education Writers Association's 2018 National Awards for Education Reporting. Before joining The Times in 2017, Ms. Green, a native Baltimorean, covered the Baltimore City school system for The Baltimore Sun. Ms. Green was also part of the Sun team named a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist for breaking news coverage of the death of Freddie Gray and the unrest that followed. She collaborated with Wes Moore on the book, "Five Days," which details the April 2015 events through the eyes of Baltimoreans as the "Baltimore Uprising" unfolded.

Tawanda Jones is the sister of Tyrone West; she and her familyd “West Wednesday,” a weekly protest and safe ground to speak out against police brutality and murder. She is also the founder of West Correlation. Jones and her supporters have moved West Wednesdays online, featuring the family members of victims of police violence from around the country on a weekly live stream. In addition to this weekly work, Jones also works to change laws at the state level. She is the mother of four children, a pre-k teacher and a freedom fighter.

Brandon Soderberg is a writer living Baltimore and was previously the Editor in Chief of the Baltimore City Paper and a contributing writer to SPIN. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Vice, The Village Voice and many other publications.

Baynard Woods is a writer living in Baltimore. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and many other publications.

Recorded On: Wednesday, November 18, 2020