Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

In 1942 Alice Allison Dunnigan, a sharecropper's daughter from Kentucky, made her way to the nation's capital and a career in journalism that eventually led her to the White House. With Alone Atop the Hill, Carol McCabe Booker has condensed Dunnigan's 1974 self-published autobiography and added scholarly annotations that provide historical context. Dunnigan's dynamic story reveals her importance to the fields of journalism, women's history, and the civil rights movement.

Carol McCabe Booker is a former journalist and attorney. She is co-author, with her husband Simeon Booker, of Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter's Account of the Civil Rights Movement.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a generous gift from PNC Bank.

Recorded On: Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Three women writers discuss the intersection of place, time, and culture in literature and in the lives of women. The conversation is moderated by Linda A. Duggins, Hachette Book Group.

Following the death of her husband, artist and chef Ficre Ghebreyesus, poet Elizabeth Alexander found herself at an existential crossroads. Hernew memoir, The Light of the World, describes a very personal and yet universal quest for meaning, understanding, and acceptance. Elizabeth Alexander composed and read "Praise Song for the Day" at President Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration. The author of six books of poetry, she is the inaugural Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University and was recently elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

LaShonda Katrice Barnett is the author of a story collection and editor of I Got Thunder: Black Women Songwriters On Their Craft and Off the Record: Conversations with African American & Brazilian Women Musicians. She has taught literature and history at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, Hunter College, and Brown University. Her debut novel, JAM! On the Vine, tells the story of Ivoe Williams who founds the first female-run African American newspaper in Kansas City in the early 20th century. She risks her freedom and her life to report on the atrocities of segregation in the American prison system.

Lalita Tademy is the author of the bestselling novels, Cane River and Red River. Set agains the backdrop of Alabama in 1822, her new novel, Citizens Creek, follows the lives of "Cow Tom," a young slave boy who is sold to work on a plantation for a Creek Indian Chief, and his beloved granddaughter, Rose, whom he nicknamed Little Warrior. Through Cow Tom and Rose, Tademy shows the strength and determination of not allowing negative circumstances or influences to stand in the way of success.

Media Sponsor: The Baltimore Times.

Recorded On: Saturday, March 7, 2015

As the Washington correspondent for the Chicago Defender, Ethel Payne used her journalistic skills to elevate civil rights issues onto the national agenda. In the 1950s and ‘60s, she raised challenging questions at presidential press conferences about matters of importance to African Americans and the emerging civil rights movement. She covered the Montgomery bus boycott, desegregation of the University of Alabama, and the Little Rock school crisis, as well as traveling overseas to write about the service of black troops in Vietnam. For many black Americans she became their eyes on the frontlines of the struggle for equality.

James McGrath Morris is the author of three previous books, including Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print and Power.

Writers LIVE! programs are supported in part by a generous grant from PNC Bank.

Recorded On: Thursday, February 26, 2015

Ekphrastic poems are based on another work of art, most often visual art.

The Instructor: Clarinda Harriss is a professor emerita of English at Towson University whose poems and short fiction are widely anthologized. Her most recent books are The White Rail, Air Travel, Mortmain, and Dirty Blue Voice.

This is the third in a series of three workshops.

Recorded On: Wednesday, February 25, 2015

PNC Bank and Enoch Pratt Free Library hosts this interview with four highly experienced and established women business owners in Baltimore to discuss the effects of the economy on their businesses and how they have managed the negative economic trends to stay operating and successful.

Recorded On: Tuesday, February 24, 2015