Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

Elmaz Abinader is an award-winning author, poet, and playwright whose works are inspired by the dislocation of her parents from Lebanon to the US, as well as dislocations, occupations, and disenfranchisement of other people in the Arab World and Diaspora. She has been a Fulbright Scholar to Egypt, has conducted writing workshops in Palestine, and has toured several countries with her one-woman plays. She is also a Professor of English at Mills College in Oakland, CA, where she specializes in creative nonfiction/memoir, poets of color, and pedagogy. She co-founded VONA Voices in 1999 with the mission to nurture developing writers of color. This House, My Bones, her new collection of poetry, is the 2014 Editor’s Selection in Poetry at Willow Books/Aquarius Press and has been praised by poet Patricia Smith as "a gorgeously scripted chronicle that probes the collective heart and the countries we inhabit when we dare to speak out loud."

Kim Jensen is a writer, educator, and political activist whose books include The Woman I Left Behind, Bread Alone, and The Only Thing that Matters. Her fiction, poems, and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies. Her recent doctoral dissertation in creative writing is a post-September-11th novel called Forget Jerusalem. Active in the peace and justice movement for many years, especially the struggle for Palestinian liberation, Kim is associate professor of English at the Community College of Baltimore County where she is the founding director of the Community Book Connection, an interdisciplinary literacy initiative that demonstrates the vital connection between classroom learning and broader social issues. Writes poet Naomi Shihab Nye, "Kim Jensen’s poems are searing and spare. They will haunt you and stretch your vision. You won’t be the same person after reading them that you were before.”

Recorded On: Sunday, January 11, 2015

This annual Cave Canem poetry reading at the Pratt features Tim Seibles and Cave Canem fellows from the Baltimore-Washington area. Hosted by Reginald Harris of Poets House.

Tim Seibles is the author of several collections of poetry, including Body Moves (1988), Hurdy-Gurdy (1992), Hammerlock (1999), Buffalo Head Solos (2004), and Fast Animal (2012), which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and was nominated for a 2012 National Book Award. Seibles' honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, as well as an Open Voice Award from the National Writers Voice Project. In 2013 he received the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for poetry.

Recorded On: Sunday, December 7, 2014

In her New York Times bestsellers, Unlikely Friendships and Unlikely Loves, Jennifer Holland opened our eyes to the rich inner lives of animals and the power of love and friendship. In her new book, she shares 37 true tales of animal heroism, stories of animals going above and beyond, often at great personal risk.

Jennifer Holland is a contributing writer for National Geographic. She also writes for the Earth Touch News Network and other online science news organizations.

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

Recorded On: Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Blackballed is Darryl Pinckney's reflection on a century and a half of black participation in US electoral politics. In this combination of memoir, historical narrative, and contemporary political and social analysis, he investigates the struggle for black voting rights from Reconstruction through the civil rights movement, leading up to the election of Barack Obama.

Darryl Pinckney, a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, is the author of a novel, High Cotton, and Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature.

Mr. Pinckney's talk is part of the Brown Lecture Series, sponsored by a generous gift from the Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Foundation.

Recorded On: Thursday, November 13, 2014

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Edward J. Larson recovers a crucially important -- yet almost always overlooked -- chapter of George Washington's life, revealing how Washington saved the United States by coming out of retirement to lead the Constitutional Convention and serve as our first president.

Larson is university professor of history and holds the Hugh & Hazel Darling Chair in Law at Pepperdine University. His numerous books include Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion, for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in History.

Recorded On: Wednesday, November 12, 2014