Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

Anthony Ray Hinton is in conversation with Jenny Egan about his book and the Equal Justice Initiative.

Anthony Ray Hinton survived for 30 years on Alabama's death row. His story is a decades-long journey to exoneration and freedom. In 1985, Mr. Hinton was convicted of the unsolved murders of two fast-food restaurant managers based on the testimony of ballistics experts for the State who claimed that the crime bullets came from a dusty revolver found in Mr. Hinton's mother’s closet. Without the benefit of a competent expert to challenge the State’s theory (Mr. Hinton’s lawyer hired a ballistics expert who was blind in one eye), an all-white jury convicted Mr. Hinton and he was sentenced to death. After years of petitioning to have the revolver re-analyzed, three independent experts concluded that the bullets could not have been fired from his mother’s revolver. With the assistance of the Equal Justice Initiative, led by attorney Bryan Stevenson, Mr. Hinton was freed in 2015. Since his release, Mr. Hinton has traveled the world sharing his story and discussing the changes that need to be made to prevent similar injustices from happening to other people. In 2018, Mr. Hinton published The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row, which was selected for Oprah’s Book Club and is a New York Times bestseller. In 2019, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from St. Bonaventure University.

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

Recorded On: Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Firmin DeBrabander is in conversation with columnist Dan Rodricks.

With Life after Privacy: Reclaiming Democracy in a Surveillance Society, Professor of Philosophy at Maryland Institute College of Art Firmin DeBrabander explores the role that privacy does and does not play in today’s world. Even though people do know that their every move is watched and recorded online, why do they still share everything that happens to them on social media and are so careless about virtually sending along their own personal data? We no longer have privacy, but do we really need it or want it?

DeBrabander aims to understand the prospects and future of democracy without any privacy (or very little of it) within a society that does not know how to appreciate and protect it.

Firmin DeBrabander is Professor of Philosophy, Maryland Institute College of Art. He has written commentary pieces for a number of national publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, the Atlantic, LA Times, Salon, Aeon, Chicago Tribune, and The New Republic. Professor DeBrabander is also the author of Do Guns Make us Free?, a philosophical and political critique of the guns rights movement.

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

Recorded On: Thursday, November 12, 2020

Mary Rizzo is in conversation with Wesley Wilson and Melvin Brown.

In Come and Be Shocked, Mary Rizzo examines the cultural history and racial politics of these contrasting images of the city. From the 1950s, a period of urban crisis and urban renewal, to the early twenty-first century, Rizzo looks at how artists created powerful images of Baltimore. How, Rizzo asks, do the imaginary cities created by artists affect the real cities that we live in? How does public policy (intentionally or not) shape the kinds of cultural representations that artists create? And why has the relationship between artists and Baltimore city officials been so fraught, resulting in public battles over film permits and censorship?

To answer these questions, Rizzo explores the rise of tourism, urban branding, and citizen activism. She considers artists working in the margins, from the East Baltimore poets writing in Chicory, a community magazine funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity, to a young John Waters, who shot his early low-budget movies on the streets, guerrilla-style. She also investigates more mainstream art, from the teen dance sensation The Buddy Deane Show to the comedy-drama Roc to the crime show The Wire, from Anne Tyler's award-winning book The Accidental Tourist to Barry Levinson's movie classic Diner.

Mary Rizzo is an assistant professor of history at Rutgers University–Newark. She is the author of Class Acts: Young Men and the Rise of Lifestyle and founder of the Chicory Revitalization Project.

Melvin E. Brown was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. He attended Columbia University and is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. He was the longest serving editor of Chicory Magazine published by the Enoch Pratt Free Library's Community Action Program (1966-1983). Melvin is a former faculty member at Sojourner Douglass College and Towson University, where he taught African American Literature and Creative Writing.

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

Recorded On: Tuesday, September 22, 2020

Join us for a talk by Michael J. Wilson in honor of National Voter Registration Day on Tuesday, September 22.

The right to vote has been a continuing journey of expanding civic rights. In the beginning, the only people who could vote were white male land-owners (even in Maryland you had to own at least fifty acres of land). This journey has been led by movements (women’s suffrage, civil rights, labor unions, etc.) by political parties (Democratic, Republican, and independent parties like the Communists, Socialists and Greens) and often by candidates. At times, the government itself has led efforts for enfranchising voters.

In Michael J. Wilson's collection, he has focused on the movements, parties, and government--not on candidates. The reasons why people register and vote has been as wide-ranging as anti-smoking to tenants’ rights to marriage equality. It’s about using pop art, fine art, and celebrities. The history of voting rights in United States is also the story of growing diversity, inclusion, and democratizing political power. Join us for a conversation about this history.

A member of the American Political Items Collectors, Michael J. Wilson has participated in voter registration campaigns for Planned Parenthood, the NAACP and the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union and led registration and get-out-vote campaigns in many states, including Florida, New Hampshire, and Michigan. He is a registered voter in Baltimore City.

Recorded On: Monday, September 21, 2020

Dapper Dan is in conversation with Mykel Hunter of WEAA about his life and work.

With his eponymous store on 125th Street, Dapper Dan pioneered streetwear in the early 1980s, co-opting luxury branding to design original garments with high-end detail. Known for using exquisite leathers, furs, and other fine materials, he first drew powerful New York City hustlers as clientele, who all came due to his strong street reputation as a legendary professional gambler and dandy. He then went on to outfit entertainers and other celebrities, including Eric B. & Rakim, LL Cool J, Salt-N-Pepa, Mike Tyson, Missy Elliott, JAY-Z, Beyonce, Aaliyah, P. Diddy, Floyd Mayweather, and many more. Dapper Dan has been featured on platforms including The New York Times, Elle, Vogue, W, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, CNN, and Netflix. His works have been on display at The Smithsonian, The Museum at FIT, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art. Dapper Dan’s boutique reopened in 2017 in a major partnership with Gucci. His memoir, Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem is a New York Times Bestseller.

Thank you to our program supporters: The Ruth Enlow Library, Carroll County Public Library, Prince George's County Memorial Library System.

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

Recorded On: Tuesday, September 15, 2020

Happy 100th birthday, Ray Bradbury! Bring your own dandelion wine to this virtual celebration. Justina Ireland, Michael Swanwick, Sam Weller, and David Wright share readings of Bradbury and join in a discussion of his legacy moderated by Sarah Pinsker.

Justina Ireland lives with her husband, kid, cats, and dog in Maryland. She is the author of both full-length books and short fiction and considers words to be her best friends. She has written a number of books, including Star Wars books for children. You can find her books Vengeance Bound and Promise of Shadows, as well as the New York Times best seller Dread Nation and its sequel Deathless Divide, wherever books are sold. You can visit her at her website: justinaireland.com.

Sarah Pinsker’s fiction has won the Nebula, Sturgeon, and Philip K. Dick Awards, and her 50-plus published stories include finalists for the Hugo, World Fantasy, and other awards. Her first collection, Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea (Small Beer Press), and her first novel, Song For A New Day (Berkley), were published in 2019. She is also a singer/songwriter with three albums and another forthcoming.

Michael Swanwick is one of the most acclaimed and prolific science fiction and fantasy writers of his generation. He is the recipient of the Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards as well as five Hugo Awards. His most recent novel, The Iron Dragon's Mother, completes a trilogy begun 25 years before with The Iron Dragon's Daughter. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter. Photo credit: Mikey Mongol.

Sam Weller is the two-time Bram Stoker Award-winning biographer of Ray Bradbury. He worked with the legendary author for 12 years on four books and a graphic novel. Weller's The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury was a national best seller. Weller's latest book, Dark Black, a collection of new American Gothic short fiction, is available now. Weller is a professor in the English and Creative Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago. You can follow him on twitter @Sam__Weller.

David Wright is a librarian with the Reader Services department at The Seattle Public Library, working out of the big downtown branch, where for over 15 years he has presented—and now podcasts—the library's Thrilling Tales: A Storytime for Grownups. Ray Bradbury is among his very favorite writers, and he has enjoyed sharing his tales in senior centers, shelters, bookstores, bars, and libraries. He will be presenting two segments of Fahrenheit 451 for the Bradbury Center's Centennial Read-A-Thon, which begins streaming on August 22nd.

Pictured clockwise from top left: Justina Ireland, Sarah Pinsker, Michael Swanwick, Sam Weller, David Wright.

Recorded On: Wednesday, August 19, 2020

Featuring artists Valeria Fuentes, Phaan Howng, and Kate Reed Petty. Moderated by Sheri Parks.

Celebrate the Year of the Women with a conversation looking to the future of women’s lives and work. Sheri Parks will lead a panel exploring Apocalyptic/Utopic narratives.  The panel brings together multidisciplinary artists in conversation to share how they interpret their experiences the world. 

Presented in partnership with MICA.

Valeria Fuentes was born in Bolivia but raised in Baltimore. She is a multidisciplinary artist and designer, cultural producer, and arts educator. She now runs a platform for immigrants called Roots & Raíces which aims to highlight, support, and celebrate immigrants through the arts in Baltimore. She received both a BFA in Architectural Design and an MA in Social Design at the Maryland Institute College of Art. As part of the board of Baltimore Votes she also engages on work around civic engagement and voting in Baltimore City. She is committed to helping Baltimore and communities of color achieve equity and justice through her role as an artist, designer, and catalyst.

Phaan Howng is a Baltimore based Taiwanese American multi-disciplinary art practice centers around creating various narratives and landscapes that reflect nature thriving in a utopian post-human planet, or what she terms an “optimistic post-apocalypse.” She received her MFA from the Mount Royal School of Art at MICA in 2015, and her BFA in Painting from Boston University in 2004. Howng has exhibited her work at various places such as the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Arts and Industry Museum, and the Spring Break Art Show in New York City.

Kate Reed Petty is a writer, feminist, and environmentalist. Her first novel, entitled TRUE STORY, is coming Aug 4, 2020 from Viking Books. Her fiction and essays have been published online by Electric Literature, American Short Fiction, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, and she was awarded a "30 Below" prize by Narrative Magazine. Kate's work has been supported by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bloedel Reserve, The Mount, and the Rubys Artist Grants. She lives in Baltimore. 

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

Re-opening activities are made possible in part by a generous gift from Sandra R. Berman.

Recorded On: Wednesday, March 11, 2020

Join us for an evening with Evelyn from the Internets: humor writer, digital storyteller, and host of Say It Loud, a PBS Digital Studios series that celebrates Black culture, context, and history. She is in conversation with Mykel Hunter of WEAA.

Re-opening activities are made possible in part by a generous gift from Sandra R. Berman.

Recorded On: Thursday, February 27, 2020

Canadian-American poet James Arthur is the author of The Suicide’s Son (Véhicule Press, 2019) and Charms Against Lightning (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). His poems have also appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Review of Books, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, and the London Review of Books. He has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Hodder Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship, a Discovery/The Nation Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship to Northern Ireland, and a Visiting Fellowship at Exeter College, Oxford. Arthur lives in Baltimore, where he teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. 

George David Clark’s Reveille (Arkansas, 2015) won the Miller Williams Prize and his recent poems can be found in AGNI, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ecotone, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. The editor of 32 Poems, he teaches creative writing at Washington and Jefferson College and lives in western Pennsylvania with his wife and their four young children.

Read "Wind" by James Arthur.
Read "Black Igloo" by George David Clark.

Recorded On: Wednesday, February 26, 2020

From the creator of Elle’s “Eric Reads the News,” a heartfelt and hilarious memoir-in-essays about growing up seeing the world differently, finding unexpected hope, and experiencing every awkward, extraordinary stumble along the way. In essays by turns hysterical and heartfelt, R. Eric Thomas redefines what it means to be an “other” through the lens of his own life experience. He explores the two worlds of his childhood: the barren urban landscape where his parents’ house was an anomalous bright spot, and the verdant school they sent him to in white suburbia. He writes about struggling to reconcile his Christian identity with his sexuality, the exhaustion of code-switching in college, accidentally getting famous on the internet (for the wrong reason), and the surreal experience of covering the 2016 election, and the seismic changes that came thereafter.

R. Eric Thomas (he/him/his) is a senior staff writer at Elle online where he has written the daily pop culture and politics humor column “Eric Reads the News” since 2016. He’s also been published by The New York Times, among many other publications. As a playwright, his work has been seen on stages around the country; he won the Barrymore Award and the Dramatists Guild Lanford Wilson Award and was a finalist for the Steinberg/American Theater Critics Association New Play Award. Off the page, he is the long-running host of The Moth StorySlams in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. He lives in Baltimore with his extraordinary husband, the Reverend David Norse Thomas, and an out-of-control collection of succulents, candles, and tote bags. Here for It is his first book.

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

Re-opening activities are made possible in part by a generous gift from Sandra R. Berman.

Recorded On: Thursday, February 20, 2020