Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

John Rizzo talks about his new book, Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA.

Company Man is John Rizzo's insider memoir of his career at the CIA under eleven CIA directors and seven Presidents. During a crisis, said former CIA Director George Tenet, "You don't call in the tough guys; you call in the lawyers." From 1976 to 2009, John Rizzo was the lawyer they called. He made legal calls on virtually every major CIA issue of the past 30 years, from rules governing waterboarding and drones to answering for the Iran Contra scandal. Following 9/11 Rizzo was the CIA's top lawyer.

(This event was originally scheduled for January 21, 2014.)

Recorded On: Thursday, February 6, 2014

Janis Kearney's book, Daisy: Between a Rock and a Hard Place, chronicles the life of civil rights legend Daisy Gatson Bates, including her role in the 1957 Little Rock Central High School integration crisis. Bates served as co-publisher with her husband of the award-winning Arkansas State Press newspaper and as the first and only female state president of the NAACP. In 1959 Daisy Gatson Bates won the NAACP Spingarn Award, along with the members of the Little Rock Nine.

Janis Kearney, a graduate of the University of Arkansas, served as personal diarist to President Bill Clinton from 1995-2001. She served as managing editor and later publisher of the Arkansas State Press newspaper. In 2003 she founded Writing Our World Press.

Recorded On: Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Dr. Dolen Perkins-Valdez talks about Twelve Years a Slave, the story of Solomon Northup.

Twelve Years a Slave, published in 1853 and the inspiration for the 2013 motion picture, tells the story of a free-born African American from New York State who was kidnapped into slavery in 1841. A new edition of Northup's memoir, edited and with an introduction by Dr. Dolen Perkins-Valdez, was issued in November.

Dolen Perkins-Valdez is the author of the bestselling novel, Wench, for which she received the First Novelist Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. In 2011, she was a finalist for two NAACP Image Awards and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for fiction.

Recorded On: Thursday, January 30, 2014

Kaid Benfield talks about his new book, People Habitat: 25 Ways to Think about Greener, Healthier Cities.

With over 80 percent of Americans now living in cities and suburbs, getting our communities right has never been more important, more complicated, or more fascinating. Longtime sustainability leader Kaid Benfield shares 25 enlightening essays about the ecology of human settlement and how to make it better for both people and the planet.

Kaid Benfield is Special Counsel for Urban Solutions at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, DC. He is also an adjunct professor at the George Washington University School of Law and a cofounder of the Smart Growth America Coalition.

Presented in partnership with 1000 Friends of Maryland.

Recorded On: Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Sarah Arvio’snight thoughts: 70 dream poems & notes from an analysis(Knopf 2013) is a hybrid book: poetry, memoir and essay. Her earlier books areVisits from the SeventhandSono: cantos(Knopf, 2002 and 2006). She has been awarded the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Guggenheim and Bogliasco Fellowships, among other honors. For two decades a translator for the United Nations in New York and Switzerland, she has also taught poetry at Princeton. A lifelong New Yorker, she now lives in Maryland, near the Chesapeake Bay. In a review ofnight thoughts, Grace Cavalieri writes, "Who does not love the nighttime mind with its full disclosure, lack of censor—metaphor, innuendo, enchantment, intensity? Sarah Arvio breaks the codes through psychoanalysis and converts her thoughts to poems. [...] From the uncomfortable silence of the psyche’s tundra, Arvio wrings out her truth."

Lia Purpurais the author of seven collections of essays, poems and translations, most recently,Rough Likeness(essays) andKing Baby(poems). Her new collection of poems,It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful, comes out next year with Viking Penguin. Her honors include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, National Endowment for the Arts and Fulbright Fellowships, three Pushcart prizes, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Nonfiction, and the Beatrice Hawley, and Ohio State University Press awards in poetry. Recent work appears inAgni,Field,The Georgia Review,Orion, The New Republic,The New Yorker,The Paris Review,Best American Essays, and elsewhere. She is Writer in Residence at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, a member of the core faculty at the Rainier Writing Workshop, and teaches at writing programs around the country, including the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference. She lives in Baltimore, MD.

Read poems by Sarah Arviohere.
Read poems by Lia Purpurahere,here,here, andhere.

Recorded On: Tuesday, January 28, 2014