Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

How do restaurant workers live on some of the lowest wages in America? And how do poor working conditions -- discriminatory labor practices, exploitation, and unsanitary kitchens -- affect the meals that arrive at our restaurant tables? Saru Jayaraman, who launched the national restaurant workers' organization  Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, attempts to answer these questions by following the lives of restaurant workers in nine major U.S. cities.

Blending personal narrative and investigative journalism, Jayaraman shows that the quality of the food that arrives at our restaurant tables depends not only on the sourcing of the ingredients but also on the attention and skill of the people who prepare and serve it. Behind the Kitchen Door explores the political, economic, and moral implications of dining out. Jayaraman sets out a bold agenda to raise the living standards of the nation's second-largest private sector workforce and to ensure that dining out is a positive experience on both sides of the kitchen door.

Recorded On: Tuesday, September 24, 2013

A daughter of American royalty, Eileen Rockefeller is the first woman in the Rockefeller family to write a memoir of growing up with fame and fortune and finding her own voice within its storied history. The great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller and the daughter of David and Peggy Rockefeller, she reveals what it was like to grow up as the youngest of six children and 22 cousins in one of the world's most famous families. Eileen learned in childhood that great wealth and fame could open almost any door, but they could not buy a sense of personal worth.

A proponent of agricultural and environmental sustainability, a national leader in mind/body practices to promote health, and a pioneer in the practice of strategic philanthropy, Eileen Rockefeller has succeeded in her attempts to live up to her heritage. She has learned that real power and richness come not from material goods but from our relationships with one another.

Recorded On: Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Joanna Pearson's first book of poetry, Oldest Mortal Myth (2012), was chosen by Marilyn Nelson for the 2012 Donald Justice Prize. Her poems have appeared in various publications, including Best New Poets, Blackbird, Gulf Coast, The New Criterion, and Subtropics. She is also the author of a young adult novel, The Rites and Wrongs of Janice Wills (2011), and is currently completing a second young adult novel. She works as a resident physician at Johns Hopkins.

Megan McShea's writing has recently appeared in WORMS Quarterly, Furious Season, and The Shattered Wig Review, and her book A Mountain City of Toad Splendor was published in 2013 by Publishing Genius Press. She lives in Baltimore and works as an archivist.

Read poems by Joanna Pearson here.

Read poems by Megan McShea here, here, here, and here.

Recorded On: Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Thomas Glave has been admired for his unique style and exploration of taboo, politically volatile topics. The award-winning author's new collection, Among the Bloodpeople, contains all the power and daring of his earlier writing but ventures even further into the political, the personal, and the secret. Each essay reveals a passionate commitment to social justice and human truths. Whatever the subject, Glave expresses the observations of a global citizen with the voice of a poet.

Thomas Glave has won the O. Henry Award and the Lambda Literary Award. He is the author of Whose Songs? and Other Stories, Words to Our Now, and The Torturer's Wife. He edited the anthology Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles. Glave has been the Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professor at MIT and is a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.

Recorded On: Monday, September 23, 2013

Grammy-nominated lutenist Ronn McFarlane is joined by flutist Mindy Rosenfeld, a founding member of the Baltimore Consort, in a concert featuring period flutes, lutes, fife, harp, and bagpipes.

Recorded On: Saturday, September 21, 2013