Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

Taking us into detention centers, immigration courts, and the inner lives of Aida Hernandez and other daring characters, The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez reveals the human consequences of militarizing what was once a more forgiving border. With emotional force and narrative suspense, Aaron Bobrow-Strain brings us into the heart of a violently unequal America in this nonfiction account. He also shows us that the heroes of our current immigration wars are less likely to be perfect paragons of virtue than complex, flawed human beings who deserve justice and empathy all the same.

Aaron Bobrow-Strain is a professor of politics at Whitman College, where he teaches courses dealing with food, immigration, and the U.S.-Mexico border. He is the author of White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf and Intimate Enemies: Landowners, Power, and Violence in Chiapas. In the 1990s, he worked on the U.S.-Mexico border as an activist and educator. He is a founding member of the Walla Walla Immigrant Rights Coalition in Washington State.

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: Tuesday, December 10, 2019

…and Other Disasters, the smart and moving collection of short fiction and poetry from acclaimed author Malka Older, examines otherness, identity and compassion across a spectrum of possible existence. In stories about an AI built for empathy, a corps of fighting midwives traveling to a new planet, and a young anthropologist who returns to study the cultures of a dying Earth, Older's characters grapple with what it means to belong and be othered, to cling to the past and face the future, all while navigating a precarious world, riddled with natural and man-made disasters.

Malka Older is a writer, aid worker, and sociologist. Her science-fiction political thriller Infomocracy was named one of the best books of 2016 by Kirkus, Book Riot, and the Washington Post. With the sequels Null States (2017) and State Tectonics (2018), she completed the Centenal Cycle trilogy, a finalist for the Hugo Best Series Award of 2018. She is also the creator of the serial Ninth Step Station, currently running on Serial Box, and her short story collection And Other Disasters will come out in November 2019. Named Senior Fellow for Technology and Risk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs for 2015, she is currently an Affiliated Research Fellow at the Center for the Sociology of Organizations at Sciences Po, where her doctoral work explored the dynamics of post-disaster improvisation in governments. She has more than a decade of field experience in humanitarian aid and development.

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: Wednesday, December 4, 2019

Join us for the annual Cave Canem poetry reading featuring Kyle Dargan and local Cave Canem fellows.

Hosted by Reginald Harris from Poets House, New York City.

Kyle Dargan is the author of the poetry collection Anagnorisis, which was awarded the 2019 Lenore Marshall Prize and longlisted for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His four previous collections, Honest Engine, Logorrhea Dementia, Bouquet of Hungers and The Listening–were all published by the University of Georgia Press. For his work, he has also received the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and grants from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Dargan has partnered with the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities to produce poetry programming at the White House and Library of Congress. He’s worked with and supports a number of youth writing organizations, such as 826DC, Writopia Lab, Young Writers Workshop and the Dodge Poetry high schools program. He is currently an Associate Professor of literature and Assistant Director of creative writing at American University, as well as the founder and editor of POST NO ILLS magazine. 

Also hear from: Abdul Ali, Teri Cross, Alan King, Saida Agostini, Cedrick Tillman, Kateema Lee, Hayes Davis.

Founded by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady in 1996 to remedy the under-representation and isolation of African American poets in the literary landscape, Cave Canem Foundation is a home for the many voices of African American poetry and is committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of African American poets.

Presented in partnership with CityLit Project.

Recorded On: Sunday, December 1, 2019

This program is in conjunction with Undesign the Redline, exhibited at Central Library November 1, 2019-January 31, 2020.

Lawrence Lanahan is the author of The Lines Between Us: Two Families and a Quest to Cross Baltimore’s Racial Divide. In his deeply reported, revelatory story, Lanahan chronicles how the Baltimore region became so highly segregated and why its fault lines persist today. 

Writing from the Fair Housing Act to the death of Freddie Gray and beyond, Lanahan describes epic efforts to desegregate the Baltimore region and deconcentrate poverty in West Baltimore. As Baltimoreans “cross the lines” in the book, one theme emerges repeatedly: the struggle for self-determination. During the attempted revitalization of 1990s Sandtown, for example, and during the protests following Freddie Gray’s death, neighborhood leaders in West Baltimore worked the lines trying to ensure that their communities remained in control of their own destiny.

Lawrence Lanahan will speak with three Baltimoreans whose lives and work have drawn them to this struggle. 

Sandtown resident Antoine Bennett is the founder of Men of Valuable Action, a leadership development program in West Baltimore. From 2007 to 2012, he was the co-director of New Song Urban Ministries, which worked closely with followers of the Christian Community Development movement who moved into West Baltimore to live in solidarity with the poor.

Dayvon Love is the director of public policy for Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, where he has worked for nearly a decade years to advance the public policy interests of Black people. As interest in West Baltimore intensified after the death of Freddie Gray, Love and other community leaders created Baltimore United for Change, a hub to connect people to grassroots activists with long histories in Baltimore communities. Love is the author of Worse Than Trump: The American Plantation and co-author with Lawrence Grandpre of The Black Book: Reflections from the Baltimore Grassroots.

Audrey McFarlane is the Dean Julius Isaacson Professor of Law and associate dean of faculty research and development at the University of Baltimore School of Law. McFarlane studies the intersection of economic development with race, place, and class. Her latest article, “The Properties of Integration: Mixed Income Housing as Discrimination Management” (UCLA Law Review), looks at the impact of discriminatory preferences on the development of affordable housing.

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

Recorded On: Wednesday, November 20, 2019

Rick Atkinson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning An Army at Dawn, has long been admired for his deeply researched, stunningly vivid narrative histories. Now he turns his attention to a new war, and in the initial volume of the

Full of riveting details and untold stories, The British Are Coming is a tale of heroes and knaves, of sacrifice and blunder, of redemption and profound suffering. Rick Atkinson has given stirring new life to the first act of our country’s creation

Rick Atkinson is the bestselling author of the Liberation Trilogy―An Army at Dawn (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history), The Day of Battle, and The Guns at Last Light―as well as The Long Gray Line and

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: Tuesday, November 19, 2019

Are you interested in getting your genre writing published? Do you want tips and tricks on how to become a published author or how to self-publish? Have you considered marketing strategies to become a successful writer? Then join us for a panel discussion and Q&A featuring local authors and editors.

Panelists include:

Sarah Pinsker, author of the novelette "Our Lady of the Open Road," winner of the Nebula Award, and over fifty other stories. Her first collection, Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea: Stories was published by Small Beer Press in March 2019, and her first novel, A Song For A New Day, was published by Berkley/Penguin/Random House in September 2019.

Dave Ring, chair of the OutWrite LGBTQ Book Festival in Washington, DC. He has stories featured or forthcoming in a number of publications, including Speculative City, GlitterShip, and A Punk Rock Future. He is the publisher and managing editor of Neon Hemlock Press, as well as the editor of Broken Metropolis: Queer Tales of a City That Never Wasfrom Mason Jar Press.

K.M. Szpara, a queer and trans author who lives in Baltimore, MD, with a tiny dog. Kellan's debut alt-/near-future novel, Docile, will be published March 3, 2020 from Tor.com Publishing. He is the author of "Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time," a Hugo and Nebula nominated novelette about a gay trans man who's bitten by a vampire. More of his fiction can be found in venues such as Uncanny, Lightspeed, and Shimmer.

John Edward Lawson; who writes novels, short fiction, and poetry that has garnered nominations for many awards, including the Stoker and Wonderland Awards. In addition to being a founder of Raw Dog Screaming Press and former editor-in-chief of The Dream People, he currently serves as Vice President of Diverse Writers and Artists of Speculative Fiction.

Recorded On: Saturday, November 16, 2019

Presented in partnership with Church of the Redeemer.

The experience the first undergraduate women found when they stepped onto Yale's imposing campus was not the same one their male peers enjoyed. Isolated from one another, singled out as oddities and sexual objects, and barred from many of the privileges an elite education was supposed to offer, many of the first girls found themselves immersed in an overwhelmingly male culture they were unprepared to face. Yale Needs Women is the story of how these young women fought against the backward-leaning traditions of a centuries-old institution and created the opportunities that would carry them into the future. Anne Gardiner Perkins's unflinching account of a group of young women striving for change is an inspiring story of strength, resilience, and courage that continues to resonate today.

Anne Gardiner Perkins is an award-winning historian and expert in higher education. She graduated from Yale University, where she won the Porter Prize in history and was elected the first woman editor in chief of the Yale Daily News. Perkins is a Rhodes Scholar who received her PhD in higher education from the University of Massachusetts Boston and her master's in public administration from Harvard, where she won the Littauer Award for academic excellence and served as a teaching fellow in education policy. 

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

Recorded On: Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Kalman Hettleman will be in conversation with New York Times reporter Erica L. Green. They will discuss the education system and what can be done to improve the system.

Kalman R. “Buzzy” Hettleman exposes the educational abuse suffered by tens of millions of struggling learners, including many who are “Mislabeled as Disabled” and dumped into special education. The majority of these students are not disabled in any medical or other clinical sense. Rather, in violation of federal law, they fail to receive proper instruction and fall farther behind, suffering stigma and segregation. Hettleman also shows how teachers are undervalued heroes denied the teaching tools to do the job right and, like students, are victimized by the system. This book is a call to everyone to become enraged, and then engaged in the struggle for reform.

Kalman R. Hettleman is an acclaimed expert and author on special education and struggling learners. He has represented pro bono over 200 students and been instrumental in policy reforms at the local, state and national levels. In 2016-2018, he was a member of the Maryland Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education, charged by the governor and state legislature with recommending comprehensive, statewide K-12 school reform. He has also been Maryland cabinet secretary for social welfare programs, a university professor of social policy, a public interest attorney, Deputy Mayor of Baltimore, and manager of state and local political campaigns. He is the author of the acclaimed book It’s the Classroom, Stupid: A Plan to Save America’s Schoolchildren.

Erica L. Green is a correspondent in the Washington Bureau of The New York Times covering education and education policy.

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: Wednesday, November 13, 2019

A Real Whole Lot: A World War II Soldier's Love Letters to His Wife contains about 200 transcribed v-mail letters and a dozen or so letters on paper found while Dr. Jacqueline Kane was going through family papers after both of her parents' deaths. The letters are largerly from her father to her mother while he was serving in the Army during World War II. In the pages of the book, in a manner seemingly long past, is an opportunity to share the feelings that the couple strove to communicate with each other during their separation at this unforgettable historical moment. 

Dr. Jacqueline A. Kane, better known as Dr. Jackie, was born and raised in Bronx, New York. She is active in numerous community and professional organizations, including the Association of Black Women in Higher Education, Inc. and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. 

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: Tuesday, November 12, 2019

Dorothy Butler Gilliam, whose 50-year-career as a journalist put her in the forefront of the fight for social justice, offers a comprehensive view of racial relations and the media in the U.S.

Told with a pioneering newspaper writer's charm and skill, Gilliam's full, fascinating life weaves her personal and professional experiences and media history into an engrossing tapestry. With the distinct voice of one who has worked for and witnessed immense progress and overcome heart-wrenching setbacks, this book covers a wide swath of media history--from the era of game-changing Negro newspapers like the Chicago Defender to the civil rights movement, feminism, and our current imperfect diversity. This timely memoir, which reflects the tradition of boot-strapping African American storytelling from the South, is a smart, contemporary consideration of the media.

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

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

Recorded On: Tuesday, October 29, 2019