Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

Judges of the Poetry Contest join the finalists for this poetry reading, hosted by Laura Shovan, editor of Little Patuxent Review, and by Pratt librarians.

Lori Powell is our 2013 Contest winner. Steven Leyva, Rachel Brown, Jared Fischer, and Alex Vidiani are finalists. Linda Joy Burke, Gerry LaFemina (pictured), Laura Shovan (pictured), and Patricia Jakovich VanAmburg were judges.

 Learn more about the Poetry Contest and its winner.

Recorded On: Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Baltimore native and Peabody graduate student Solomon Eichner performs a program of piano music by Beethoven, Liszt and Prokofiev.

Recorded On: Sunday, April 28, 2013

The world is facing an unprecedented crisis of resource depletion -- a crisis that encompasses shortages of oil and coal, copper and cobalt, water and arable land. With all the earth's accessible areas already being exploited, the desperate hunt for supplies has now reached the final frontiers. 

The Race for What's Left takes us from the Arctic to war zones to deep ocean floors, from a Russian submarine planting the country's flag under the North Pole to the large-scale buying up of African farmland by Saudi Arabia and other food-scarce nations. With resource extraction growing more difficult, the environmental risks are becoming increasingly severe -- and the intense search for dwindling supplies is igniting new conflicts and territorial disputes. The only way out, argues Michael Klare, is to alter our consumption patterns altogether, a crucial task that will be the greatest challenge of the coming century.

Michael T. Klare is the author of 14 books, including Resource Wars and Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet. He is the defense correspondent for The Nation and the director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Presented in partnership with Baltimore GreenWorks as part of the Sustainable Speaker Series.

Recorded On: Thursday, April 25, 2013

The Old Songs group has been translating archaic Greek poetry and putting it to old-time American folk and blues music since 2002. They have released CDs of versions of the poetry of Sappho, Archilochus, Hipponax, Alcman, and many other poets.

Old Songs members are Liz Downing (voice, banjo, and percussion), Mark Jickling (voice, banjo, mandolin, and guitar), and Chris Mason (acoustic bass guitar).

Listen to Old Songs here.

Recorded On: Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Jamal Joseph discusses his memoir, Panther Baby. In the 1960s, he exhorted students at Columbia University to burn their college to the ground. Today, he’s chair of Columbia's School of the Arts film division. Joseph’s personal odyssey—from the streets of Harlem to Riker’s Island and Leavenworth to the halls of Columbia—is as gripping as it is inspiring. Joseph is an activist, urban guerrilla, the FBI’s most wanted fugitive, drug addict, drug counselor, convict, writer, poet, filmmaker, father, professor, youth advocate, and Oscar nominee.

Reading and conversation with Marc Steiner, "The Marc Steiner Show," WEAA.

CityLit Festival was made possible in part by the generous support of the following:

Recorded On: Saturday, April 13, 2013

Jen Michalski is author of the novel The Tide King, winner of the 2012 Big Moose Prize, the short story collections From Hereand Close Encounters, and the novella collection Could You Be With Her Now. She is the founding editor of the literary quarterly jmww, a co-host of The 510 Readings and the biannual Lit Show, and interviews writers at The Nervous Breakdown. She also is the editor of the anthology City Sages: Baltimore, which Baltimore magazine called a "Best of Baltimore" in 2010. Her book featuring two novellas includes “I Can Make It to California Before It’s Time for Dinner,” which explores the dangers of living in a world while having a compromised reality, and “May-September,” which tells the story of a young writer is hired by a much-older woman over the summer to help blog her memoirs for her grandchildren.

Terese Svoboda’s Tin God contains two distinct stories told in intertwining chapters connected by setting and other elements that emerge by the novel’s end. One story involves a Spanish conquistador who has fallen from his horse and finds himself alone in an expanse of lush grass so high he cannot find his way out. The other features a guy named Pork who is searching for the brick of cocaine his buddy Jim threw into a sorghum field when their car was being chased by police. Svoboda’s writing has appeared in Paris Review, The New Yorker, TLS, Narrative Magazine, and other publications. She the author of five volumes of poetry and four novels, including Tin God originally published in 2006 and just released in paperback. 

CityLit Festival was made possible in part by the generous support of the following:

Recorded On: Saturday, April 13, 2013

 Afaa Michael Weaver is the author of eleven previous poetry collections, including Timber and Prayer: The Indian Pond Poems,My Father’s Geography, and The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985 to 2005. He is Alumnae Professor of English at Simmons College in Boston. Weaver is the recipient of an NEA fellowship, a Pew fellowship, and a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowship. He has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and a Fulbright scholar appointment, among other honors. The Government of Nature is the second volume of a trilogy (the first was The Plum Flower Dance) in which Weaver analyzes his life, striving to become the ideal poet. 

Reginald Harris, Poetry in The Branches Coordinator and Information Technology Director for Poets House in New York City, won the 2012 Cave Canem / Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize for Autogeography. A Pushcart Prize Nominee, recipient of Individual Artist Awards for both poetry and fiction from the Maryland State Arts Council, and Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the ForeWord Book of the Year for 10 Tongues: Poems (2002), his work has appeared in numerous journals, anthologies, and other publications. An Associate Editor for Lambda Literary Foundation’s Lambda Literary Review, he is currently pretending to work on another manuscript.

Introduced by Marc Steiner, "The Marc Steiner Show," WEAA.

CityLit Festival was made possible in part by the generous support of the following:

Recorded On: Saturday, April 13, 2013

 Tim Wendel’s books include Summer of ’68, High Heat, Red Rain, and Castro’s Curveball. A writer-in-residence at Johns Hopkins University, his stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, and Esquire.  His newest release, Habana Libre, is a novella set in Cuba and Baltimore. Get a sneak peak before the book's official publication on May 1, 2013.

Leigh Newman’s memoir Still Points North—set in Maryland and Alaska—is hot off the press from Dial Press. She is the Deputy Editor of Oprah.com where she writes about books, life, happiness, survival, and—on rare, lucky days—food.  Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in One Story, Tin House, The New York Times "Modern Love" and "City" sections, Fiction, O The Oprah Magazine, Oprah.com, Condé Nast Brides, Condé Nast Concierge, and Bookforum among other publications. Her work has been anthologized in Crown’s The Collected Traveler book series, My Parents Were Awesome (Villard, 2011), andCity Sages: Baltimore (CityLit Press, 2010).

CityLit Festival was made possible in part by the generous support of the following:

Recorded On: Saturday, April 13, 2013