Before language existed to identify persons whose gender expression and/or sexuality were non-conforming, nineteenth and early twentieth century local newspapers offered tantalizing clues that all was not straight and narrow.  A few decades later, the late 1920s and early 1930s previewed the openness of recent times before giving way to a darker, more perilous era for LGBTQ+ people in the 1950s. After reviewing these twilight years, this program will look at the beginnings of the current movement toward LGBTQ+ visibility and rights. 

Presenters include Baltimore Heritage LGBTQ+ History Walking Tour guides, Richard Oloizia and Louis Hughes, Preservation Maryland Intern and EPFL Staff Member, Ben Egerman, and EPFL Maryland Department Librarian, Lisa Greenhouse.  

Recorded On: Thursday, October 24, 2019

Not every family legacy is destructive. From her parents, Talusan has learned to tell stories in order to continue. In excavating abuse and trauma, and supplementing her story with government documents, medical records, and family photos, Talusan gives voice to unspeakable experience, and shines a light of hope into the darkness.

Grace Talusan was born in the Philippines and raised in New England. She graduated from Tufts University and the MFA Program in Writing at UC Irvine. She is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines and an Artist Fellowship Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Talusan teaches at Grub Street and Tufts.

Decolonize Your Bookshelves is a book club founded by blogger and activist Eliza Romero, also known as Aesthetic Distance. The group will focus on Asian American writers who tell stories of struggle and triumph, and explore themes of civil unrest, assimilation, racism, and profound alienation. Because a disproportionate number East Asian writers are represented in the American mainstream compared with other Asians, the club will delve into the works of South and Southeast Asian authors , including Filipino, Indian and Vietnamese creators. The goal: thought-provoking discourse that reveal the absolute  necessity of these works to the American collective identity.

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, October 22, 2019

Saeed Jones is in conversation with Clint Smith. Presented in partnership with CityLit Project.

Haunted and haunting, How We Fight for Our Lives: tells the story of a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence—into tumultuous relationships with his mother and grandmother, into passing flings with lovers, friends and strangers. Each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another—and to one another—as we fight to become ourselves.

Saeed Jones is the author of Prelude to Bruise, winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award. The poetry collection was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as awards from Lambda Literary and the Publishing Triangle in 2015. Jones is a co-host of BuzzFeed’s morning show, AM to DM, and previously served as BuzzFeed’s LGBT editor and Culture editor. Jones was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up in Lewisville, Texas. He earned a BA at Western Kentucky University and an MFA at Rutgers University-Newark. 

Clint Smith is a writer, teacher, and doctoral candidate at Harvard University. He is an Emerson fellow at New America and has received previous fellowships from the Art For Justice Fund, Cave Canem, and the National Science Foundation. He is a National Poetry Slam Champion whose writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. His first full-length collection of poetry, Counting Descent, was published in 2016. It won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. His debut narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed, is forthcoming from Little, Brown.

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

Recorded On: Thursday, October 17, 2019

Marita Golden is an Alzheimer’s activist and editor of the multi-cultural anthology, Us Against Alzheimer’s: Stories of Family Love and Faith. The program will include readings by Katia D. Ulysse and Lauren Francis-Sharma.

Co-founder and President Emeritus of the Zora Neale Hurston/ Richard Wright Foundation, Marita Golden is a veteran teacher of writing and an acclaimed award-winning author of seventeen works of fiction and nonfiction. As a teacher of writing she has served as a member of the faculties of the MFA Graduate Creative Writing Programs at George Mason University and Virginia Commonwealth University and in the MA Creative Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University.

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, October 16, 2019

Lady Brion is an international spoken word artist, activist, and 2015 OSI-Baltimore Community Fellow. She is a national poetry slam champion and the author of With My Head Unbowed. She received a bachelor's in communication from Howard University and a MFA in creative writing from University of Baltimore. She serves as a board member of DewMore Baltimore, the cultural ambassador for Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle and the founder of the Pennsylvania Ave Black Arts and Entertainment District. 

Recorded On: Tuesday, October 15, 2019

Celebrate the start of Baltimore Architecture Month learning about businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who was inspired by Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt to build over a thousand public libraries across America. Told in the context of library history, architectural history, and Baltimore’s growth, this program showcases original photographs of Pratt’s fourteen neighborhood branches built with Carnegie funds.

Recorded On: Tuesday, October 1, 2019

Jona Colson’s first poetry collection, Said Through Glass, won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House. He received his BA in English and Spanish from Goucher College, a Master of Arts in Linguistics from George Mason University, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from American University. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. His translations and interviews can be found in Prairie Schooner, Tupelo Quarterly, and The Writer’s Chronicle. He is an associate professor of ESL at Montgomery College in Maryland and lives in Washington, D.C.

Edgar Kunz is the author of the poetry collection Tap Out (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), a New York Times New & Noteworthy book. His work has been supported by fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the MacDowell Colony, Vanderbilt University, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where he teaches at Goucher College and in the Newport MFA at Salve Regina University.

Tanya Olson lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, and is a Lecturer in English at UMBC (University of Maryland, Baltimore County). Her first book, Boyishly, was published by YesYes Books in 2013 and received a 2014 American Book Award. Her second book, Stay, was released by YesYes Books in 2019. In 2010, she won a Discovery/Boston Review prize, and she was named a 2011 Lambda Fellow by the Lambda Literary Foundation. Her poem "54 Prince" was chosen for inclusion in Best American Poems 2015 by Sherman Alexie.

Read "When a Bee Is Caught" by Jona Colson.
Read "Farmsitting" by Edgar Kunz.
Read "54 Prince" by Tanya Olson.

Recorded On: Wednesday, September 25, 2019

Brian Kuebler in conversation with Ed Slattery.

The Long Blink is a narrative nonfiction book by Emmy Award-winning journalist, Brian Kuebler, who exposes the staggering cost of the American trucking industry’s rising crash rate through the intimate struggle of Ed Slattery, who is left to piece his family back together after a trucker fell asleep at the wheel and killed his wife and maimed his son. From the historic, public settlement with the trucking company and a bizarre confrontation with its driver to one father’s ongoing and, more recently, frustrating fight on Capitol Hill for safer roads, the Slattery’s story is a revealing, emotional look at the rapidly growing danger we all face from the passing lane each and every day.

Brian Kuebler is an award winning investigative journalist for WMAR-TV in Baltimore, Maryland. Kuebler has been a television reporter for 18 years. He has written, published, and broadcast thousands of stories in his career and has risen to become a lead investigative reporter in one of the nation’s major media markets. Kuebler has won three Edward R. Murrow Awards.

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, September 24, 2019

Kate Black will be in conversation with Baltimore City Councilwoman Shannon Sneed, Baltimore City Councilwoman Danielle McCray, Maryland Delegate Stephanie Maddin Smith, and Maryland Delegate Brook Lierman. Presented in Partnership with Emerge Maryland.

An energetic, interactive, and inspiring step-by-step guide, Represent teaches readers how to run for the approximately 500,000 elected offices in the US. Written with humor and honesty, it contains a plethora of information that will help any woman as she seeks political office. Structured around a 21-point document called “I’m Running for Office: The Checklist,” it covers everything from the nuts and bolts of where to run, fundraising, and filing deadlines, to issues like balancing family and campaigning, managing social media and how running for office can work in your real life plus infographics and profiles – including wisdom and advice - of various female politicians such as Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Lisa Murkowski and Ayanna Pressley.

Kate Black is currently a policy advisor in the federal government and formerly the Chief of Staff and Vice President of Research at EMILY’s List, the largest resource for women in politics. She served as Executive Director of American Women, a nonpartisan research organization working to uplift the voices of women and the issues they care about.

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.

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

Recorded On: Tuesday, September 17, 2019

The intertwining stories in The Great Believers take us through the heartbreak of the 80’s and the chaos of the modern world, as characters struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.

Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novels The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, as well as the short story collection Music for Wartime. The Great

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

Recorded On: Wednesday, September 11, 2019