Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

The never-say-die actress/singer/icon opens up and lets the world into her life to witness her triumphs, failures, challenges, and loves -- which include the likes of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Freddie Prinze, Sr., and Richard Pryor. She also talks in detail about a couple of well-heeled mystery suitors. This saga of one of the world's most beautiful women, and the overcoming every hurdle that gets in her way, will bring tears and cheers as she survives everything, even a bout with cancer.

Pam Grier began her acting career and achieved fame in the early 1970s when she starred in a number of popular films including Coffy, Foxy Brown, and Sheba Baby. In the 1980s, she worked alongside Paul Newman in Fort Apache: The Bronx, starred in Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, and earned an NAACP Image Award for Best Actress in a play, Fool for Love by Sam Shepard. In the 1990s her performance as the title character in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown earned her nominations for Best Actress from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's Golden Globe, the Screen Actors Guild, and the NAACP Image Award in 1997.

Recorded On: Monday, June 14, 2010

Dr. Hubert G. Locke will discuss the Holocaust and Jewish-Christian relations. Dr. Locke is Provost Emeritus for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Evan School of Public Affairs, University of Washington, Seattle, and member of the Committee on Church Relations and the Holocaust at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Dr. Locke's appearance in Baltimore is sponsored by the Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies and the Committee on Church Relations and the Holocaust, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Partners include: Associated Black Charities; THE ASSOCIATED: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore; Baltimore Community Foundation; and Open Society Institute-Baltimore.

Recorded On: Thursday, June 24, 2010

Two boys from Baltimore with the same name -- one becomes the first African American Rhodes Scholar ever from Johns Hopkins University while the other boy serves a life sentence in prison. Violence, drugs, single mothers, uninformed choices, all played critical roles in their development, but they have radically different futures.

Wes Moore wrote to the other Wes Moore in prison, the beginning of a deepening relationship consisting of letters and visits. Wes Moore served as an Army Officer in Afghanistan and worked as a special assistant to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He works as an investment professional in New York.

Recorded On: Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Since January, 2000, the online journal Beltway Poetry Quarterly has showcased the richness and diversity of authors who live or work in the Washington, DC area. Beltway has published academic, spoken word, and experimental authors, as well as poets whose work defies categorization.

Joining editor Kim Roberts will be poets Holly Bass, Grace Cavalieri, Tina Darragh, Joel Dias-Porter, Daniel Gutstein, and Merrill Leffler. Hosted by Reginald Harris, poet and author of 10 Tongues.

Recorded On: Wednesday, May 12, 2010

In the first comprehensive, single-volume biography since David Herbert Donald's in 1996, Ronald White offers a fresh definition of Lincoln as a man of integrity whose moral compass holds the key to understanding his life. Using newly available resources such as the Lincoln Legal Papers and recently discovered letters and photographs, White shows Lincoln's personal, political and moral evolution.

Ronald C. White, Jr. is the author of two bestselling books on Abraham Lincoln: The Eloquent President and Lincoln's Greatest Speech, a New York Times Notable Book. White earned his Ph.D. at Princeton and has lectured on Lincoln at hundreds of universities and organizations, at Gettysburg and the White House. He is a Fellow at the Huntington Library and a visiting professor of history at UCLA.

www.ronaldcwhitejr.com

Recorded On: Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Against the backdrop of today's increasingly multicultural society, are America's elite colleges admitting and succeessfully educating a diverse student body?

Thomas Espenshade, professor of sociology at Princeton University, pulls back the curtain on the selective college experience and takes a rigorous and comprehensive look at how race and social class impact application and admission, enrollment, and student life on campus. Based on data provided by the National Survey of College Experience and more than 9,000 student interviews, Espenshade and coauthor Alexandria Walton Radford discover that students from different racial and social classes do not mix as one might expect.

Recorded On: Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Immediately after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Baltimore's liberal school board voted to desegregate and adopted a free choice policy that made integration voluntary. Baltimore's school desegregation proceeded peacefully, without the resistance or violence that occurred elsewhere. However, few whites chose to attend school with blacks, and after a few years of modest desegregation, schools resegregated and became increasingly segregated. The school board never changed its policy. Black leaders had urged the board to adopt free choice, and, despite the limited desegregation, continued to support the policy and never sued the board to do anything else.

Howell S. Baum is professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Maryland. He is the author most recently of Community Action for School Reform and The Organization of Hope: Communities Planning.

Recorded On: Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, and professor at New York University School of Law, and Renee Hutchins, professor at the University of Maryland School of Law, will discuss how race affects attitudes and outcomes in the criminal justice system.

Part of "Talking About Race," a year-long speaker series, presented in partnership with Open Society Institute-Baltimore.

Recorded On: Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Recorded On: Saturday, April 17, 2010

Masha Hamilton is the author of four novels, most recently 31 Hours (2009), a Washington Post selection for one of the best novels of the year and an Indie Choice pick by independent booksellers. Her previous novels include Staircase of a Thousand Steps, The Distance Between Us, and The Camel Bookmobile. A former foreign correspondent, Hamilton is the founder of two world literacy programs: the Camel Book Drive, begun in 2007, and the Afghan Women's Writing Project, begin in 2009 to foster creative and intellectual exchange between Afghan women writers and American women authors and teachers. She teaches for Gotham Writers' Workshop and has taught at the 92nd Street Y in New York City and at other writers' workshops around the country.

Thrity Umrigar's most recent novel is The Weight of Heaven, published in 2009. She is the author of three other novels -- The Space Between Us, If Today Be Sweet, and Bombay Time -- and the memoir First Darling of the Morning. A journalist for 17 years, Umrigar is the winner of the Nieman Fellowship to Harvard University and a 2006 finalist for the PEN/Beyond Margins Award. She is an associate professor of English at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Recorded On: Saturday, April 17, 2010