Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

Before Gina Apostol's fourth novel, Insurrecto, hit the shelves, Publishers' Weekly named it one of the Ten Best Books of 2018. Insurrecto was also named Buzzfeed's Best Books of 2018 and Autostraddle's 50 Best Feminist Books of 2018, among many other Best Lists.  Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, and others. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Philippines. She teaches at the Fieldston School in New York City.

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.

Gina Apostol is in conversation with Eliza Romero.

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

Recorded On: Thursday, June 6, 2019

James Cabezas will be in conversation with co-author Joan Jacobson.

Despite a childhood affliction that left James Cabezas with the grim knowledge that he might one day go blind, he led a courageous career in law enforcement for more than four decades. With his vision intact, Jim proudly wore a police uniform, tracking drug dealers, thieves, and an armed robber in the precarious days before Baltimore cops wore bullet proof vests. While the world’s finest eye doctors kept him from going blind, Jim worked as a deep covert, driving a cab in Baltimore’s notorious red light district. While his eyesight continued to deteriorate, Jim defied a government doctor who ordered him to stop working. Instead, he got a talking computer.

No matter the hurdle, Jim performed his duties relentlessly. Eyes of Justice is a memoir of one man’s faith and devotion to duty who refused to be defined by his disability.

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

Recorded On: Tuesday, May 21, 2019

Angie Kim’s Miracle Creek is a thoroughly contemporary take on the courtroom drama, drawing on the author’s own life as a Korean immigrant, former trial lawyer, and mother of a real-life “submarine” patient.

Angie Kim moved as a preteen from Seoul, South Korea, to the suburbs of Baltimore. She attended Stanford University and Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review, then practiced as a trial lawyer at Williams & Connolly. Her stories have won the Glamour Essay Contest and the Wabash Prize in Fiction, and appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, Salon, Slate, The Southern Review, Sycamore Review, The Asian American Literary Review, and PANK.

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

Recorded On: Thursday, May 16, 2019

Mason Jar Press brings together their authors in a celebration of literature and art. Join the authors of the most recent and upcoming MJP publications—Danny Caine, Nicole Callihan and Jaime Fountaine—for a reading, Q and A, and book signing. Hosted and moderated by fellow MJP author, Justin Sanders.

Danny Caine is the author of the chapbook Uncle Harold's Maxwell House Haggadah. His poetry has appeared in Hobart, Mid-American Review, DIAGRAM, and New Ohio Review among other places. He received an MFA in poetry from the University of Kansas in 2017. He hails from Cleveland and lives in Lawrence, Kansas, where he owns the Raven Book Store.

Nicole Callihan writes poems and stories. Her poetry books include SuperLoop (2014) and Translucence (with Samar Abdel Jaber, 2018), and the chapbooks: A Study in Spring (with Zoë Ryder White, 2015), The Deeply Flawed Human (2016), Downtown (2017), and Aging (2018). 

Jaime Fountaine was raised by "wolves." Her work has appeared in places like JMWW, Paper Darts, X-R-A-Y, and Barrelhouse, where she writes the “Fountaine of Advice” column. She lives in Philadelphia, where she co-hosts the Tire Fire reading series with Mike Ingram at Tattooed Mom.

Justin Sanders is a ghost from Baltimore and the author of for all the other ghosts. His words have appeared most recently in American Short Fiction and on the city’s walls.

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

Recorded On: Wednesday, May 8, 2019

Ned Balbo is the author of The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems, awarded the Poets’ Prize and the Donald Justice Prize. His fifth book, 3 Nights of the Perseids, was selected by Erica Dawson for the Richard Wilbur Award. A co-winner of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, he is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship. Balbo was recently a visiting faculty member in Iowa State University’s MFA program in creative writing and environment. He lives in Baltimore with his wife, poet-essayist Jane Satterfield. Learn more at https://nedbalbo.com.

G.H. Mosson is the author of Family Snapshot as a Poem in Time (Finishing Line Press, 2019), as well as three prior books of poetry, Heart X-rays (PM Press, 2018, with Marcus Colasurdo), Questions of Fire (Plain  View, 2009), and Season of Flowers and Dust (Goose River, 2007). His poetry and literary criticism have appeared in Measure, Tampa Review, The Cincinnati Review, Smartish Pace, and Loch Raven Review, among other journals, and his poetry has been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize. He also edited the anthology Poems Against War: Bending Towards Justice (Wasteland Press, 2010).  He holds an MA in writing from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, and a BA in English. Mr. Mosson is a father, writer, lawyer, and dreamer. He practices employee rights and disability rights law as well as general civil litigation.  He hails from NYC and lives in his second home-state of Maryland.

Nomi Stone is a poet and an anthropologist, and the author of two poetry collections, Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly, 2008) and Kill Class (Tupelo, 2019). Winner of a Pushcart Prize, Stone’s poems appear recently in Poetry, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, Bettering American Poetry, The Best American Poetry, Tin House, New England Review, and elsewhere. Her anthropological articles recently appear in Cultural Anthropology and American Ethnologist, and her ethnographic monographic, Pinelandia: Human Technology and American Empire, is currently a finalist for the University of California Press Atelier series for Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century. Kill Class is based on two years of fieldwork she conducted within war trainings in mock Middle Eastern villages erected by the US military across America. Stone has a PhD in anthropology from Columbia, an MPhil in Middle Eastern Studies from Oxford, and an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College and teaches at Princeton University.

Read "Dark Horse" by Ned Balbo.
Read "Letter by a French Soldier, 1916, Found at Verdun" by G.H. Mosson.
Read "War Catalogues" by Nomi Stone.

Recorded On: Wednesday, May 1, 2019

Marriage in Black: The Pursuit of Married Life Among American-born and Immigrant Blacks offers a progressive perspective on black marriage that rejects talk of black relationship “pathology” in order to provide an understanding of enduring black marriage that is richly lived. The authors offer an in-depth investigation of details and contexts of black married life and seek to empower black married couples whose intimate relationships run contrary to common?but often inaccurate?stereotypes. Husbands and wives tell their stories, from how they met, to how they decided to marry, to what their life is like five years after the wedding and beyond.

Katrina Bell McDonald is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, Co-director of the Center for Africana Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, and an Associate of the Hopkins Population Center.

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

Recorded On: Thursday, April 11, 2019

In 1958, the very same year that an unknown songwriter named Berry Gordy borrowed $800 to found Motown Records, a pretty young mother from Nashville, Tennessee borrowed $100 from her brother to run a Numbers racket out of her tattered apartment on Delaware Street, in one of Detroit's worst sections. That woman was Fannie Davis, Bridgett M. Davis's mother.

A daughter's moving homage to an extraordinary parent, The World According to Fannie Davis is also the suspenseful, unforgettable story about the lengths to which a mother will go to "make a way out of no way" to provide a prosperous life for her family -- and how those sacrifices resonate over time. Part bookie, part banker, mother, wife, granddaughter of slaves, Fannie Davis became more than a numbers runner: she was a kind of Ulysses, guiding both her husbands, five children and a grandson through the decimation of a once-proud city.

Bridgett M. Davis is Professor of Journalism and the Writing Professions at Baruch College, CUNY, where she teaches creative, film and narrative writing and is Director of the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program. A graduate of Spelman College in Atlanta, and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, she is the director of the award-winning feature film Naked Acts, as well as the author of two novels, Into the Go-Slow and Shifting Through Neutral.

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

Recorded On: Wednesday, April 10, 2019

Join Adelaide Books authors as they share from their work and talk about the publishing process, featuring Matthew Nino Azcuy and Heather Rounds.

Heather Rounds is the author of the novella She Named Him Michael (Ink Press, 2017) and the novel There (Emergency Press, 2013). Her poetry and short works of fiction have appeared in numerous publications, including PANK, Big Lucks, Smokelong Quarterly and Atticus Review. Visit her at http://www.heatherrounds.com/

Matthew Nino Azcuy was born in 1994 in Olney, a small town in Maryland, USA where he and his family still reside. He is the author of "Views & Haikus", "The Seeker", "The Lion Kicks", "Matthew Nino Azcuy", and "My Castle" published by Adelaide Books (to be released in November). Writing poems is Matthews passion; and his work consists of a spiritual, romantic, and motivational nature. All works available on Amazon.com.

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

Recorded On: Thursday, April 4, 2019

Charita Cole Brown was diagnosed with a severe form of bipolar disorder while finishing her final semester as an English major at Wesleyan University. Doctors predicted she would never lead a "normal" life. Despite that prognosis and because she sought treatment,  Charita went on to marry,  raise a family, earn a master's degree in teaching and enjoy a fulfilling career in education.  Her powerful story is chronicled in her debut book,  Defying the Verdict: My Bipolar Life.

Charita Cole Brown is in conversation with Emma Snyder, owner of the Ivy Bookshop.

Presented in partnership with NAMI Metropolitan Baltimore.

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

Recorded On: Thursday, March 28, 2019

Pulitzer-winning journalist and bestselling novelist Leonard Pitts, Jr.’s new historical page-turner is a great American tale of race and war, following three characters from the Jim Crow South as they face the enormous changes World War II triggers in the United States.

Leonard Pitts, Jr. is the author of the novels The Last Thing You Surrender, Grant Park, Freeman, and Before I Forget, as well as two works of nonfiction. He is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Miami Herald and winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, in addition to many other awards. Born and raised in Southern California, Pitts lives in Maryland outside Washington, DC.

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

Recorded On: Wednesday, March 27, 2019