Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

Reginald Harris serves as host for readings by these poets:

Ron Egatz, Beneath Stars Long Extinct (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE3DE103CF933A15750C0A9639C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all);

John Murillo, Up Jump the Boogie (http://www.myspace.com/johnmurillo);

Paul Nelson, A Time Before Slaughter (http://www.americansentences.com/paul-nelson.html);

January G. O'Neil, Underlife (http://poetmom.blogspot.com/); and

Shelley Puhak, Stalin in Aruba (www.shelleypuhak.com)

Recorded On: Saturday, April 17, 2010

Nearly half of all young black men in America are behind bars, on parole or probation. Legal scholars Michelle Alexander and Paul Butler argue that the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a system of racial control, targeting black men and decimating communities of color.

In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans -- employment and housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote and educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion of jury service.

Paul Butler's book, Let's Get Free: A Hip Hop Theory of Justice, offers a powerful new vision of justice. Americans live in a society fueled by fear and fettered by the lock-'em-up culture that dominates our criminal justice system; we have the highest rate of incarceration in the world, yet our streets are no safer. Part memoir, part manifesto, Let's Get Free takes a fresh investigative look at the dysfunctional politics of our broken justice system and proposes a series of controversial solutions.

A longtime civil rights advocate and litigator, Michelle Alexander was a 2005 Soros Justice Fellow. She served for several years as director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California. She clerked for Justice Harry Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court, directed the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School, and appeared as a commentator on CNN and MSNBC. She is currently a professor at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law.

Paul Butler is a former federal prosecutor and the country's leading expert on jury nullification. He regularly provides commentary for CNN, NPR, and Fox News. He has been featured on 60 Minutes and profiled and published in the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and The Progressive. Butler is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School. An award-winning law professor, he now teaches in the areas of criminal law, civil rights, and jurisprudence at George Washington University.

Recorded On: Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Baltimore is the setting for this examination of bigotry and residential segregation. Antero Pietila shows how continued discrimination practices toward African Americans and Jews has shaped the cities in which we live.

Eugenics, racial thinking, and white supremacist attitudes influenced even the federal government's actions toward housing in the 20th century. The Federal Housing Administration continued discriminatory housing policies even into the 1960s, long after civil rights legislation. This all-American tale is told through the prism of Baltimore, from its early suburbanization in the 1880s to the consequences of "white flight" after World War II and into the first decade of the 21st century. Pietila's narrative centers on the human side of residential real estate practices, whose discriminatory tools were the same everywhere: restrictive covenants, redlining, blockbusting, predatory lending.

Antero Pietila spent 35 years as a reporter with the Baltimore Sun, most of it covering the city's neighborhoods, politics, and government. A native of Finland, he became a student of racial change during his first visit to the United States in 1964.

Recorded On: Thursday, March 25, 2010

Through a series of fictional episodes about a small Midwestern town, Jabari Asim brings into focus how the tumultuous events of 1968 affected real people's lives. The 16 connected stories are set in one of the most turbulent years in modern history, 1968, in the fictional town of South Gateway, where second-generation offspring of the Great Migrators have pieced together a thriving if uneasy existence. Centered on the lives of a diverse cast of well-drawn characters, the stories evoke a uniquely American epoch. With police brutality on the rise, the civil rights movement gaining momentum, and wars raging at home and abroad, the community Asim has conjured stands on edge.

Jabari Asim is the author of What Obama Means, The N Word, and several books for children. He is a scholar-in-residence at the University of Illinois and editor-in-chief of The Crisis. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Essence, Ebony, and other publications. He recently was honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship. 

Recorded On: Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Young urban black men are overwhelmingly the victims and perpetrators of violent crime in the U.S. Troubled by this tragedy -- and his medical colleagues apparent numbness in the face of it -- Dr. Rich, a black man who grew up in relative comfort, reached out to many of these young patients to learn why they lived in a seemingly endless cycle of violence and how it affected them.

Dr. John A. Rich is the chair of and a professor in the Department of Health Management and Policy at the Drexel University School of Public Health, where he is also the director of the Center of Academic Public Health Practice. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2006 and is the former medical director of the Boston Public Health Commission and the Young Men's Health Clinic in Boston.

Joining Dr. Rich at this program: Roy Martin, a senior youth development specialist in the Youth Development Network, Boston Public Health Commission. He helps connect young men with health and social services they desperately need. Previously Martin worked as a network manager and constituent services manager in the office of Senator John Kerry. Martin combines his wisdom from the streets with his passion for social justice to help young men survive and heal from the trauma of their lives.

Recorded On: Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Five women writers from various regions of the globe discuss the voice and role of women past, present and future, on the page and living life as only women can. The conversation will be moderated by Linda A. Duggins, Hachette Book Group (pictured.) Authors include:

• Connie May Fowler, How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly (Grand Central Publishing)
• Iris Gomez, Try to Remember (Grand Central Publishing)
• Elizabeth Nunez, Anna-In-Between (Akashic Press)
• Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Wench (Amistad/HarperCollins)
• Tiphanie Yanique, How to Escape From a Leper Colony (Graywolf Press)

Connie May Fowler is an award-wining novelist, memoirist, and screenwriter. She is the author of seven books, including her new novel, How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly, which will be released in April. Her books have received the Chautauqua South Literary Award, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, and the Francis Buck Award; three of her novels have been Dublin International Literary Award nominees. (www.conniemayfowler.com)

Iris Gomez is the author of two poetry collections, Housicwhissick Blue and When Comets Rained, which earned a prestigious national poetry prize from the University of California. Originally from Colombia, she is a public interest immigration lawyer and law school lecturer. Her novel, Try to Remember, will be released in May. (www.irisgomez.com)

Elizabeth Nunez is the author of seven novels, inlcuding Prospero's Daughter (New York Times Editors' Choice) and Bruised Hibiscus (American Book Award). She is coeditor, with Jennifer Sparrow, of the anthology Stories from Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad. (http://aalbc.com/authors/elizabet.htm)

Dolen Perkins-Valdez's fiction and essays have appeared in The Kenyon Review, African American Review, and other publications. A former George McCandlish Fellow in American Literature at George Washington University, Dolen was a finalist for the 2009 Robert Olen Butler Short Fiction prize. Wench is her first novel. (www.dolenperkinsvaldez.com)

Tiphanie Yanique is from the Hospital Ground neighborhood of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. She is an assistant professor of Creative Writing and Caribbean Literature at Drew University and an associate editor with Post-No-Ills. (http://tiphanieyanique.blogspot.com/)

Program partners:
 

Recorded On: Saturday, March 6, 2010

Ted Venetoulis' novel turns the Washington scene upside down when the First Lady kicks her unfaithful husband out of of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Full of twists and turns and a White House filled with cronies and chicanery, this far-fetched spoof boasts an ending unlike any in the long annals of the affiars of state.

Former Baltimore County executive, Ted Venetoulis currently serves as chairman and CEO of Corridor Media, Inc., a regional business and political news magazine serving the Baltimore Washington corridor. He has taught courses on politics and the media at Johns Hopkins University and Goucher College. Venetoulis has been the leader of efforts to return the Baltimore Sun to local ownership and is recognized nationally for his knowledge of the various approaches to restructuring and salvaging the newspaper industry.

Recorded On: Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Born to parents of modest means but middle-class values and aspirations, Jerald Walker spent his early years in a Chicago housing project. Drawn to the streets like so many African American boys, he dropped out of school and by his early teens was well on the road to self-destruction. And then came the blast of gunfire that changed everything: his coke dealer friend Greg was shot to death, less than an hour after Walker had scored a gram from him. Walker tells the story of his descent and rebirth in alternating time frames. It is a classic coming-of-age story and an eloquent account of how the past shadows, but need not determine, the present.

Jerald Walker is an associate professor of English at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts. He attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was a teaching/writing fellow and James A. Michener Fellow. His work has appeared in Mother Jones, Best African American Essays: 2009, and Brothers: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry. 

Recorded On: Sunday, February 28, 2010

When Elisa New held her great-grandfather Jacob Levy's cane in her hands for the first time in 1997, she realized that her family's story was not the standard coming-to-America tale she had long assumed.

In the mid-1880s, Levy landed not at Ellis Island, but at Baltimore where he soon became a successful businessman and prominent socialist leader. New and her daughter Yael set out to research their family history, from Lithuania to Baltimore to London, and in the process unlocked family mysteries and explained the etching on Jacob Levy's cane.

Elisa New is professor of English and American literature at Harvard University and the author of The Line's Eye and The Regenerate Lyric.

Recorded On: Thursday, January 21, 2010

When gold rush fever gripped the globe in 1849, thousands of Chinese immigrants came through San Francisco on their way to seek their fortunes. In The Poker Bride, Christopher Corbett looks at this Chinese experience through a little-known legend from Idaho lore, the story of Polly, a young Chinese concubine, won by a white gambler in a poker game in Idaho.

Corbett is the author of Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express and Vacationland. He writes the popular "Back Page" column for Style magazine and teaches at UMBC.

Recorded On: Wednesday, February 24, 2010