The Author Events Series presents Geraldine Brooks | Memorial Days 

In Conversation with Tamala Edwards

Barbara Gohn Day Memorial Lecture

A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey towards peace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Horse.

Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz – just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy – collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.

After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha's Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at the beach. But all of this ended abruptly when, on Memorial Day 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.

Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the various ways in which cultures grieve and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony's death.

A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls that exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life.

Geraldine Brooks is the author of six novels, including Horse, People of the Book, Year of Wonders, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning March. She has also written acclaimed works of nonfiction, including Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages and have sold millions of copies around the world. Born and raised in Australia, Brooks divides her time between Sydney and Martha's Vineyard.

Tamala Edwards joined 6abc in January of 2005. She is the weekday co-anchor of Action News Mornings from 4 a.m to 7 a.m. and is a regular co-host of Inside Story, conducting probing interviews with newsmakers like Governor Tom Corbett, Senator Bob Casey, Mayor Michael Nutter and others, as well as moderating many election debates. Prior to joining 6abc, Tamala Edwards was the anchor of ABC's World News Now, and World News This Morning.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

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(recorded 4/30/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Ben Crump | Worse Than A Lie

First 100 people to arrive onsite receive a free copy of the book.

It's the night of November 4, 2008. America's first Black president has just been elected. And fifty-three-year-old Hollis Montrose-a Black ex–police officer from the suburbs of Chicago-has become the latest victim of a brutal attack. As the result of a traffic stop gone wrong, Hollis is shot ten times in cold blood, by four white men who could have been his colleagues back in his police days.

Beau Lee Cooper was born serious, as if on an urgent mission with little time to waste. Raised in the tumultuous world of 1970s Texas, he always dreamed of becoming a lawyer and fighting for what's right, ever since he was a little boy reading To Kill a Mockingbird. And now, ten years into running his own law firm with his best friend and partner in crime, Nelson ''Nellie'' Rivers, and his suave right-hand-man, Brent ''Cape'' Capers, he feels he's finally making a difference. When Beau Lee learns about Hollis's situation, he's determined to help.

Miraculously, Hollis survives the encounter, but the Chicago police department has already spun the narrative in its favor, and Hollis is given a wrongful prison sentence with an unreasonable bail. What really happened that night the car was pulled over? Was it random or was Hollis targeted? Beau Lee knows he's treading in dangerous waters, and finding evidence of the truth will be his biggest challenge yet, but with troubling powers at play, one innocent man's life hangs in the balance.

Named to the TIME100 list of the 100 most influential people in 2021 and The NNPA Top Black Newsmaker of the 21st Century in 2026, Attorney Ben Crump is known as "Black America's Attorney General" and has established himself as one of the nation's foremost lawyers and advocates for social justice.

He has represented families in the most high-profile cases in the country, including Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tyre Nichols, and Henrietta Lacks in a landmark medical reparations case. Crump is co-founder of DreamFi, a financial empowerment platform, and author of Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People and debut novel Worse Than a Lie. As founder of Ben Crump Law, he continues fighting for justice nationwide.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

All tickets are non-refundable.

(recorded 3/10/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Amitav Ghosh | Ghost-Eye

In Conversation with Brooke O'Harra

Past and present collide in a novel about a girl who might just be a "case of the reincarnation type."

Varsha Gupta wants fish for lunch. Her family is shocked; the three-year-old has never tasted fish in her life. The Guptas are strict vegetarians and don't allow it inside their Calcutta mansion. But Varsha claims she can remember another life, in a mud house by a river where she caught and cooked fish with a different mother.

Perplexed, the Guptas turn to Dr. Shoma Bose, a psychologist who has been investigating what are known as "cases of the reincarnation type" for years. But her understanding of the world is changed forever by Varsha's revelations.

Half a century later, Varsha's case file catches the attention of a group of environmental activists, and Shoma's nephew Dinu is drawn inexorably into their plans. As Dinu finds himself caught up in the search for Varsha, buried memories of his own past begin to surface.

Traveling between late 1960s Calcutta and present-day Brooklyn, Amitav Ghosh's Ghost-Eye is an urgent and expansive novel from one of our greatest living storytellers, about family, fate, and our fragile planet.

Amitav Ghosh is the author of the bestselling Ibis Trilogy, composed of Sea of Poppies (short-listed for the Man Booker Prize), River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire. His other novels include The Circle of Reason, which won the Prix Médicis étranger, and The Glass Palace. He is also the author of many works of nonfiction, including The Great Derangement, The Nutmeg's Curse, and Smoke and Ashes. In 2018, Ghosh became the first English-language writer to win the Jnanpith Award, India's highest literary honor. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Brooke O'Harra (she/her) is a professional director, artist and writer. Brooke and Amitav collaborated with musician Ali Sethi in May 2022 to stage a musical performance of Ghosh's book Jungle Nama. Brooke O'Harra is a queer autuer theater director who often works in collaboration with poets, writers, composer and musicians. O'Harra's current projects include the upcoming performance of Be Holding, to be performed at 59th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh 2026. O'Harra (director) co-created the project with poet Ross Gay, composer Tyshawn Sorey, and the new ensemble Yarn/Wire.  She is also commissioned to develop an original performance work with the museum docents for the 59th Carnegie International.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

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(recorded 6/16/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Danielle Allen | Radical Duke

An explosive, deeply revisionist work that reveals how a renegade English Duke and Thomas Paine, the firebrand polemicist, almost brought the American Revolution to Britain.

When Danielle Allen discovered a parchment of the Declaration of Independence buried away in Sussex, England, little did she know that she had stumbled onto a larger story that fundamentally changes our understanding of eighteenth-century British and American history. Demonstrating in Radical Duke that the Age of Revolution began neither with Boston patriots nor with Parisian Jacobins, Allen shows how Charles Lennox, the progressive Third Duke of Richmond, along with radical pamphleteer Thomas Paine secretly fomented a political revolution in which they supported their rebelling American brethren, led the first proposals for universal manhood suffrage, and argued for freedom of the press and religious toleration. Identifying for the first time the anonymous authors of Britain's seditious Junius letters and revealing that Paine cowrote The Juryman's Touchstone of 1771, Radical Duke sets the historical record straight, conjoining radical thought in America and Britain and revealing the complex foundation of modern constitutional monarchy and our own age.

Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and author of Justice by Means of Democracy, Cuz, and Our Declaration, winner of the Parkman Prize. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Academy of Sciences and Letters, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night!

All tickets are non-refundable.

(recorded 6/9/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Matt Haig | The Midnight Train

In Conversation with Katy Waldman

When your life flashes before your eyes, where would you stop?

No one can change the past, but the Midnight Train can take you there.

The chance to re-live the moments that meant most.

To see what kind of person you really were.

For Wilbur his best days were with Maggie, the love of his life. On his honeymoon in Venice.

Before he gave it all away.

He wishes he could go back and live differently. But to do so risks everything . . .

A magical, time-travelling love story, from the world of The Midnight Library.

Matt Haig is the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of the novels The Midnight Library, The Life Impossible, and How to Stop Time, along with four other novels, the acclaimed memoirs Reasons to Stay Alive and Notes on a Nervous Planet, and several award-winning children's books. His work has been published in fifty territories across the world.

Katy Waldman is a staff writer at The New Yorker, for which she writes about books, culture, and more. Previously, she was a staff writer at Slate and the host of the ''Slate's Audio Book Club'' podcast. She won the National Book Critics Circle's Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing in 2019 and the American Society of Magazine Editors's award for journalists under thirty in 2018; her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York magazine, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband and dog in Washington, D.C.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

If you'd like to purchase two tickets but only one copy of the book, please email [email protected]

Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night!

All tickets are non-refundable.

(recorded 6/4/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Barbara McQuade | The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government

In Conversation with Zane Memeger

In The Fix, McQuade draws on her decades of experience as a federal prosecutor to reveal how systems of organized crime and political opportunism exploit the levers of power-using corruption, cruelty, and chaos as tools to dominate institutions and eliminate accountability. With clarity, precision, and moral force, she exposes the tactics of today's far-right MAGA system: information warfare, aggressive retribution, conformism enforced by fear, and pervasive dismantling of legal checks and balances necessary to defend the public interest and uphold justice.

Weaving together courtroom stories, real-time political analysis, and cautionary lessons from history and democratic backsliding abroad, McQuade makes the case that the threats we face are not future possibilities-they're already here. Yet The Fix is not just a warning; it is a call to action. In the book's final chapters, McQuade outlines common-sense reforms and strategies that can reclaim the rule of law and recenter democracy with the power of the people.

Accessible, eye-opening, and grounded in constitutional faith, The Fix is essential reading for everyone concerned about the future of America-and ready to work together to take a stand for it.

Barbara McQuade is a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, where she teaches criminal law and national security law. She is also a legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. From 2010 to 2017,  McQuade served as the U.S Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. She was appointed by President Barack Obama, and was the first woman to serve in her position. McQuade also served as vice chair of the Attorney General's Advisory Committee and co-chaired its Terrorism and National Security Subcommittee. She and her husband live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and have four children.

Zane Memeger is the Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Innocence Project; a non-profit organization focused on exonerating those convicted of crimes they did not commit and helping the wrongfully convicted transition to freedom.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night!

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(recorded 6/2/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. | America, U.S.A. 

In Conversation with Senator Cory Booker

SOLD OUT

Celebrated public intellectual Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. presents a groundbreaking analysis of the vicious cycles of American history and the country's enduring refusal to face its true nature-especially at the moments when national anniversaries steer us back toward the mythology meant to disguise the truth.

America, U.S.A., deliberately formulated and beautifully written, details a heart-wrenching exploration of America's legacy. It is a magnificently complex combination of lessons and voices-from W.E.B. DuBois and John Dos Passos to Herman Melville and Martin Luther King, Jr.-that, together, paint a sprawling and honest tableau of the United States, its complicated past, and ever more tenuous future. Glaude's is a powerful voice of conscience in our tumultuous world. He pulls no punches, calling on us to interrogate our conceptions of innocence and freedom and the stories we tell ourselves about our past and present.

Centered around the major celebrations of America's milestone birthdays across 250 years of history, the book offers a riveting look at the battles over who has a stake in writing the American story. Devastatingly candid, profoundly moving, and deeply reflective, America, U.S.A. is a shining meditation on how we must reckon with a grim past in order to strive for the better angels of our future.

Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton University and author of New York Times bestselling Begin Again and Democracy in Black.

Senator Cory Booker is the senior United States Senator from New Jersey. He served as mayor of Newark before becoming New Jersey's first Black senator and only the fourth popularly elected Black senator in US history. 

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night!

All tickets are non-refundable.

(recorded 5/27/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Jodi Kantor | How to Start

Join Jodi Kantor and Michael Solomonov for a discussion of the question: how, in these challenging times, can anyone discover and begin their life's work?

Jodi Kantor's groundbreaking reporting has toppled media magnates, sparked reform worldwide, and foretold many of the unsettling changes we see in the workplace today. But before all of this, Kantor was kicked off her college newspaper. Society expects perfection, but Kantor knows those first professional steps are often rocky. She also knows that young people are facing new and frightening terrain, with political upheaval, skyrocketing costs of living, and the unknowns of AI.

Kantor casts aside platitudes and false hope to offer tangible help. Work is how we spend much of our time. It's our engine of progress: how cancer therapies are invented, political campaigns won, thrilling art created and matched with an audience. Instead of letting cynicism take over, Kantor identifies two principles to help young people discover their life's work: craft and need. By pairing the two, they can navigate tough, sensitive choices: how to think about money. How much risk to take on. When to buck what others are saying.

Powerful and provocative, How to Start is a statement of faith for young people as they make their way through uncertain times, offering wisdom, strategy, and a set of aspirations to launch their careers and last their whole lives.

Jodi Kantor is a New York Times investigative reporter who has revealed hidden truths about power, technology, gender, law, and employment. In 2017, she and Megan Twohey exposed Harvey Weinstein's treatment of women, setting off the worldwide #Metoo reckoning. They were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and co-authored She Said, a book taking readers inside their investigation, also made into a film. Recently, she has been working to illuminate one of our most secretive and critical institutions, the Supreme Court. Kantor lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her husband Ron Lieber and their two children. She began her journalism career by dropping out of law school, and she speaks at campuses across the country about finding work of meaning.

As chef of the trailblazing restaurant Zahav, and co-owner of CookNSolo Restaurants with his twenty-year business partner Steve Cook, Michael Solomonov has redefined Israeli cuisine in the U.S. and beyond. With five James Beard Awards, including Zahav's ''Outstanding Restaurant'' accolade in 2019, he is celebrated for honoring Israel's diverse culinary traditions through innovative flavors and vibrant settings. Solomonov's Philadelphia-based group includes beloved concepts like Dizengoff, Goldie, K'Far and Laser Wolf, with recent expansions in New York and Miami's 1 Hotel South Beach. Through his acclaimed cookbooks and the launch of Zahav Restaurant Recipe Hummus at Whole Foods, he continue to share his signature approach to Israeli flavors with a nationwide audience. Outside of the restaurants, you can often find Michael with Steve at Pho 75 in South Philly, working out the kinks in their Israeli village. 

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

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All tickets are non-refundable.

(recorded 5/19/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Annette Gordon-Reed | Jefferson on Race: A Reader

In Conversation with Patrick Spero, Ph.D

Among America's Founding Fathers, none was more deeply, personally, or controversially entangled with race and slavery than Thomas Jefferson. The man whose Declaration of Independence proclaimed that ''all men are created equal'' enslaved more than 600 people of African descent even as he acknowledged the injustice of slavery, saw himself as its opponent, and condemned it in his writings. How is this possible? In Jefferson on Race, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed gathers Jefferson's most revealing writings about African Americans, slavery, and Native Americans, enabling readers as never before to directly explore his complex and contradictory thoughts, feelings, and decisions on these subjects-the most hotly debated aspect of his legacy.

These selections come from Jefferson's public and private writings, letters, and plantation records, as well as accounts by contemporaries, including his son Madison Hemings and three other people formerly enslaved at Monticello. The book documents Jefferson's ideas about-and self-image in relation to-African Americans, slavery, and Native Americans, as well as his conduct, including interactions with individual Black and Native people. The writings show how Jefferson responded to living in a multiracial slave society while professing progressive ideals, and how his views on race and slavery were shaped by his experiences with enslaved Black people.

Jefferson on Race is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Jefferson's conflicted attitudes-and the impact of race and slavery on American history.

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. Gordon-Reed won 16 book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize  and the National Book Award, for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family  (2008). She is the author of six books, and editor of two. She was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford (Queen's College) 2014-2015, and was appointed an Honorary Fellow at Queen's in 2021. Gordon-Reed served as the 2018-2019 President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and is currently president of the Organization of American Historians.  Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, and the National Humanities Medal. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the British Academy. 

Patrick Spero, Ph.D., is the Chief Executive Officer of the American Philosophical Society and a scholar of early American history. Dr. Spero is the author of four books on the era of the American Revolution. They are Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania (2016), which was named a staff pick by the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2017, Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765-1776 (2018), winner of the Philadelphia Athenaeum's Literary Award and a finalist for the Journal of the American Revolution's best book of the year, The Scientist Turned Spy: Andre Michaux, Thomas Jefferson, and the Kentucky Conspiracy of 1793 (2024), and The Other Presidency: Thomas Jefferson and the American Philosophical Society (2024). 

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night!

All tickets are non-refundable.

(recorded 5/7/2026)

The Author Events Series presents M Lin | The Memory Museum: Stories

In Conversation with 'Pemi Aguda

Stretching from the present day to the near future, from China to America and beyond, M Lin's piercing and melodious debut captures the spirit of China's One-Child Generation as its characters navigate homes and cultures, hopes and contradictions, survival and resistance. These frank, tender, and playful stories offer profound insight into the ambivalence of migration, the perverse ways race and class can operate, and what it means to be Chinese today.

The collection begins with ''Scenes from Childhood,'' in which a lonely, elderly woman in a dystopian reality remembers her grandfather's village. In ''Magic, or Something Less Assuring,'' a politically divided couple goes on a divorce honeymoon in Morocco. ''You Won't Read This in the News'' features four migrant workers during one night of petty theft and connection. In ''Tough Egg,'' a filmmaker thwarted by censorship untangles her fraught relationship to motherhood. Other stories portray a photographer reuniting with her first love in Beijing; the historic White Paper protests that ended the zero-COVID policy; and generations into the future, a newly instated Memory Museum where two sensory architects share their vision for a utopian world.

With daring political and creative commitment, The Memory Museum brims with joy even as Lin exposes the knife's edge between powerlessness and agency, pain and intimacy, our memories and our futures.

M Lin is a Chinese writer living in the US. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Swamp Pink, Joyland, Epiphany, Fence, and Best Debut Short Stories 2023, and her nonfiction can be read in The New York Times, Guernica, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.

'Pemi Aguda is the author of One Leg on Earth, and Ghostroots, a finalist for the National Book Award, the LA Times First Fiction Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. She is from Lagos, Nigeria.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night!

All tickets are non-refundable.

(recorded 4/29/2026)