Free Library Podcast

Dave Eggers is the author of What Is the What, The Circle, the National Book Award-nominated A Hologram for the King, and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated memoir of death and adoption. He is also founder of the independent publishing company McSweeney's, its eponymous magazine, the periodical The Believer, and the nonprofits Voice of Witness, 826 National, and ScholarMatch. The titular ''monk'' of Eggers's latest book, Mokhtar Alkhanshali is the San Francisco-raised son of Yemeni immigrants. A coffee fanatic and cultivator, he returned to his native land in 2015 to learn more about its historical connection to coffee just as civil war was brewing. This true story follows his incredible journey from California to coffee to chaos.

Natalie Cohn Memorial Lecture

(recorded 2/12/2018)

Watch the video here.

Lauded for his ''ferocious moral vision and astute intellect'' (New York Times), educator and philosopher Dr. Cornel West is the author of the National Book Award-winning Race Matters, a sea change discourse on race, justice, and democracy in America. His other books include the bestselling Democracy Matters, Hope on a Tightrope, and Black Prophetic Fire. A former teacher at Union Theological Seminary, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton, he has collaborated on three spoken-word albums with Prince, Andre 300, Jill Scott, and a litany of other artists. More relevant than ever, the new edition of West's classic book of essays seeks methods to create a genuinely inclusive 21st-century democracy.

Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Endowed Lecture

(recorded 2/10/2018)

Watch the video here.

Lauded for his ''ferocious moral vision and astute intellect'' (New York Times), educator and philosopher Dr. Cornel West is the author of the National Book Award-winning Race Matters, a sea change discourse on race, justice, and democracy in America. His other books include the bestselling Democracy Matters, Hope on a Tightrope, and Black Prophetic Fire. A former teacher at Union Theological Seminary, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton, he has collaborated on three spoken-word albums with Prince, Andre 300, Jill Scott, and a litany of other artists. More relevant than ever, the new edition of West's classic book of essays seeks methods to create a genuinely inclusive 21st-century democracy.

Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Endowed Lecture

(recorded 2/10/2018)

Watch the video here.

Focusing mostly on the urban South, Tayari Jones‘s four novels include Silver Sparrow, The Untelling, and Leaving Atlanta, winner of the Hurston/Wright Award for Debut Fiction. ''One of the best writers of her generation'' (Atlanta Journal Constitution), she currently teaches writing in Rutgers University's MFA program. Her new novel follows a husband and wife who seem to embody the new South but are unmoored by false accusation and imprisonment.  

Stephanie Powell Watts is the author of the 2017 novel No One Is Coming to Save Us, a Great Gatsby-esque tale of African Americans in Jim Crow North Carolina, which presents ''an important, largely missing part of our ongoing American story'' (Chicago Review of Books). In 2017, No One is Coming to Save Us was chosen by Sarah Jessica Parker as an inaugural pick for the American Library Association's Book Club Central, and in 2018 the novel earned Ms. Watts the NAACP Image Award in the category of Debut Author. Her story collection We Are Taking Only What We Need was a PEN/Hemingway finalist, and one of O: The Oprah Magazine's 2013 Best Summer Reads. A professor at Lehigh University, Watts is the winner of a Pushcart Prize.

(recorded 2/13/2018)

Dave Eggers is the author of What Is the What, The Circle, the National Book Award-nominated A Hologram for the King, and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated memoir of death and adoption. He is also founder of the independent publishing company McSweeney's, its eponymous magazine, the periodical The Believer, and the nonprofits Voice of Witness, 826 National, and ScholarMatch. The titular ''monk'' of Eggers's latest book, Mokhtar Alkhanshali is the San Francisco-raised son of Yemeni immigrants. A coffee fanatic and cultivator, he returned to his native land in 2015 to learn more about its historical connection to coffee just as civil war was brewing. This true story follows his incredible journey from California to coffee to chaos.

Natalie Cohn Memorial Lecture

(recorded 2/12/2018)

Watch the video here.

Jennifer Egan won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for the novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. Her other books of fiction include the National Book Award Finalist Look at Me, the bestselling The Keep, and The Invisible Circus, which was adapted into a movie starring Cameron Diaz. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and McSweeney's, among an array of other publications. Manhattan Beach is a historical novel about the transformative moments before and after the Great Depression.

The Artist in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, Carmen Maria Machado has published work in Granta, in The New Yorker, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Nebula Award and a Shirley Jackson Award and was a finalist for the Calvino Prize. She has received residencies and fellowships from the University of Iowa and the Elizabeth George Foundation, among others, and is the author of the forthcoming memoir House in Indiana. In Machado's debut collection Her Body and Other Stories, narratives ''build and build until they surround and ensnare and at the end you're always glad to be all tangled up'' (NPR). (recorded 10/3/2017)

Watch the video here.

The governor of the Bank of England and Chairman of its Monetary Policy Committee from 2003 to 2013, Lord Mervyn King steered the U.K.'s central banking institution through the financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing recession. Currently a professor at NYU and the London School of Economics, he was named Baron King of Lothbury in 2013 and a Knight of the Garter in 2014, and he is a Fellow of the British Academy. In The End of Alchemy, ''an outstandingly lucid account of postwar economic policymaking and the dilemmas we now face'' (Financial Times), King interprets the strengths and weaknesses of our world banking system in order to ensure a prosperous and stable future. In his talk he will discuss both his book and the implications of Brexit for the world economy.

(recorded 10/4/2017)

Watch the video here.

''Lyrical and portentous'' (The New York Times), Jeffrey Eugenides is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Middlesex; The Virgin Suicides, which was adapted into a feature film by Sofia Coppola; and The Marriage Plot, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist that explored love and idealism in the early 1980s. A professor of creative writing at Princeton University, he is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Whiting Award for fiction. Fresh Complaint, his first story collection, follows an embezzling poet, a foundering clavichordist, an immigrant high school student, and a host of other characters questing for self-discovery and understanding. 

(recorded 10/5/2017)

Watch the video here.

In conversation with Mary Richardson Graham

John Hodgman played the role of ''PC'' in the Apple vs. PC commercials, served alternately as the ''Resident Expert'' and ''Deranged Millionaire'' on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, adjudicates vital disputes such as ''Is a hotdog a sandwich?'' on the appropriately named Judge John Hodgman podcast, and writes a weekly column for The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of three bestselling books, The Areas of My Expertise, More Information Than You Require, and That Is All. Vacationland is a collection of his real-life New England coastal wanderings, the horrors he's found there, and the awful truths he's encountered as a human facing his forties.

(recorded 10/27/2017)

Watch the video here.

''One of the finest poets of our time'' (Ebony), Nikki Giovanni is the author of nearly 30 books, including the collections Acolytes; Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgment; Those Who Ride the Night Winds; and Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea. A renowned activist and educator whose art emerged during the turmoil of the Civil Rights and Black Arts movements of the 1960s, she is a winner of the Langston Hughes Medal for Outstanding Poetry, a seven-time winner of the NAACP Image Award, and one of Oprah Winfrey's 25 ''Living Legends.'' In A Good Cry, Giovanni ruminates on a life spent in the vanguard of social change and the people who have transformed her the most.

(recorded 11/6/2017)