Free Library Podcast

In conversation with author and Pennsylvania State Senator, Nikil Saval

In Solidarity, Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix offer a comprehensive look at not just the popular and ethereal idea of solidarity, but how it can be used by political organizing movements to affect real societal change. Also a lively history of such movements from Ancient Roman revolts to Occupy Wall Street and BLM, it reveals the nuts-and-bolts methods through which solidarity is built and sustained.

Leah Hunt-Hendrix earned a PhD in Religion, Ethics, and Politics from Princeton University, where she wrote her dissertation on the Ethics of Solidarity. In 2012 she co-founded Solidaire, a nationwide network of philanthropists who fund progressive movements; and in 2017, she co-founded Way to Win, an organization devoted to electoral strategy. A Senior Advisor at the American Economic Liberties Project and a member of the Board of Directors of the Solutions Project, she is an advisor to her family foundation, the Sister Fund.

The cofounder of the Debt Collective, a union of debtors, Astra Taylor is the director of several documentaries and the author of The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, Democracy May Not Exist But We'll Miss It When It's Gone, and The People's Platform, winner of an American Book Award. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and n+1, among other publications. She sits on the editorial board of Hammer & Hope and is an advisor to Lux Magazine.

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The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees.

(recorded 3/19/2024)

In conversation with Kim Kelly

A labor journalist who regularly contributes to In These Times magazine and The Guardian, Hamilton Nolan has written about inequality, politics, and class war for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Gawker, and Splinter, among other publications. He also regularly contributes articles about boxing to Defector. A member of the Writers Guild of America, East, Hamilton led the 2015 effort to unionize Gawker Media, where he was the longest-serving writer in the organization's history. In The Hammer, he offers a comprehensive overview of the contemporary American labor movement and highlights specific actions and organizations where politics and workers combine to affect change.

 

Kim Kelly has worked as a labor columnist for Teen Vogue since 2018, and her writing on labor, class, and politics has appeared in The New Republic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Esquire, among other places. Also a video correspondent for More Perfect Union, The Real News Network, and Means TV, she formerly served as the heavy metal editor at VICE's ''Noisey'' imprint. She was an original member of the VICE union, is a member of the Industrial Workers of the World's Freelance Journalists Union, and is a member and elected councilperson for the Writers Guild of America, East.

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The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees.

(recorded 3/18/2024)

In conversation with Airea Dee Matthews

Referred to by Nick Cave as ''exquisitely crafted fire bombs of incandescent rage,'' Nam Le's 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem is a debut collection of verse that both honors and shatters the tropes of diasporic literature. Le is also the author of The Boat, a short story collection that takes readers to such places as New York City, Tehran, his birth country of Vietnam, and Australia, where he was raised and now lives. Winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Award, and a Pushcart Prize, this work has been widely anthologized, translated, and taught. Le has also contributed writing to a wide array of publications, including Zoetrope, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Bomb, Boston Review, and One Story.

Airea Dee Matthews is the 2022–23 Philadelphia Poet Laureate and directs the poetry program at Bryn Mawr College. Her collection Simulcra won the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Best American Poets, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, and VQR, among other journals. Matthews' other honors include a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, a 2020 Pew Fellowship, and the 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. Her latest work, Bread and Circus, addresses themes of income inequality, commodification, and conventional economic theories through poetry, prose, and imagery.

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The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees.

(recorded 3/14/2024)

In conversation with Tamala Edwards, anchor, 6abc Action News morning edition.

Tamron Hall is the Emmy Award-winning host and executive producer of the eponymous program Tamron Hall, ABC Disney's second longest running nationally syndicated talk show. Also the host of Deadline: Crime with Tamron Hall on Investigation Discovery, she formerly served as an anchor for Today, the host of MSNBC Live with Tamron Hall, and a national news correspondent for NBC. While at NBC, she earned a 2015 Edward R. Murrow Award for her reportage on domestic abuse. Hall also partnered with Safe Horizon to launch The Tamron Renate Fund, which aids victims and families affected by domestic violence. A sequel to her 2022 bestselling crime fiction novel As the Wicked Watch, Watch Where They Hide follows intrepid journalist Jordan Manning as she uncovers the truth about a missing young mother.

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The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees.

(recorded 3/15/2024)

In conversation with Shantrelle Lewis

Morgan Parker won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Magical Negro, a poetry collection that ponders the nuances of Black American womanhood. She is also the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On? and the poetry collections Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night and There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and the winner of a Pushcart Prize, Parker is the creator/co-curator of the Poets With Attitude reading series and is a member of The Other Black Girl Collective. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues, including The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, Best American Poetry, a Broadway playbill, and two Common albums. In You Get What You Pay For, she charts the generational and historical difficulties, traumas, and beauty of existing as a Black woman.

Shantrelle P. Lewis is a multi-hyphen creative and scholar who accesses multiple disciplines to help elucidate African Diasporic history, aesthetics, culture and spirituality. After premiering at BlackStar Film Festival, her critically acclaimed directorial debut, In Our Mothers' Gardens, was released on Netflix via Ava Duvernay's Array. Her book, Dandy Lion: The Black Dandy and Street Style, was published by Aperture in 2017. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, LA Times, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, NPR, BBC, Washington Post, Slate, The New Yorker and the Philadelphia Inquirer. She co-founded Shoppe Black with her husband and fellow Howard alum, Tony Oluwatoyin Lawson. As an initiated Lukumi Sango Priest, hoodooist and New Orleans native, Shantrelle can be found waxing poetic about all things African spirituality online and in person at the Beaucoup Hoodoo Shop, the annual Beaucoup Hoodoo Fest this October and within her community, ATRS Book Club.

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The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees.

(recorded 3/13/2024)

In conversation with Tamala Edwards, anchor, 6abc Action News morning edition

An award-winning journalist who has covered the business of the Internet since 1994, Kara Swisher is the host of the podcast On with Kara Swisher and the cohost of the Pivot podcast with Scott Galloway, both distributed by New York magazine. Also the cofounder and editor-at-large of Recode, host of the Recode Decode podcast, and co-executive producer of the Code conference, she is the author of aol.com and There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere, both of which explored AOL's position as an online cultural and business behemoth. Swisher is a former contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and host of its Sway podcast, and has also written for The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, and The Washington Post. A scathing but balanced account of the tech industry and its founders, Burn Book employs Swisher's many decades of experience with Silicon Valley's most important figures, failures, and innovations.

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The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees.

(recorded 3/12/2024)

''Packed with richly imagined characters and vivacious prose'' (Esquire), Xochitl Gonzalez's debut novel Olga Dies Dreaming tells a tale of family secrets, Latinx politics in a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood, and romance set against the backdrop of the most devastating hurricane in Puerto Rican history. Winner of the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize in Fiction and the New York City Book Award, it was named a best book of 2022 by The Washington Post, NPR, The New York Times, and TIME magazine. Gonzalez's nonfiction has appeared in Vogue, Allure, The Cut, and other periodicals, and her commentary writing for The Atlantic was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A tale of legacy, class, and art, Anita De Monte Laughs Last follows a first-generation Ivy League art student's quest to uncover the work of a brilliant but largely forgotten 1980s-era painter.

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The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees. (recorded 3/11/2024)

In conversation with Tailinh Agoyo

Tommy Orange is the author of There There, a novel of ''pure soaring beauty'' (The New York Times) that tells the story of 12 interconnected Native Americans living in Oakland, California. A national bestseller and lauded by scores of publications as one of the best books of 2018, it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the John Leonard Prize, and the American Book Award. There There was also the 2020 One Book One Philadelphia selection. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, Orange teaches in the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. In Wandering Stars, he revisits some of the characters from There There and paints new protagonists in America's past as he examines the tragic legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and the country's contemporary war on its indigenous peoples.

Tailinh Agoyo is co-founder and director of We Are the Seeds of Culture Trust, a non-profit organization committed to amplifying Indigenous voices through the arts. She also hosts From Here, With a View, a podcast that honors the voices of Indigenous artists and educators, and is a co-founder of Project Antelope, an online marketplace platform developed by Indigenous business leaders for Indigenous artists. Her other work includes the children's book I Will Carry You and the photo collection The Warrior Project.

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The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees.

(recorded 3/7/2024)

In conversation with Elisabeth Perez-Luna, contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer and former Executive Producer of Audio Content at WHYY  

The inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress, Marie Arana is the author of the National Book Award finalist American Chica, a memoir about her childhood in Peru and the United States that was praised for its ''spareness, clarity, and passion for allegory'' (The New York Times Book Review). Her other work includes the novels Cellophane and Lima Nights; a biography of Simon Bolivar that won the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Silver, Sword, and Stone, a narrative history of Latin America; and The Writing Life, a collection of her articles for The Washington Post. In Latinoland, Arana employs hundreds of interviews, a prolific body of research, and her own experiences as a Latina to present an encompassing portrait of America's fastest-growing minority group.

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The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees. (recorded 3/4/2024)

In conversation with Ali Velshi

Barbara McQuade is a legal expert for MSNBC and NBC News, and a co-host of the podcast #SistersInLaw. She teaches courses in criminal law, criminal procedure, national security, and data privacy at the University of Michigan Law School. The first woman to serve in her position, from 2010 to 2017 she was the U.S Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. Her early career included work as a sportswriter and copy editor, a judicial law clerk, an associate in private practice, and an assistant U.S. attorney. In Attack from Within, McQuade presents an encompassing examination of the ways in which mass disinformation is damaging democracy, while also offering a practical guide to shoring up the institutions, technology, and policies beset by those with an interest in dividing us.

Ali Velshi is an award winning journalist, host of "Velshi" and Chief Correspondent for MSNBC, and a weekly economics contributor to NPR's "Here And Now." He has covered multiple U.S. Midterm and Presidential elections and significant news stories around the globe, including extensive reporting from Israel during the war with Israel and Hamas, Ukraine and across Central and Eastern Europe during the Russian invasion, the Syrian refugee crisis from Turkey and Jordan, and the Iran Nuclear Deal in Tehran. He hosts the "Velshi Banned Book Club on MSNBC, and the "Velshi Banned Book Club" podcast. Velshi is known for his immersive on-the-ground reporting and his interactive discussions with small groups, which form part of his ongoing series, Velshi Across America. He previously worked as an anchor and correspondent for Al Jazeera America and CNN. He has been nominated for multiple Emmy Awards, and is the recipient of two National Headliner Awards and a Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award. 

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The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees. (recorded 2/29/2024)