Free Library Podcast

In conversation with Ernest Owens

A writer, activist, and media strategist dedicated to Black transgender liberation, Raquel Willis has served as director of communications for Ms. Foundation for Women, a national organizer for the Transgender Law Center, and executive editor of Out magazine. In 2017, she spoke at the National Women's March that took place just after the presidential election of Donald Trump. She has contributed articles to Essence, VICE, The Cut, and Vogue, and her writing has been anthologized in Black Futures and Four Hundred Souls. Referred to by Elliot Page as ''deeply engaging with searing honesty and compassion,'' The Risk It Takes to Bloom recounts Willis' childhood in Georgia in a Black Catholic family, how her career in journalism and community organizing showed her the courage to come out, and how this particular moment can propel us all to collective liberation.

Ernest Owens is editor-at-large for Philadelphia Magazine and editor for Eater Philly, host of the podcast Ernestly Speaking!, and president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. His book The Case for Cancel Culture was published in February, and his other work has been featured in a number of media outlets, including The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, and NPR. He teaches media and journalism at Cheyney University.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 11/29/2023)

Renowned for her ability ''to generalize from her personal experience to the greater human one'' (The Washington Post), Beth Kephart is the author of more than 30 books across a wide range of genres, including poetry, young adult fiction, and, most notably, the memoir. These works include the award-winning how-to-guide Handling the Truth; A Slant of Sun, a National Book Award finalist; Love, an ode to all things Philly; and Wife | Daughter | Self, an interlocking essay collection about her various identities. A writing professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the co-founder of Junction workshops, she is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, a Pew Fellowship, and the Speakeasy Poetry Prize, among other honors. Exploring how various forms of paper tie to our memories, legacies, and inner archives, Kephart's new illustrated memoir My Life In Paper was born from the aftermath of her father's passing.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 11/28/2023)

In conversation with Dorothy Roberts

One of the country's foremost authorities in civil rights, Black feminist legal theory, race, and the law, Kimberlé Crenshaw is a law professor at UCLA and Columbia Law School, where in 1996 she founded the African American Policy Forum. She is the co-author of Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women and Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected, and her articles have appeared in Harvard Law Review, the National Black Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, The New Republic, and The Nation. The coiner of the terms ''critical race theory'' and ''intersectionality,'' Crenshaw served on the legal team of Anita Hill during the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and wrote the background paper on race and gender discrimination for the United Nations' World Conference on Racism in 2001. Including a forward by Janelle Monáe, #SayHerName explains how Black women are especially susceptible to police violence and the ways in which various communities can help empower them.

Addressing social justice issues of policing, state surveillance of families, and science, Dorothy Roberts's books include Killing the Black Body, Shattered Bonds, and Fatal Invention. She has also authored more than 100 scholarly articles and has co-edited six books on various legal issues. The George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania, Roberts is the director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. In her latest book Torn Apart she explains that the abolition of the U.S. child welfare system-which is designed to punish Black families-will liberate Black communities.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 11/14/2023)

In conversation with Airea D. Matthews

The winner of three Grammy Awards and three NAACP Image Awards, Tariq Trotter, aka Black Thought, is the MC and co-founder of The Roots. The Philly-based hip-hop group has produced 11 albums and is the house band for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Trotter's solo work includes three volumes of Streams of Thought, collaborative albums with Danger Mouse and El Michels Affair, and guest appearances on dozens of other artists' tracks. He also co-wrote, co-composed, and starred in the off-Broadway play Black No More; acted in other such varied projects as The Deuce; Tick, Tick . . . Boom!; and Brooklyn Babylon; and, with Roots partner Questlove, founded the production company Two One Five Entertainment. ''Refined literary fire from the soulful furnace of pain and suffering'' (The New York Times), The Upcycled Self tells the story of Trotter's difficult early life, his redemptive steps toward success and happiness, and the lessons he gleaned that readers can use to move forward on their own paths.

Airea D. Matthews is the 2022–23 Philadelphia Poet Laureate and directs the poetry program at Bryn Mawr College. Her collection Simulacra 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.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 11/18/2023)

Sigrid Nunez won the 2018 National Book Award for The Friend, a ''beautiful'' novel ''crammed with a world of insight into death, grief, art, and love'' (The Wall Street Journal) in which a woman is forced to adopt her deceased best friend's Great Dane. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Berlin Prize, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Whiting Award, she is also the author of What Are You Going Through, Salvation City, The Last of Her Kind, A Feather on the Breath of God, and Sempre Susan, a memoir about her friend and mentor Susan Sontag. In The Vulnerables, Nunez offers a comic and elegiac study of a solitary female narrator who ponders questions of connection in our time of collective angst.

A ''slim jewel of a novel'' that is ''what fiction should be'' (The New York Times Book Review), Henry Hoke's Open Throat follows the surreal Hollywood Hills wanderings of a lonely and inadvertently wise mountain lion grappling with desperate hunger, the intricacies of gender, and the challenges of urban living. Hoke is also the author of four other books, including a memoir titled Sticker, and his play At Sundown premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. His other work has appeared in No Tokens, Triangle House, Electric Literature, Carve, and the flash noir anthology Tiny Crimes. Co-creator of the Los Angeles-based Enter>text performance series and the humor editor at The Offing, he has taught at CalArts and the UVA Young Writers Workshop.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 11/16/2023)

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

Jonathan Karl is the author of the instant New York Times bestsellers Front Row at the Trump Show and Betrayal, behind-the-scenes accounts of Donald Trump and his allies' unprecedented actions while in office and the chaotic events that followed the 2020 presidential election. The co-anchor of This Week with George Stephanopolous and chief Washington correspondent for ABC News, he has also covered some of D.C.'s most important beats, including four presidential administrations, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the State Department. Karl was the president of the White House Correspondents' Association from 2019 to 2020 and has earned the Walter Cronkite Award for National Individual Achievement, an Emmy Award, and the Everett McKinley Dirksen Award, the highest honor for Congressional reporting. Replete with all new reportage, Tired of Winning examines the ways in which Trump has remolded the Republican Party in his own image, the damage he's left in his wake, and his improbable resurgence.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 11/15/2023)

In conversation with Errin Haines

Stephanie Land is the author of the bestseller Maid, a memoir that ''nails the sheer terror that comes with being poor, the exhausting vigilance of knowing that any misstep or twist of fate will push you deeper into the hole'' (The Boston Globe). The inspiration for a popular and critically acclaimed Netflix series of the same name, Barack Obama picked it as one of the best books of 2019. Focusing on social and economic justice and parenting under the poverty line, Land's writing has been featured in numerous media outlets, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Washington Post. Picking up where Maid left off, Class follows Land's journey through college and into her writing career as she addresses the intricacies of the student loan system, financial burdens, and the judgments of her professors and peers.

Errin Haines is a Founding Mother and Editor at Large for The 19th, a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom covering the intersection of women, politics and policy, and an MSNBC Contributor. An award-winning political journalist focused on issues of race, gender and politics, Errin was previously the Associated Press' National Writer on Race and Ethnicity. She has also worked at The Washington Post, The Orlando Sentinel and The Los Angeles Times. Errin was a Fall 2019 Ferris Professor at Princeton University, teaching a class on black women and the 2020 election.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 11/9/2023)

In conversation with Marc Lamont Hill

Tanisha Ford's Our Secret Society is a biography of Mollie Moon, the socialite, powerbroker, and founder of the National Urban League Guild, who was a key fundraiser for the Civil Rights Movement. It also serves as a social history and who's who of Black Americans from the 1930s through the 1960s, as Moon moved in New York and Harlem society circles that included the likes of Lorraine Hansberry and Langston Hughes. A history professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY and a former Smithsonian research associate at the National Museum of American History, Ford was named to The Root's 2019 list of the ''100 Most Influential African Americans.'' Her other books include Dressed in Dreams, Kwame Brathwaite, and Liberated Threads, which was awarded the 2016 Organization of American Historians' Liberty Legacy Foundation Award.

The Steve Charles Chair in Media, Cities and Solutions at Temple University, Marc Lamont Hill is the host of BET News and the Coffee and Books podcast. The recipient of honors from the National Association of Black Journalists, GLAAD, and the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, he is the author of six books, including Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life; Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond; and Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 11/8/2023)

In conversation with Nomi Eve

''Filled with so much universal experience, such haunting imagery, such urgent matters of life and death'' (The New York Times), Alice McDermott's bestselling novels include Someone; Charming Billy, winner of the 1998 National Book Award; That Night; At Weddings and Wakes; and After This, all of which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction, a collection of essays inspired from a lifetime of reading, writing, and teaching literature. For more than 20 years, McDermott was the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and on the Sewanee Writers Conference faculty. She has contributed writing to The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and The New York Times, among many other periodicals. A meditative novel about grace, sacrifice, and forgiveness, Absolution is a decades-spanning account of two women's peripheral experience with the Vietnam War and its permanent consequences.

The director of the creative writing MFA program at Drexel University, Nomi Eve is the author of the novels Henna House and the National Jewish Book Award-nominated The Family Orchard. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Conjunctions, and Glimmer Train, and she has published book reviews in The Village Voice and Newsday. 

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 11/7/2023)

Watch the video here.

''A marvelous epitaph to a monumental family, makers of several worlds and keepers of none'' (The Wall Street Journal), Joseph Sassoon's eponymous historical volume The Sassoons charts the remarkable 19th-century rise and 20th-century fall of his illustrious ancestors. During the 19th century, the Sassoon family, once known as ''the Rothschilds of the East,'' built a global empire based on shipping, opium, and banking, but experienced the loss of its dynastic fortunes during the 20th century. A professor of history and politics at Georgetown University, Sassoon is also a senior associate member at St. Antony's College, Oxford and a trustee of the Bodleian Library. His other books include the prize-winning Saddam Hussein's Ba'th Party, The Iraqi Refugees, and The Anatomy of Authoritarianism in the Arab Republics.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 11/2/2023)