Free Library Podcast

''Unflinching but also irrepressibly humorous'' (The New York Times Book Review), Eileen Myles is the celebrated author of nearly two dozen books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, plays, and performance pieces, including Pathetic Literature, For Now, Chelsea Girls, I Must Be Living Twice, The Irony of the Leash, and Afterglow (a dog memoir). Their lengthy list of honors includes a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction, election to the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Clark Prize for Excellence in Art Writing, and an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant. Peering into the miracles hidden in our daily ablutions, a ''Working Life'' is a poetry collection that seeks to engage with our often-subsumed senses of mortality, fear, and wonder. (recorded 4/25/2023)

Charles Yu is the author of four books, including Interior Chinatown (the winner of the 2020 National Book Award for fiction), and the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (a New York Times Notable Book and a Time magazine best book of the year). He received the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 Award and was nominated for two Writers Guild of America Awards for his work on the HBO series, Westworld. He has also written for shows on FX, AMC, and HBO. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired, among other publications. Together with TaiwaneseAmerican.org, he established the Betty L. Yu and Jin C. Yu Writing Prizes, in honor of his parents.

Terence Washington is the Manager of Civic Engagement and Programs for the Free Library of Philadelphia. After leaving the Air Force, he got a master's in art history at Williams College before working as an arts administrator, curator, and educator. He has done full-time and freelance work with the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the NXTHVN residency, the Readying the Museum initiative, DC Arts Center, The Phillips Collection, Mass MoCA, and elsewhere. He thinks everyone should read Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom. (recorded 4/20/2023)

David Grann is the No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, an account of the chilling true-life story of one of the most sinister conspiracies in U.S. history. A finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award, it has been adapted into an upcoming film directed by Martin Scorcese. His other bestsellers include The Lost City of Z, the nonfiction tale of the deadly search for a fabled Amazonian civilization; and The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, named by Men's Journal as one of the best true crime books ever written. An award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker, Grann has previously contributed to The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic, among other periodicals. In The Wager, he details the wildly differing narratives offered by two groups of 18th century British naval castaways. (recorded 4/19/2023)

In conversation with Signe Wilkinson

A Wall Street Journal correspondent for two decades, Neil King Jr. reported from more than 50 countries, served as the newspaper's chief diplomatic correspondent, national political reporter, and global economics editor in Washington, D.C., and was part of a Wall Street Journal team that earned a Pulitzer Prize for its 9/11 coverage. He formerly wrote for the Tampa Tribune and the Prague Post, and he is the founder and editor of Gotham Canoe, an online journal dedicated to exploring nature and nearby wildernesses. Inspired by his search for meaning amidst the nation's increasing political and social divides as well as by his own long battle with cancer, American Ramble follows King's revelatory 26-day walk from Washington, D.C., through Philadelphia and its surrounding environment, to New York's Central Park. 

Signe Wilkinson is a widely syndicated cartoonist and the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. Formerly based at The Philadelphia Inquirer, she is the recipient of three Overseas Press Club Awards. With Jonathan Zimmerman, she co-authored the book Free Speech: And Why You Should Give a Damn. (recorded 4/18/2023)

In conversation with Homay King

The lead vocalist, songwriter, and guitarist of the indie rock outfit Japanese Breakfast, Michelle Zauner has garnered wide acclaim for her shoegaze-inspired pop earworms. These works include Psychopomp, Soft Sounds from Another Planet, and her 2021 breakthrough album Jubilee, for which she received Grammy Award nominations for Best Alternative Music Album and Best New Artist. Zauner is also the author of Crying in H Mart, a memoir based on her viral 2018 New Yorker essay of the same name. A New York Times bestseller and selected as one of 2021's best books by a wide range of periodicals, it offers an honest perspective on her identity as a Korean American, the death of her mother, and the struggles of her early musical career. She is currently adapting this memoir into a screenplay for MGM Studios.

Homay King is Professor of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier and Virtual Memory: Time-based Art and the Dream of Digitality, both from Duke University Press. Her essays have appeared in Afterall, Discourse, Film Quarterly, October, and elsewhere, including the catalogue for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's China: Through the Looking Glass. She is a member of the Camera Obscura editorial collective. Currently, she is working on a book project entitled Go West: A Mythology of California's Silicon Valley, for which she was awarded an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellowship at the National Gallery of Art. (recorded 4/14/2023)

In conversation with award-winning journalist and broadcaster Tracey Matisak

Barbara Gohn Day Memorial Lecture

An NPR reporter for more than two decades, Mary Louise Kelly currently co-hosts the network's flagship program All Things Considered, the most listened-to radio news show in the United States. Also the author of two popular suspense novels, she has contributed articles and essays to a variety of publications, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Atlantic. Kelly created and taught a graduate course on national security and journalism at Georgetown University, served as a contributing editor at The Atlantic, and has moderated high-profile interviews at venues around the globe. In It. Goes. So. Fast., she reflects on life's joys, sorrows, and pivotal changes in the year leading up to her son's departure to college. (recorded 4/13/2023)

In conversation with Bill Marimow

Renowned for his ''signature blend of deep reportage and character-driven storytelling (The New York Times Book Review),'' Mark Bowden is a former national correspondent for The Atlantic and a former longtime reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He is the author of 16 bestselling books of investigative journalism, including Black Hawk Down, adapted by Ridley Scott into a popular film; Guests of the Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam; Hue 1968, the story of the Vietnam War's bloodiest battle as told by U.S. and Vietnamese soldiers; and The Steal, an account of former President Donald Trump and his allies' attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election that he co-authored with Matthew Teague. In Life Sentence, Bowden writes about the inner workings of one of Baltimore's deadliest gangs and details the painstaking FBI investigation that brought it down.

As a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Bill Marimow twice won the Pulitzer Prize for public service. The editor in chief of the Inquirer from 2006 to 2017 and formerly its vice president of strategic development, he also served as vice president of news at National Public Radio and editor in chief of The Baltimore Sun. His other honors include two Silver Gavel Awards from the American Bar Association and two Robert F. Kennedy awards. (recorded 4/11/2023)

In conversation with Mike Sielski

A staff writer at The Atlantic, Jennifer Senior won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for ''Twenty Years Gone,'' an account of a family still reeling from the loss of a loved one on 9/11. Her critically acclaimed 2015 book All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood spent eight weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, and in 2014 she delivered a popular TED Talk on happiness and child rearing. A frequent guest on numerous news programs, Senior formerly worked as a book critic and columnist at The New York Times and was a staff writer at New York Magazine for 18 years. On Grief is an Atlantic Edition volume of her Pulitzer-winning essay.

A sports columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer since 2013, Mike Sielski is the author of Fading Echoes, the true story of two Pennsylvania high school football rivals who later found brotherhood while in the U.S. military in in the battlefields of the Middle East, and is the co-author of How to Be Like Jackie Robinson, a collection of life lessons taken from the trailblazing baseball legend. In 2015 he was voted the best sports columnist in the U.S. by The Associated Press Sports Editors. His most recent book The Rise is about the life of Kobe Bryant and offers a thorough account of Bryant's identity as a sports and cultural figure and an assessment of his impact on our society. Bob Costas described the books as a ''story informed by meticulous research and rendered with clear-eyed insights.'' (recorded 4/10/2023)

In conversation with Pia Sarkar

A former longtime columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, Vanessa Hua has written about Asia and the diaspora from countries such as China, Burma, and South Korea, and has contributed articles to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She is the author of the bestselling novel A River of Stars, the award-winning story collection Deceit and Other Possibilities, and fiction that has been published in numerous literary journals. Hua's honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. A national bestseller, longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and named one of the best novels of the year by several publications, Forbidden City tells the story of a teenage girl in 1960s China who becomes a heroine of the Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong's lover.

Pia Sarkar is a longtime journalist with more than two decades of experience. She currently serves as deputy business editor for enterprise at The Associated Press, based in Philadelphia. She is also a board member of the South Asian Journalists Association and an executive committee member of the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing. She previously worked as an editor and reporter for such media outlets as The American Lawyer, the San Francisco Chronicle and The Bergen Record. Sarkar received her bachelor's degree in English and communication from SUNY-Buffalo and her master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. (recorded 4/3/2023)

In conversation with Shane Claiborne

Alex Mar is the author of Seventy Times Seven, a chronicle of the brutal 1985 Indiana murder of an elderly white woman by a fifteen-year-old Black girl.  ''A probing examination of the intersection of race, crime, and punishment (Kirkus), it delves into the crime's reverberating effects across the world and the victim's grandson's campaign to spare the perpetrator from execution.

Mar's other work includes Witches of America, ''a genuine and touching'' (Los Angeles Times) five-year journalistic foray into modern day occult belief and her own relationship to mysticism. American Mystic, her feature-length documentary feature film about members of fringe religious sects, premiered to wide acclaim at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival. Her essays have appeared The New York Times Book Review, The Believer, The Guardian, and Wired, among many other outlets. 

Shane Claiborne is a cofounder of The Simple Way, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that works in the New Monastic tradition to live, minister, and improve its Kensington community. Also an activist, prominent public speaker, and author, he is the author of many books, including The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical; Beating Guns: Hope for People Who Are Weary of Violence; and Executing Grace: How the Death Penalty Killed Jesus and Why It's Killing Us. (recorded 3/30/2023)