Free Library Podcast

In conversation with Jo Piazza

A ''quite prescient and worthwhile'' writer who ''understands her characters inside and out'' (The New York Times Book Review), Jodi Picoult has authored many No. 1 bestsellers that are renowned for combining controversial topics with nuanced characters and precise descriptions of suburbia's fraught reality. Her 28 novels include House Rules, Handle with Care, Wish You Were Here, Nineteen Minutes, My Sister's Keeper, and Small Great Things, as well as the young adult novel Between the Lines, co-written with her daughter, Samantha van Leer.

The author of more than a dozen books, Jennifer Finney Boylan achieved great literary success in 2003 with her critically acclaimed memoir She's Not There, the first bestselling book by a transgender American. Her other works include You Are You, Long Black Veil, and I'm Looking Through You, a memoir about her upbringing in a dilapidated mansion on Philadelphia's Main Line. Currently the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer-in-Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University, a fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a trustee of PEN America, Boylan is a former longtime national co-chair of GLAAD.

In their first collaborative novel, Picoult and Boylan tell the story of a woman who flees with her son to her sleepy New Hampshire hometown only to face the possibility that the teenager shares his father's explosive tendencies. (recorded 10/5/2022)

In conversation with Mark Krotov, publisher and editor of n+1 

Vladimir Sorokin is one of contemporary Russian literature's most popular writers. Banned by the Soviet Union, his numerous novels include The Queue, The Blizzard, Day of the Oprichnik, and the controversial Blue Lard. His work also includes several screenplays, plays, short story collections, art exhibitions, and an opera libretto, and his writing has been translated into more than 30 languages. The subject of a 2019 documentary and famed for his outspoken criticism of Vladimir Putin's government, Sorokin has earned an O. Henry Award, the Andrei Bely Award for outstanding contributions to Russian literature, and a nomination for the Russian Booker Prize. His latest novel, Telluria, imagines a fractured future in which a holy war between Europe and Islam has sent the world spiraling into a state of feudalism and disarray.

Max Lawton has translated eight of Sorokin's novels and has translated his stories for n+1 and The New Yorker. The recipient of the prestigious Clarendon Scholarship for the University of Oxford, he is also a novelist and musician. (recorded 10/3/2022)

In conversation with Tracey Matisak

Margaret A. Burnham is the founding director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, an initiative to document every racially motivated killing in the South between 1930 and 1970. Also a law professor at Northeastern University and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve on the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board, she formerly worked as a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, as a staffer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and as a judge in the Boston Municipal Court. In By Hands Now Known, Burnham expands her analysis of the astonishing violence of the Jim Crow era to investigate the legal apparatus that held up this infamously cruel system and its still-reverberating legacy. (recorded 9/29/2022)

In conversation with Edwin Mayorga and Sharif El-Mekki 

For 20 years Camika Royal was a middle and high school teacher and a teaching coach for her fellow educators in Baltimore, Washington, DC, and her hometown of Philadelphia. Currently an associate professor of urban education at Loyola University Maryland, she examines the racial, historical, and sociopolitical contexts of school reform ideologies, policies, and practices. A sought-after speaker and education consultant, she taught at Lincoln University of Pennsylvania and other colleges and universities in the Philadelphia and Baltimore areas. 

 

Associate Professor in Swarthmore College's Department of Educational Studies and the Program in Latin American and Latino Studies, Edwin Mayorga is the founder of the Education in Our Barrios Project (BarrioEdProject) research study and after school club, and the Philadelphia Community, School and College Partnership Research Project. The co-editor of What's Race Got to do With It?: How Current School Reform Policy Maintains Racial and Economic Equality, he is the recipient of several research grants and fellowships.

 

The Director of the Center for Black Educator Development, Sharif El-Mekki has served as an administrator and teacher in Philadelphia schools for nearly three decades. The co-creator of The Fellowship-Black Male Educators for Social Justice, he was a 2013 U.S. Department of Education Principal Fellow Ambassador and an America Achieves Fellow. His other projects include Philly's 7th Ward blog and the 8 Black Hands podcast. (recorded 9/28/2022)

Meelya Gordon Memorial Lecture

''John le Carré's nonfiction counterpart'' (The New York Times), Ben Macintyre is the bestselling author of A Spy Among Friends, Agent Zigzag, Operation Mincemeat, and The Spy and the Traitor, among other books. He has adapted several of these stories into popular documentaries for the BBC. Writer-at-large for The Times of London, Macintyre is the recipient of the Spears Book Award, has twice been nominated for the Edgar Award in best fact crime, and was shortlisted for Baillie Gifford Prize. Prisoners of the Castle recounts the harrowing story of the infamous Colditz Castle prison, wherein the Nazi's held some of WWII's most diverse, defiant, and resourceful Allied soldiers. (recorded 9/27/2022)

In conversation with Tracey Matisak, award winning broadcaster and journalist

Tommie Smith and John Carlos made history at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics when they stood at the winners' podium and raised their black-gloved fists to protest racial injustice in the United States. Smith, gold medalist in the 200-meter sprint, and Carlos, the bronze medal winner, were forced to leave the games and faced a swift and brutal backlash at home. In his illustrated memoir for young readers, Smith tells the story of his rural Texas childhood, early career, Olympic victory, and internationally famous protest.

In addition to his Olympic gold medal, Tommie Smith held the record for the 200-meter sprint for more than 44 years, held an additional six running world records, won the 1966 NCAA Men's Outdoor Track and Field Championship, and was drafted into the NFL. The author of the memoir Silent Gesture, he coached track and taught sociology at Oberlin College. Smith is an inductee to the United States National Track and Field Hall of Fame and the California Black Sports Hall of Fame.

Derrick Barnes is the author of more than a dozen bestselling children's books that celebrate African American culture, including The Making of Dr. Truelove, Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut, and the Ruby and the Booker Boys series. He has been honored with a Newbery Award and a Coretta Scott King Award

Emmy Award–-winning illustrator Dawud Anyabwile designed storyboards for Cartoon Network, TBS, TNT, and Boomerang. He illustrated the graphic novel adaptation of Walter Dean Myers' book Monster and is the illustrator of the Brotherman: Dictator of Discipline comic series, among numerous other projects. His many other honors include an Eisner Award and a Glyph Comics Award. (recorded 9/23/2022)

In conversation with Chenjerai Kumanyika

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is largely credited with creating carceral geography, the study of how the interplay between space, institutions, and political economies shape modern incarceration. The author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California and several often-anthologized essays, she is the co-founder of several social justice organizations, including the California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance. She is a professor of earth and environmental sciences and American studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she is also director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. Gilmore's many honors include the Angela Y. Davis Prize for Public Scholarship from the American Studies Association and the Association of American Geographers' Harold Rose Award for Anti-Racist Research. A collection of Gilmore's work from the last three decades, Abolition Geography offers scholars, activists, and all interested people a new way of reacting to the incarceration crisis. (recorded 9/22/2022)

In conversation with Wesley Stace

''The most psychologically astute writer working today, our era's Jane Austen'' (Esquire), Ian McEwan won the Booker Prize for his novel Amsterdam. His 16 other novels include Atonement, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and later adapted into an acclaimed Oscar-nominated film; The Comfort of Strangers and Black Dogs, both Booker Prize finalists; and Nutshell. McEwan's other work includes two children's books, a work of nonfiction, two plays, five screenplays, and four short story collections, including First Love, Last Rites, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award. His new novel tells the story of a man careening through some of the 20th century's most turbulent events as he searches for answers about his family history. (recorded 9/21/2022)

In conversation with Kevin Werbach

Acclaimed for their intersectional explorations of cyberculture, religion, currency, and politics, Douglas Rushkoff's 20 bestselling books include Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Present Shock, and Media Virus. He also is the host of the Team Human podcast, writes a column for Medium, and created the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. A professor of media theory and digital economics at City University of New York, Queens College, he was selected as one of the world's 10 most influential intellectuals by MIT, was the first winner of the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, is a recipient of the Marshall McLuhan Award, and has received many other accolades. In Survival of the Richest, Rushkoff reveals the flawed mindset that has led out-of-touch tech titans to prepare for a societal catastrophe they could simply avert through practical measures.

Chair of the Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, Ken Werbach is the author of For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business and The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust. He served on the Obama administration's presidential transition team and helped develop the Federal Communications Commission's approach to internet policy. (recorded 9/20/2022)

In conversation with David Fricke, senior editor for Rolling Stone and SiriusXM host

The co-founder, co-editor, and publisher of Rolling Stone, Jann Wenner has influenced the ways in which the world perceives music, politics, and pop culture for nearly 50 years. Also the founder and publisher of Outside, US Weekly, Family Life, and Men's Journal, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the American Society of Magazine Editor's Hall of Fame. Praised by Bruce Springsteen as ''a touchingly honest memoir from a man who recorded and shaped our times and of a grand life well lived,'' Like A Rolling Stone tells the story of Wenner's life and generation as it charts his association with rock stars, journalists, artists, politicians, and thought leaders. (recorded 9/15/2022)