Free Library Podcast

The Author Events Series presents Lynn Matluck Brooks | Theatres of the Body 

Theatres of the Body is Lynn Matluck Brooks' critical examination of danced stage productions in antebellum Philadelphia. Starting in the 1820s, Brooks explores visual art and social and theatrical dancing across different classes, focusing on the work of E. W. Clay. Continuing through the 1830s, she looks at pantomime ballets and blackface minstrelsy through a political lens, asking questions regarding citizenship, slavery, and freedom. At the time, the city boasted the largest number of native-born ballet dancers in the young nation. Philadelphia also became a creative home to blackface star T. D. Rice, who helped popularize that performance genre.

Reviewing print culture in the 1840s, Brooks shows how newspapers, magazines, and popular fiction provided documentation of dancing in Philadelphia as well as the responses of dance commentators, practitioners, and moralists. Theatres of the Body also considers the interplay of science with dance in the 1850s, which impacted both dance practices and reception.

Providing an expansive historiography of these significant contributions to dance in the United States, Brooks deepens our understanding of antebellum culture and history.

Lynn Matluck Brooks is Arthur and Katherine Shadek Professor of Humanities, Emerita, at Franklin & Marshall College. She is the author of John Durang: Man of the American Stage, The Art of Dancing in Seventeenth-Century Spain: Juan de Esquivel Navarro and His World, and The Dances of the Processions of Seville in Spain's Golden Age and the editor of Women's Work: Making Dance in Europe before 1800. She was also editor of Dance Research Journal, Dance Chronicle, and thINKingDANCE.org.

Lauren Putty White is a Baltimore-born dancer, choreographer, educator, and writer whose work blends the freedom of jazz with the depth of modern dance. She holds an M.F.A. in Dance from Montclair State University and a B.F.A. in Modern Dance Performance from the University of the Arts.

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(recorded 3/17/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Karla Trotman & Cheryl McKissack Daniel | Dark, Dirty, Dangerous & The Black Family Who Built America 

In Conversation with Joann Bell

Karla Trotman is President and CEO of Electro Soft, Inc., a second-generation family business specializing in electronics contract manufacturing for defense, aviation, and transit markets. A passionate advocate for entrepreneurship as a path to building generational wealth and closing the Black wealth gap, Karla is the author of the #1 Amazon bestseller Dark, Dirty, Dangerous: Building the Vibrant Future of Manufacturing. She was named 2024 EY Entrepreneur of Year for Greater Philadelphia and serves on the boards of the Museum of the American Revolution, the Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation, and the African Women's Entrepreneurship Cooperative. A member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Karla holds a B.S. in Business Logistics from Penn State and an MBA from Drexel University. Through her work and advocacy, she inspires the next generation to see manufacturing and entrepreneurship as vehicles for transforming communities and creating lasting economic impact.

Cheryl McKissack Daniel is Chair of the Board of McKissack & McKissack, the nation's oldest minority- and woman-owned design and construction firm, and former President and CEO from 2000 to 2025. A fifth-generation builder, civil engineer, and author of The Black Family Who Built America (Simon & Schuster, August 2025), she leads the firm's work across major infrastructure, healthcare, education, and transportation projects nationwide. A Howard University alumna, Cheryl is widely recognized for her leadership, board service, and commitment to equity, generational wealth, and inclusive growth.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

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(recorded 3/3/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Namwali Serpell | On Morrison

In Conversation with Angela Flournoy 

Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate and one of our most beloved writers, has inspired generations of readers. But her artistic genius is often overshadowed by her monumental public persona, perhaps because, as Namwali Serpell puts it, ''she is our only truly canonical black, female writer-and her work is highly complex.'' In On Morrison, Serpell brings her unique experience as both an award-winning writer and professor who teaches a course on Morrison to illuminate her masterful experiments with literary form.

This is Morrison as you've never encountered her before, a journey through her oeuvre-her fiction and criticism, as well as her lesser-known dramatic works and poetry-with contextual guidance and original close readings. At once accessible and uncompromisingly rigorous, On Morrison is a primer not only on how to read one of the most significant American authors of all time, but also on how to read great works of literature in general. This dialogue on the page between two black women artist-readers is stylish, edifying, and thrilling in its scope and intelligence.

Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka and lives in New York. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her second novel, The Furrows, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and was selected as one of The New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year. Her book of essays, Stranger Faces, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, the Caine Prize for African Writing, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award. She is a professor of English at Harvard University.

Angela Flournoy is the author of The Turner House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, an Indie Next pick, and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, and she has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Flournoy has taught at the University of Iowa, Princeton University, and UCLA. She lives in New York.

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(recorded 2/25/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Heather Ann Thompson | Fear and Fury

In Conversation with Cherri Gregg

On December 22, 1984, in a graffiti-covered New York City subway car, passengers looked on in horror as a white loner named Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teens,  Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur, at point-blank range. He then disappeared into a dark tunnel. After an intense manhunt, and his eventual surrender in New Hampshire, the man the tabloid media had dubbed the ''Death Wish Vigilante'' would become a celebrity and a hero to countless ordinary Americans who had been frustrated with the economic fallout of the Reagan 80s. Overnight, Goetz's young victims would become villains.

Out of this dramatic moment would emerge an angry nation, in which Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and later Fox News Network stoked the fear and the fury of a stunning number of Americans. 

Drawing from never-before-seen archival materials, legal files, and more, Heather Ann Thompson narrates the Bernie Goetz Subway shootings and their decades-long reverberations, while deftly recovering the lives of the boys whom too many decided didn't matter. Fear and Fury is the remarkable account and a searing indictment of a crucial turning point in American history.

Heather Ann Thompson is a historian and the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. Thompson is also the author of Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. She writes regularly on the criminal justice system for myriad publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. Thompson's policy work includes serving on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the US. She also co-runs the Carceral State Research Project at the University of Michigan.

Cherri Gregg, Esq. is a known quantity in the Greater Philadelphia region, serving as the co-host of WHYY's daily news show, Studio 2, as well as an afternoon drive news anchor for the station. An award-winning journalist, Cherri has a distinguished career covering civil rights, social justice, race, poverty and public affairs issues impacting marginalized communities. She spent nearly a decade on air at KYW Newsradio and several years doing reports for CBS 3 Eyewitness News.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night!

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(recorded 2/19/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Victoria Christopher Murray, author of the award winning book, The Personal Librarian.

In Conversation with Elizabeth Wellington

This partnership was inspired by Victoria Christopher Murray's role as an Honorary Member of The Society, Inc., and developed in collaboration with the Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation and The Greater Delaware Valley Chapter of The Society, Inc.

The Society, Incorporated, is a non-profit national organization of women dedicated to enhancing, exposing, and promoting youth in the arts for the betterment of our communities, with a focus on under-served children. The group provides support for young literary, visual, vocal, and performing artists.

Victoria Christopher Murray is a New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty novels, including her most recent release Harlem Rhapsody. With Marie Benedict, she coauthored The Personal Librarian, a Good Morning America book club pick, and The First Ladies, Target's 2023 Book of the Year. She is an NAACP Image Award Winner for Outstanding Literary Work for her novel Stand Your Ground, which was also a Library Journal Best Book of the Year. She holds an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night!

All tickets are non-refundable.

(recorded 2/17/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Dorothy Roberts | The Mixed Marriage Project

In Conversation with Marcia Chatelain 

Dorothy Roberts grew up in a deeply segregated Chicago of the 1960s where relationships barely crossed the ''colorline.'' Yet inside her own home, where her father was white and her mother a Black Jamaican immigrant, interracial marriage wasn't just a part of her upbringing, it was a shared mission. Her father, an anthropologist, spent her entire childhood working on a book about Black-white marriages-a project he never finished but shaped every aspect of their family life.

As a 21-year-old graduate student, Dorothy's father dedicated himself to the study of interracial marriage and her mother soon became his full-time partner in that work. Together over the years they interviewed over 500 couples and assembled stunning stories about interracial marriages that took place as early as the 1880s-studying, but also living, championing, and believing in their power to advance social equality.

Decades later, while sorting through her father's papers, Roberts uncovers a truth that upends everything she thought she knew about her family: her father's research didn't begin with her parents' love story-it came long before it. This discovery forces her to wrestle with her father's intentions, her own views about interracial relationships, and where she fits in that story. Rather than finish the book her father never published, Roberts immerses herself in their archive of interviews to trace the story of her parents and to better understand her own.

Though grounded in her parents' research, it's Roberts' captivating storytelling that drives this memoir. In following the arc of her parents' interviews and marriage, The Mixed Marriage Project invites us into the everyday lives of interracial couples in Chicago over four decades. Along the way, Roberts reflects on her own childhood as a Black girl with a white father, and how those experiences shaped her into one of today's most prominent public thinkers and scholars on race. Blurring the boundaries between the political and the personal, between memoir and history, The Mixed Marriage Project is a deeply moving meditation on family, race, identity, and love.

Dorothy Roberts is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. The author of five books, including Killing the Black Body, a MacArthur Fellow, and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Marcia Chatelain is the Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of two books, South Side Girls: Growing up in the Great Migration and the Pulitzer Prize winning Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. Her forthcoming book, How Bright the Path Grows: The Women who Made the March on Washington will be released in fall 2026 with Pantheon Books.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

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(recorded 2/11/2026)

The Author Events Series presents James Martin, SJ | Work in Progress 

In Conversation with Tamala Edwards

Work in Progress, set in the Philly suburbs, is a snapshot of several years-first as a boy, then as a teenager, and finally as a young adult--of being thrown into a series of jobs for which Martin had zero training. He had never set foot in a restaurant kitchen before working as a busboy and dishwasher; never stepped onto a golf course before working as a caddy; and had never seen a factory floor before working as an assembly-line worker. He almost always felt uncomfortable, unsettled, and uneasy. But, like many of us, he needed the money.

This coming-of-age story is set in the 1960s and 1970s, a lighthearted tale for readers who enjoy personal narratives, and it's unlike anything Father Martin has written before. As he puts it, "This is a spiritual memoir from a different angle ... told 'slant' as Emily Dickinson might say."

Each chapter features photos of memories and milestones throughout Father Martin's young life. If you're an aficionado of snafus, you won't be disappointed. He's not the hero of these stories, more a hapless teenager who learns in each job, even the ones he loathes, something about the value of work, about what it means to be an adult, about people, and about life overall.

Rev. James Martin, SJ, born in Philadelphia and raised in the suburbs, is a Jesuit priest, editor at large of America magazine, consultor to the Vatican's Dicastery for Communication, and author of the New York Times bestsellers Learning to Pray, Jesus: A Pilgrimage, and The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything. Father Martin is a frequent commentator in the national and international media, having appeared on all the major networks and outlets, like The Colbert Report, NPR's Fresh Air, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

Tamala Edwards joined 6abc in January of 2005. She is the weekday co-anchor of Action News Mornings from 4 a.m to 7 a.m. and is a regular co-host of Inside Story, conducting probing interviews with newsmakers like Governor Tom Corbett, Senator Bob Casey, Mayor Michael Nutter and others, as well as moderating many election debates. Prior to joining 6abc, Tamala Edwards was the anchor of ABC's World News Now, and World News This Morning.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

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(recorded 2/5/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Matthew F. Delmont | Until the Last Gun Is Silent 

In Conversation with Richard Brookshire

As the civil rights movement blazed through America, more than 300,000 Black troops were drafted and sent to fight in the Vietnam War. These soldiers, often from disadvantaged backgrounds and subjected to the brutalities of racism back home, found themselves thrust onto the frontlines of a war many saw as unjust. On the homefront, Black antiwar activists faced another battle: Opposition to the Vietnam War, vilified by key allies in the media and government as anti-American, jeopardized the fight for civil rights. For Black Americans, the Vietnam War forced a generation to question what it truly meant to fight for justice.

Award-winning civil rights historian Matthew F. Delmont weaves together the stories of two Black heroes of the Vietnam War era: Coretta Scott King, who bravely championed the antiwar cause-and eventually persuaded her husband to do the same-and Dwight ''Skip'' Johnson, a Medal of Honor recipient whose life ended tragically after returning from battle to his native Detroit. Together, these extraordinary accounts expose the contradictions of Black activism and military service during the Vietnam War. Through rich storytelling, Delmont offers a portrait of this period unlike any other, shedding light on a fractured civil rights movement, a generation of veterans failed by the country they served, and the valor of Black servicemen and peace advocates in the midst of it all.

Vivid, revelatory, and meticulously researched, Until the Last Gun Is Silent: How a Civil Rights Icon and Vietnam War Hero Changed America is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the enduring legacy of Black military service, protest, and patriotism in the United States.

Matthew F. Delmont is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth College. A Guggenheim Fellow and expert on African American history and the history of civil rights, he is the author of five books, most recently Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and several academic journals, and on NPR. Originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Delmont earned his BA from Harvard University and his MA and PhD from Brown University.

Richard Brookshire is a multi-hyphenate storyteller and nationally recognized political communications strategist. As the co-CEO and co-founder of the Black Veterans Project, his work is advancing institutional reforms around racial equity and the case for reparations for Black veterans and military families. A former infantry combat medic and U.S. Army veteran of the War in Afghanistan, he is a graduate of Columbia University's School of International & Public Affairs, Fordham University and the New York Film Academy's Documentary Conservatory.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night!

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(recorded 2/4/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Marc Shaiman | Never Mind the Happy

In Conversation with Alan Zweibel

Featuring a special performance from Rob Reiner's THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT with MATTHEW GALLAGHER, Principal trumpeter of The Philly Pops Orchestra. 

In Never Mind the Happy, musical dynamo Marc Shaiman looks back on five decades of Broadway triumphs, Hollywood hijinks, and unforgettable collaborations. Along the way, he charts the personal highs and heartbreaks that have shaped him-spending his teenage years in community theater, starting a decades-long collaboration with Bette Midler in the '70s, surviving the AIDS crisis of the '80s, his award-winning film music career in the Hollywood of the '90s, right up to the peaks (and valleys) of creating Broadway musicals from 2000 on.

Candid, hilarious, and deeply human, Shaiman's story is a tribute to the power of music, the pull of the spotlight, and the beat that never stops.

Part showbiz tell-all, part love letter to the melancholy that fuels creativity, told with perfect comic timing-along with a few wrong notes, and plenty of standing ovations.

Marc Shaiman is a renowned American composer, lyricist, arranger, and music producer known for his work across film, television, and theater. Shaiman began his career as a musical director and arranger for Bette Midler before expanding into film scoring. He gained prominence with his work on films such as When Harry Met Sally, The Addams Family, Sister Act, City Slickers, A Few Good Men, Sleepless in Seattle, The American President, and South Park, on television with SNL, and on his recordings with Harry Connick Jr. and Mariah Carey. Shaiman earned widespread acclaim for co-writing the Broadway musical Hairspray alongside his longtime co-lyricist Scott Wittman. The duo has also co-created the musicals Catch Me If You Can, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Some Like It Hot, and Smash. He has been nominated for multiple Academy Awards and has won a Tony, two Emmys, and two Grammys. Marc Shaiman is celebrated for his versatile, emotionally resonant music and his ability to blend classic musical theater sensibilities with modern storytelling. Born and raised in New Jersey, he currently lives in New York with his husband, Lieutenant Commander (ret) Lou Mirabal.

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(recorded 1/29/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Lee Bollinger | University: A Reckoning

In Conversation with Ali Velshi

The American university-one of the most successful institutions in human history-is facing an unprecedented assault from the President of the United States. Experts on authoritarianism have drawn comparisons to Turkey and Hungary, where strongmen subdued universities as part of their power grabs. Yet as former Columbia president Lee C. Bollinger points out in his powerful account of the university's significance, in such dire times one has no choice but to state clearly and forcefully what one stands for.

Defenses of the university usually emphasize the practical benefits it offers to society: highly skilled graduates who can thrive in an information-saturated world; scientific research that leads to important advances in health; technological breakthroughs that contribute to the American economy being the envy of the world. Bollinger offers a more original, and more sweeping, account. He reveals how the seemingly unwieldy structure of the university actually contributes to the success of the American system- providing those who study and work within it a degree of creative freedom hard to find elsewhere-and why that structure is both impossible to re-create and vulnerable to outside attack. The fundamental mission of the university is to enhance knowledge, but this is not merely a high-minded idea. It is, as Bollinger demonstrates, a notion rooted deeply in the Enlightenment ideas of the nation's founding documents, specifically the First Amendment to the Constitution, the basis of our political and civic life. The university helps realize the First Amendment; the First Amendment helps make the university.

Bollinger argues that, in a challenging era for journalism, it is more essential than ever that the university stands strong as an essential source of truth-seeking for those who still believe in democracy. The stakes are self-evident: The university, like the press, must be defended if the American experiment is to continue.

Lee C. Bollinger is an American legal scholar and educator who served as the nineteenth president of Columbia University, from 2002 to 2023. He is currently president emeritus and the Seth Low Professor of the University. He also served as the president of the University of Michigan from 1997 to 2002. A renowned expert on the First Amendment and freedom of speech and press, he lives in New York City.

Ali Velshi is an award winning journalist, host of "Velshi" and Chief Correspondent for MS NOW, and a weekly economics contributor to NPR's "Here And Now." He hosts the "Velshi Banned Book Club'' on MS NOW, and the "Velshi Banned Book Club" podcast. 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.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night!

All tickets are non-refundable.

(recorded 1/28/2026)