Free Library Podcast

In conversation with Marc Lamont Hill

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 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.

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. (recorded 4/26/2022)

Meelya Gordon Memorial Lecture

In conversation with John Holloway

One of the United States's foremost experts on forensic sciences and the criminal justice system, M. Chris Fabricant is the director of strategic litigation at the Innocence Project, a nonprofit organization that uses DNA testing to release wrongly convicted individuals from prison. He is a former longtime public defender and law professor, frequently serves as a public speaker on legal reform and social justice, is featured in the Netflix documentary series The Innocence Files, and has published numerous articles in journals such as Fordham Law Review and New York University Law Review. In his new book, Fabricant examines the role that faulty scientific evidence has in continuing and strengthening an unjust and racist criminal justice system.

John Holloway is the associate dean and executive director of the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. (recorded 4/21/2022)

In conversation with Asali Solomon, author of the novels Disgruntled and Days of Afrekete

Using ''gorgeous, compassionate prose'' to continue ''our national conversation about people working together to heal our communities'' (The Washington Post), Dolen Perkins-Valdez is the author of The New York Times bestselling novels Wench and Balm. She has been a finalist for two NAACP Image Awards, the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and the Robert Olen Butler Fiction Award, and she won the 2011 First Novelist Award from Black Caucus of the American Library Association. The current chair of the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, she teaches creative writing at American University in Washington, D.C. In Take My Hand, inspired by shocking real-life events, Perkins-Valdez tells the story of Civil Townsend, a Black doctor who seeks justice for wrongs done to her patients decades before in 1970s Alabama. (recorded 4/20/2022)

''A pioneer in primate studies'' (The Wall Street Journal), Dr. Frans de Waal is the author of The Bonobo and the Atheist, an exploration of the biological roots of human morality found in primate social interaction. His other 16 books include Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, and The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. De Waal is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, the C. H. Candler Professor in Emory University's psychology department, and the former director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. Based on decades of human and animal research, Different argues that biology doesn't necessarily support traditional gender roles in human communities. (recorded 4/14/2022)

Carole Phillips Memorial Lecture

Maggie Shipstead is the bestselling author of the novels Astonish Me and Seating Arrangements, the latter of which won the Dylan Thomas Prize and the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. A former Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University and the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a longtime travel writer and has frequently contributed articles to Condé Nast Traveler and Departures. Shipstead's latest bestseller, Great Circle, tells the parallel stories of a bold woman aviator and the actor who portrays her on film almost a century later. ''A fat, juicy peach of a novel ... epic in spirit and scope'' (The Telegraph UK), it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and chosen as one of 2021's best books by NPR, The Washington Post, and Time, among others.

(recorded 4/12/2022)

In conversation with Jamila Robinson

Chef and educator Bryant Terry is the author of four vegan cookbooks, including Grub, Afro-Vegan, and Vegetable Kingdom, winner of an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work. In 2015 he earned a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award for his food justice activism. The chef-in-residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, his writing and recipes have been published in periodicals such as Gourmet, Food and Wine, and The New York Times Magazine, among many other places. San Francisco Magazine selected him as one of the 11 smartest people in the Bay Area food scene and Fast Company referred to him as one of 9 People Who Are Changing the Future of Food. In Black Food, Terry offers a tribute to Black culinary creativity with more than 100 esteemed contributors from around the globe.

The assistant managing food editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Jamila Robinson is the chair of the James Beard Foundation Journalism Committee, where she is also a coach and mentor for the JBF fellowship program. She formerly worked as an editorial director for Atlantic Media, as a senior content strategist for the USA Today Network, and as a senior editor for features at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. (recorded 4/12/2022)

Introduced by Denice Frohman

In conversation with Cynthia Dewi Oka

The 2018–19 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, Raquel Salas Rivera is the author of five full-length books of poetry. These poetry collections include lo terciario/the tertiary, longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry and winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry; while they sleep (under the bed is another country), longlisted for the 2020 Pen America Open Book Award; and x/ex/exis, winner of the inaugural Ambroggio Prize. The recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a grant from the Mellon Foundation, he serves as the principal translator for El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña/ The Puerto Rican Literature Project. In his latest poetry collection, Salas Rivera imagines a future decolonialized Puerto Rico.

Originally from Bali, Indonesia, Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of Fire Is Not a Country (2021) and Salvage (2017) from Northwestern University Press, and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (2016) from Thread Makes Blanket Press. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, Hyperallergic, Guernica, The Rumpus, ESPNW, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Leeway Foundation's Transformation Award and the Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, she is currently Poet in Residence at the Amy Clampitt House. (recorded 4/11/2022)

In conversation with Ariel Delgado Dixon

Jennifer Egan won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for the novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, ''a new classic of American fiction'' (Time) that follows an aging punk rocker and his young employee. Her other books of fiction include the National Book Award Finalist Look at Me, the bestselling The Keep, The Invisible Circus, and the historical novel Manhattan Beach, winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Her work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and The New Yorker, among many other publications. Imagined as a ''sibling novel'' to A Visit From the Goon Squad, Egan's new novel conjurs a reality only a few advancements away from our own in which technology will allow users to download and share all their memories.

In Ariel Delgado Dixon's debut novel Don't Say We Didn't Warn You, two sisters endure a childhood of deprivation in a decaying warehouse and in a wilderness camp where troubled teenage girls are sent as a last resort. Referred to by author Joy Williams as ''eventful, complex, admirably structured, relentless, and spooky'', this novel tells a story of trauma and the struggles of family relationships. Delgado Dixon has published writing in Kenyon Review, O: The Oprah Magazine, The Mississippi Review, and The Greensboro Review, among other periodicals.

(recorded 4/7/2022)

In conversation with Nydia Han, Consumer Investigative Reporter and co-anchor of 6ABC Action News Sunday mornings

A reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer for 31 years, Jennifer Lin worked as an international correspondent in China, a national correspondent in Washington, D.C., and a financial correspondent on Wall Street. She is the author of the family memoir Shanghai Faithful: Betrayal and Forgiveness in a Chinese Christian Family. Her documentary Beethoven in Beijing, co-directed with Sharon Mullally, recently premiered on PBS's Great Performances. In her companion book of the same name, Lin uses interviews and news stories to recount the Philadelphia Orchestra's 1973 historic tour of China, which at that time still banned Western music. (recorded 4/5/2022)

In conversation with John M. Cooper

Historian Neil Lanctot is the author of Campy: The Two Lives of Roy Campanella and Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution, a ''prodigiously researched'' and ''enormously important historical corrective to feel-good versions of baseball integration'' (The New York Times). The recipient of the Seymour Medal from the Society for American Baseball Research, he has published articles in Smithsonian magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Baltimore Sun, among other periodicals. In The Approaching Storm, Lanctot details the early-20th century rift between three of the U.S.'s most important progressives as the country struggled to respond to the global consequences to World War I. 

 

John M. Cooper's many historical works include Pivotal Decades: The United States, 1900-1920; The Vanity of Power: American Isolationism and the First World War, 1914-1917; and Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, which was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a Fulbright professorship in Moscow, Russia, he is professor-emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (recorded 3/29/2022)