Free Library Podcast

In conversation with Major Jackson

Garrett Hongo was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for the poetry collection The River of Heaven. His other books of poetry include Yellow Light and Coral Road. The distinguished professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon and a regular contributor to SoundStage! Ultra, Hongo also authored Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaiʻi and The Mirror Diary: Selected Essays. Writing about his lifelong passion for sound reproduction equipment, music in many formats, and the poetic voices that influenced him most, The Perfect Sound is a celebration of all things audio.

The Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University and the poetry editor of The Harvard Review, Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry, including The Absurd Man and Leaving Saturn. His many honors include the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has published poems and essays in a wide variety of periodicals, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, and Ploughshares. (recorded 3/2/2022)

In conversation with Cajetan Iheka, Associate Professor of Literature, Yale University, and author of African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics

One of Nigeria's most celebrated authors, Ben Okri is the author of many post-colonial novels, poetry, short story collections, and essays. He rose to international fame in 1980 upon the publication of his first novel, Flowers and Shadows, and is perhaps best known for The Famished Road, winner of the 1991 Booker Prize. A fable about the realities we create for ourselves, Astonishing the Gods was included, almost 25 years after its publication, in the BBC's ''100 Novels That Shaped Our World'' list. Every Leaf a Hallelujah, the tale of a young girl searching for a special flower that can cure her ill mother, is a modern-day fairytale written to be read by adults and children alike.

Cajetan Iheka is Associate Professor of English at Yale University, author of Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature, editor of Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media, and coeditor of African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space. (recorded 2/28/2022)

Education historian Erika M. Kitzmiller has conducted research in the city of Philadelphia, its public schools, and the Free Library for nearly two decades. The result of her investigation is The Roots of Educational Inequality, a decades-spanning report of the factors contributing to one school's path from first-rate institution to its 2014 closure. An assistant professor of education at Columbia University's Barnard College, her writing has appeared in the Harvard Educational Review, Dissent, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Reuters, among other places. Her work has received funding from the National Academy of Education, the National Science Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation.

In conversation with:

Ted Domers, School District of Philadelphia, Assistant Superintendent, Germantown High School Teacher

Janel Moore-Almond, School District of Philadelphia Graduate and Teacher, Carver High School

Akira Drake Rodriguez, Assistant Professor, Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania (recorded 2/24/2022)

Barbara Gohn Day Memorial Lecture

In conversation with Tracey Matisak, award winning broadcaster and journalist

In her 20 years as a columnist and assistant editor at The Times of London, Mary Ann Sieghart won a popular following for her pieces on politics, feminism, economics, and parenthood. Also a frequent broadcaster, she has presented several programs on BBC Radio 4 and hosted Newshour on the BBC World Service. Sieghart is chair of the judges for the 2022 Women's Prize for Fiction, recently served as a visiting professor at King's College London, chaired the Social Market Foundation think tank, and sat on several corporate, arts, and public policy boards. The Authority Gap uses data, analysis, and interviews with important women leaders, thinkers, and artists to uncover and fight the unconscious biases that continue systemic sexism.

Please allow up to three weeks for delivery.

U.S. orders only.

Books provided by Uncle Bobbie's Coffee and Books

(recorded 2/23/2022)

In conversation with Sara Nović 

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. A 2017 nominee for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Award for Emerging Writers and shortlisted for the Masters Review Anthology Prize, Delgado Dixon has published writing in Kenyon Review, O: The Oprah Magazine, The Mississippi Review, and The Greensboro Review, among other periodicals.

Sara Nović teaches in the Popular Fiction MFA program at Emerson College, and is an instructor of Deaf studies at Stockton University. Her first novel, Girl at War, won the American Library Association's Alex Award, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Nović has an MFA in fiction and literary translation from Columbia University, and lives with her family in Philadelphia. (recorded 2/22/2022)

In conversation with Lise Funderburg

The director of the M.F.A. Creative Writing program at Emerson College, Jabari Asim is the author of the novel Only the Strong, the story collection A Taste of Honey, and several works of nonfiction, including We Can't Breathe, The Art of Survival, and What Obama Means...For Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Future. Also a Guggenheim fellowship-winning poet, playwright, and children's book author, he formerly served as the editor-in-chief of the NAACP's official publication The Crisis, and was an editor and syndicated columnist at The Washington Post. In his new novel, Asim tells the story of a group of enslaved Black people seeking love, friendship, and independence in the 19th century United States South.

Lise Funderburg is the author of Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk about Race and Identity and Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home. A lecturer in creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania and a teacher at the Paris Writers' Workshop, her achievements include a Nonfiction Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Nation, Salon, and The Washington Post, among many other periodicals. Her most recent book is Apple, Tree: Writers on Their Parents.

(recorded 2/17/2022)

In conversation with Geoffrey Dyer

Tessa Hadley's many ''strange, unsettling-eerily beautiful, discomfiting, stay-up-late-addictive, sometimes hair-raising'' (San Francisco Chronicle) novels about the complexities of family relationships include Clever Girl, Accidents in the Home, The Past, and Everything Will be All Right. Two of her short story collections, Sunstroke and Married Love, were New York Times Notable Books and her fiction regularly appears in The New Yorker. A creative writing professor at England's Bath Spa University and a regular reviewer for the London Review of Books, Hadley has twice been longlisted for the Orange Prize and the Wales Book of the Year. Free Love tells the story of a compliant homemaker's intellectual and sexual awakening in a vibrant 1960s London.

Geoffrey Dyer is the author of four novels and numerous works of nonfiction. Writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, his honors include the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, the Somerset Maugham Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. (recorded 2/16/2022)

In conversation with Nell Irvin Painter

Barbara Chase-Riboud's watershed 1979 novel Sally Hemings told a fictionalized story based on the true account of the life of Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman with whom Thomas Jefferson had children. It was the winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for best novel by an woman writer in the United States and through DNA evidence, the novel's premise about Heming and Jefferson's relationship has since been proven true. Chase-Riboud's other novels include Echo of Lions, The President's Daughter, and Hottentot Venus. She is also a celebrated poet and widely exhibited sculptor and visual artist. In the spirit of Sally Hemings, her new novel breathes life into the previously enigmatic Hannah Elias, one of early 1900s America's richest black women, and the murder that precipitated her rapid downfall.

Historian Nell Irvin Painter's books include Sojourner Truth, Creating Black Americans, and the bestseller The History of White People. The Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, at Princeton University, Painter directed that institution's Program in African American Studies from 1997 to 2000. She has also published numerous essays, reviews, and articles, and is the author of the memoir Old in Art School. (recorded 2/15/2022)

Catherine Price discusses her new book with #1 best selling author, Gretchen Rubin

Catherine Price is the author of How to Break Up with Your Phone, a book that ''gives practical advice on how to forge a healthier relationship with technology-without the fear mongering." (Refinery29). Her other books include the parody travel guide 101 Places Not to See Before You Die, Vitamania, The Big Sur Bakery Cookbook, and Mindfulness: A Journal. A public speaker, teacher, and consultant, Price has contributed work to The Best American Science Writing, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Outside, and Men's Journal, among many other periodicals. A mix of science and personal experience, The Power of Fun argues that having fun is crucial to our mental and physical health and presents a practical guide for having more of it.

Gretchen Rubin is one of today's most influential and thought-provoking observers of happiness and human nature. She's known for her ability to distill and convey complex ideas with humor and clarity in a way that's accessible to a wide audience. She's been interviewed by Oprah, eaten dinner with Daniel Kahneman, walked arm-in-arm with the Dalai Lama, had her work written up in a medical journal, been the subject of a ''The Talk of the Town'' piece in The New Yorker magazine, and been an answer on the game show Jeopardy! She's the author of many books, including the blockbuster New York Times bestsellers, The Four Tendencies and Better Than Before. Her book The Happiness Project has sold more than one million copies, been published in more than thirty languages, and spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list, including at #1. (recorded 2/10/2022)

Co-promoted with Asian Arts Initiative and Blue Stoop

In conversation with Elizabeth McCracken

A debut ''work of gorgeous, enduring prose'' (The Washington Post), Lan Samantha Chang's Hunger explored the lives of immigrant families haunted by the past. Her other writing includes the novels Inheritance and All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, as well as several other works of short fiction and nonfiction. The first Asian American and the first woman director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Chang was a Berlin Prize fellow, won the PEN Open Book Award, and earned grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. In The Family Chao, a Chinese American family's long-simmering resentments bubble to the surface amidst the mystery of its stern patriarch's murder.

Evoking ''moving depictions of marriage and parenthood, and love, betrayal, and loneliness'' (The Boston Globe), Elizabeth McCracken's seven books include Bowlaway, The Giant's House, and Thunderstruck & Other Stories. A former faculty member at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and currently the James Michener Chair for Fiction at the University of Texas at Austin, McCracken has earned the PEN New England Award, three Pushcart Prizes, and an O. Henry Prize, among other honors. Longlisted for the National Book Award, The Souvenir Museum is a story collection in which characters begin transformative journeys that test the strange relationships that bind families together. (recorded 2/9/2022)