Free Library Podcast

In conversation with Fat Joe, rapper, producer, platinum recording artist, and host of the Fat Joe Show

Named the first chairman of the Jordan Brand Advisory Board in January 2019, Larry Miller led Michael Jordan's $200-million basketball shoe company to become a $4-billion athletic apparel global powerhouse. After helping found the Jordan Brand at Nike in 1999, he was president of the Portland Trailblazers from 2007 to 2012 and has served in leadership and advocacy roles for the Urban League, Junior Achievement, and Self Enhancement, Inc. In Jump, Miller begins his story with the violence of his 1960s West Philadelphia upbringing and incarceration and shares his later opportunities of education, redemption, and success.

Laila Lacy, a native of Philadelphia, graduated from Central High School. She earned a degree from Howard University in Washington, DC, where she studied Psychology and Human Communications and has studied at New York's Bank Street Graduate School of Education. Lacy taught middle school for the New York Board of Education and later served as a business development manager for several mortgage banking firms in California. In addition to collaborating on her father's memoir, she has written op-eds and product reviews that have been featured in the several online magazines.

Due to the changing nature of the COVID-19 pandemic and local health and safety regulations, please visit our website before all events to get the latest information on vaccine and masking guidance.

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

A book signing will follow the presentation.

Books provided by Uncle Bobbie's Coffee and Books.

(recorded 1/17/2022)

In conversation with Michael Days

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. The Rise, referred to by Bob Costas as a ''story informed by meticulous research and rendered with clear-eyed insights,'' is about more than the tragedy that took Kobe Bryant's life and offers a thorough account of his identity as a sports and cultural figure and an assessment of his impact on our society.

Formerly The Philadelphia Inquirer's managing editor, vice president for diversity and inclusion, and editor for reader engagement, Michael Days serves on the Board of Visitors at Temple University's Klein College of Media and Communication. (recorded 1/13/2022)

In conversation with Tracey Matisak, award-winning journalist and broadcaster

Renowned for his ''signature blend of deep reportage and character-driven storytelling (The New York Times Book Review),'' Mark Bowden is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He is the author of 15 bestselling books of investigative journalism, including Blackhawk Down, adapted by Ridley Scott into a popular film; Killing Pablo, winner of the Overseas Press Club's Cornelius Ryan Award for book of the year; The Three Battles of Wanat, a collection of his best long-form essays; and Hue 1968, the story of the Vietnam War's bloodiest battle as told by participants from both sides. 

A contributor to National Geographic, The Atlantic, Esquire, and other periodicals, Matthew Teague is a former international and national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. He is executive producer of the 2021 feature film Our Friend, and his writing has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Best American Travel Writing, Best American Crime Writing, and Best American Sports Writing. 

In The Steal, Bowden and Teague detail the 64 days in which Donald Trump and his allies attempted to invalidate the results of the 2020 presidential election. Employing detailed research, never-before-shared first-person accounts, and reports from all over the country, it offers a thorough account of this unprecedented attack on U.S. democracy. (recorded 1/12/2022)

In conversation with Carmen Maria Machado

Rumaan Alam is the author of the New York Times instant bestseller Leave the World Behind,  ''a genuine thriller, a brilliant distillation of our anxious age, and a work of high literary merit'' (The Washington Post) that follows two families who meet at an isolated vacation during a possible cataclysm. The book was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award and named to nearly two dozen ''best of the year'' lists, and a film adaptation starring Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali is in production. Alam's other novels include Rich and Pretty and That Kind of Mother, and his other writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Wall Street Journal, among other periodicals. 

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the memoir In the Dream House and the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She is the Abrams Artist in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and a Guggenheim fellow. (recorded 12/2/2021)

In conversation with Rabih Alameddine, National Book Award nominated author of An Unnecessary Woman, The Angel of History, The Hakawati, and most recently, The Wrong End of the Telescope.

Somali-British author Nadifa Mohamed is the writer of the renowned novels Black Mamba Boy and The Orchard of Lost Souls. A regular contributor to The Guardian and the BBC, she is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and is a lecturer in creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. Mohamed is the recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award, and was named one of Granta's best young British novelists of 2013, and was a part of the 2014 Africa39 list of the most promising writers under the age of 40 from sub-Saharan Africa. A finalist for the 2021 Booker Prize, The Fortune Men is a novel about Mahmood Mattan, a young Somali sailor falsely accused of a violent crime in 1950s Cardiff, Wales.

''Nadifa Mohamed's The Fortune Men is a blues song cut straight from the heart. It tells about the unjust death of an innocent Black man caught up in a corrupt system. Nadifa's masterful evocation of the full life of Mahmood Mattan, the last man executed in Cardiff for a crime he was exonerated for forty years later, is brought alive with subtle artistry and heartbreaking humanity. In one man's life Mohamed captures the multitudes of homelands, dialects, hopes, and prayers of Somalis, Jews, Maltese and West Indians drawn in by the ships that filled Wales' Tiger Bay in the 1950's, all hoping for a future that eludes Mattan.''-Walter Mosley, author of Devil in a Blue Dress (recorded 12/15/2021)

Watch the eventhere.

In conversation with Dorothy Roberts

Sandra Shaber Memorial Lecture

Recognized by the National Law Journal as one of the ''100 Most Influential Lawyers in America,'' Kathryn Kolbert made history in 1992 when she argued the case Planned Parenthood v. Casey before the U.S. Supreme Court, a case widely recognized as protecting the right to an abortion guaranteed by Roe v. Wade. The founder of the Athena Center for Leadership at Barnard College and the cofounder of the Center for Reproductive Rights, she created and was the executive producer of NPR's Justice Talking series.

Julie F. Kay has spent decades on the front lines of the legal fight to advance gender equality and religious freedom in the U.S. and internationally. After starting her career in law as a staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights , she has since helped pave the way for the legalization of abortion in Ireland, fought to protect the parenting rights of people leaving ultra-religious communities, and served as a founding president of Women's Link Worldwide. 

In Controlling Women, Kolbert and Kay offer a comprehensive account of the struggle to safeguard the protections of Roe v. Wade and preserve women's fundamental reproductive rights in the face of nearly 50 years of legal battles.

Dorothy Roberts is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. She is also founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society in the Center for Africana Studies and the author of several books that focus on health, social justice, and bioethics. (recorded 12/14/2021)

Watch the video on our youtube channel.

In conversation with Signe Wilkinson

''One of America's foremost political satirists'' (The New York Times), illustrator, caricaturist, and cartoonist Edward Sorel has illustrated 41 covers for The New Yorker and has published pictorial essays and features in The Nation, Vanity Fair, Esquire, and The Atlantic, among many other publications. His many pictorial books include Literary Lives, Unauthorized Portraits, and Mary Astor's Purple Diary. The recipient of the George Polk Award for Satiric Drawing and the Best in Illustration Award from the National Cartoonists Society, Sorel's work has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums. His new memoir combines 172 of his drawings, cartoons, and caricatures with lively prose to tell the story of his Depression-era Bronx upbringing, the adventures in his rich personal life, and extraordinary 70-year career.   

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 12/9/2021)

The most widely read woman female writer in Turkey and acclaimed worldwide for her work's ''vision, bravery and compassion'' (The New York Times Book Review), Elif Shafak is the author of 12 bestselling novels, including The Bastard of Istanbul, The Architect's Apprentice, Three Daughters of Eve, and 10 Minutes 28 Seconds in This Strange World, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She is also the author of the memoir Black Milk and has written articles for periodicals around the world. A fellow and a vice president of the Royal Society of Literature, Shafak has taught at numerous universities in Turkey, the U.K., and the U.S. The Island of Missing Trees explores love, trauma, and ecological renewal through the bittersweet love story of two Cypriot teens on opposing sides of war.

 A ''21st-century Virginia Woolf'' (Literary Review UK), Siri Hustvedt is the author of the internationally bestselling novels The Blazing World, What I Loved, and The Summer Without Men, among others. She is also the author of A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, a three-part essay collection that employs feminism, psychology, neuroscience, and a host of other frameworks that connect pursuits to bridge the gaps between the sciences and humanities, a topic upon which she has also published numerous academic essays and papers. Her many honors include the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. In Mothers, Fathers, and Others, Hustvedt examines familial love and hate, feminism, and the power of art in a series of interdisciplinary essays. (recorded 12/7/2021)

In conversation with Michael Gorra, the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College and the editor of the Norton Critical Editions of As I Lay Dying, and The Sound and the Fury, and most recently The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War.

Kevin Birmingham is the author of The Most Dangerous Book, a ''lively'' and ''impressively researched'' (The Washington Post) history of James Joyce's controversial Ulysses. A New York Times bestseller, it won the PEN New England Award and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. Birmingham's other writing has appeared in such periodicals as The New York Times Book Review and Harper's, and he was named a public scholar by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Sinner and the Saint reveals the incredible true story of the notorious 1830s Parisian murderer who inspired Fyodor Dostevsky's magnum opus Crime and Punishment.

(recorded 11/30/2021)

Rabih Alameddine was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award for An Unnecessary Woman, a ''paean to the transformative power of reading'' (LA Review of Books). His many other works include the novels The Angel of History, The Hakawati, and the short story collection The Perv. The winner of the 2019 Dos Passos Prize, Alameddine was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has had solo gallery exhibitions of his paintings on three continents. In The Wrong End of the Telescope, a steadfast Arab American trans woman aids Syrian refugees on the island of Lesbos, and forms a close bond with a Syrian matriarch who is determined to protect her children and husband.

Claire Vaye Watkins' debut story collection Battleborn was named a best book of 2012 by numerous periodicals. Her other work includes Gold Fame Citrus, a novel in which two young lovers squatting in an abandoned mansion find hope in a drought-wracked future Los Angeles. Watkins is a writing professor at the University of California, Irvine, and her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, One Story, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Glimmer Train. I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness is the ''trippy and beautiful, slippery and seductive'' (Vogue) story of a new mother who leaves for a speaking engagement in Reno, Nevada and ends up on a transformative journey through the Mojave Desert of her youth. (recorded 11/23/2021)