Free Library Podcast

Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Endowed Lecture

One of the world's leading neuroscientists, Dr. Antonio Damasio has made watershed contributions to the understanding of how our brains process emotions, decisions, and conscious. He is the David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Philosophy, and director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. His prolific body of work includes scores of scientific articles and several books, including Decartes' Error, The Feeling of What Happens, and The Strange Order of Things. A member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Damasio is the recipient of some of the scientific community's most prestigious awards. Feeling & Knowing is a guide to understanding the phenomenon of consciousness and how it relates to the physical brain. (recorded 11/4/2021)

In conversation with Christine Kendall, author of Riding Chance, nominated for a NAACP Image Award, and The True Definition of Neva Beane

Glory Edim is the creator of Well-Read Black Girl, a book club, book, and online community that showcases the universality of Black women's stories and experiences in and through literature. She also edited the 2018 NAACP Image Award-nominated anthology of the same name that featured a wide array of essays by Black women. A recipient of the 2017 Innovator's Award from the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, Edim serves on the board of New York City's Housing Works Bookstore. She is the curator of the new story collection On Girlhood, referred to by Jacqueline Woodson as ''a loving family of writers who came before me,'' that includes such towering voices as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Toni Cade Bambara, and Alice Walker--among many others. (recorded 11/3/2021)

Meelya Gordon Memorial Lecture

Renowned for his ''ability to combine high thinking with a shrewd capacity to understand day-to-day American politics,'' (The Economist) Pulitzer Prize winner George Will has written a nationally syndicated column at The Washington Post for the past 45 years. His many books include The Conservative Sensibility, Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball, and One Man's America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation. Will is the winner of the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism, two Silurian Awards for editorial writing, and the Order of Lincoln award from his home state of Illinois. In American Happiness and Discontents, Will addresses such varied topics as American socialists, anti-capitalist conservatives, drug policy, the criminal justice system, climatology, the Coronavirus, the First Amendment, the composition of the federal judiciary, the morality of watching football, and so much more. (recorded 11/1/2021)

In conversation with Adam McNeil, host of the New Books in African American Studies podcast

The McCausland Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, Woody Holton teaches early U.S. history, specializing in economics, African American history, Indigenous history, and women's history. His many books include the Bancroft Prize–winning biography Abigail Adams; Forced Founders, winner of the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians; and Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, a National Book Award finalist. He is also the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation. In Liberty Is Sweet, Holton uses more than a thousand primary accounts to offer a wide-ranging reassessment of marginalized peoples' contributions to U.S. independence and their conflicts with the values, decisions, and agendas of the Founding Fathers.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Rutgers University, where he writes about Black Women from the Chesapeake Bay during the Revolutionary and Founding eras. Adam's research has been supported by fellowships from the University of Michigan's Clements Library, the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society, and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture. In addition to academic writing, Adam regularly contributes to academic blogs Black Perspectives and The Junto, and regularly interviews scholars on the New Books in African American Studies podcast, where he has interviewed nearly one hundred scholars about their works in African American Studies and African American History. 

(recorded 10/28/2021)

Joshua Ferris's ''brash, extravagant, and chillingly beautiful'' (The New Yorker) novels include Then We Came to the End, winner of the 2008 PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel and a finalist for the National Book Award; To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, which was shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize; and The Unnamed, the story of a lawyer who has the uncontrollable urge to walk and keep walking. One of The New Yorker's ''20 Under 40'' writers and winner of the International Dylan Thomas Prize, Ferris is also the author of the short story collection The Dinner Party and has published fiction in Granta, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Voices, among other places. In A Calling for Charlie Barnes, a scheming malcontent finds redemption on an unlikely path.   

Dana Spiotta is the author of five novels, including Wayward, which the New York Times called a "virtuosic, singular and very funny portrait of a woman seeking sanity and purpose in a world gone mad." Spiotta has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.  She was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, the St. Francis College Literary Prize, and the John Updike Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

(recorded 10/26/2021)

In conversation with Jonathan Franzen, bestselling author of Crossroads, Freedom, Purity, and The Corrections among other works of fiction and non-fiction.

''A fiercely intelligent writer'' (The New York Times), Donald Antrim is the author of three critically acclaimed novels, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, The Hundred Brothers, and The Verificationist. His other work includes Afterlife, a memoir about his mother; The Emerald Light in the Air, a story collection compiled from his published work's frequent appearances in The New Yorker; and essays and articles  published in a variety of periodicals. He has received grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the MacArthur Foundation, among others. In One Friday in April, Antrim uses the harrowing circumstances surrounding his 2006 suicidal thoughts and actions to reframe this misunderstood illness as something other than the choice of a depressed person.    

(recorded 10/21/2021)

In conversation with Nicole Dennis-Benn

Asali Solomon is the author of Disgruntled, ''a smart, philosophical, coming-of-age'' (San Francisco Chronicle) novel about the double-binds of race in late 1980s Philadelphia. Her other work includes the short story collection Get Down, as well as stories published in a wide array of periodicals, including McSweeney's, Essence, and O, The Oprah Magazine. A professor of fiction writing and literature of the African diaspora at Haverford College, Solomon is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award and the National Book Foundation's ''5 Under 35'' honor. The Days of Afrekete follows two women who reconnect years after their college days and rediscover themselves amidst the questions asked at middle age.

Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of Patsy and Here Comes the Sun, a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the Lambda Literary Award. Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, she teaches at Princeton and lives with her wife in Brooklyn, New York. (recorded 10/20/2021)

In conversation with John Freeman

Anthony Doerr won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for All the Light We Cannot See, ''a beautiful, daring, heartbreaking, oddly joyous novel'' (Seattle Times) about a blind French girl and a German boy navigating the carnage of World War II. Also the winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and a National Book Award finalist, it spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list. Doerr's other work includes the novel About Grace, two story collections, and a memoir, for which he has earned five O. Henry Prizes, the Story Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors. A novel of the interconnected tapestry of human experience, Cloud Cuckoo Land weaves together the lives of a fifteenth century orphan, an octogenarian in present-day Idaho, and a girl on an interstellar spacecraft decades from today.

John Freeman was the editor of Granta until 2013. His books include Dictionary of the Undoing, How to Read a Novelist, Tales of Two Americas, and Tales of Two Planets. His poetry includes the collections Maps, The Park, and the forthcoming Wind, Trees. In 2021, he edited the anthologies There's a Revolution Outside, My Love with Tracy K. Smith, and The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story. An Executive Editor at Knopf, he teaches writing and literature classes at NYU.

(recorded 10/19/2021)

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is the author of five poetry collections, including The Gospel of Barbecue, Red Clay Suite, and The Age of Phillis, which was longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry and won a 2021 NAACP Image Award. Critic at Large for The Kenyon Review and a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, Jeffers has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Antiquarian Society. Additionally, Jeffers has been honored with the Harper Lee Award for Literary Distinction and with induction into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. An instant New York Times bestseller and an Oprah Book Club selection, her debut novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois chronicles the centuries-spanning journey of a Black American family from the days of the colonial slave trade to our own unsteady era.

The director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, Kevin Young is also the poetry editor for The New Yorker, where he hosts the Poetry Podcast. He is the author of the poetry collections Brown, Blue Laws, Book of Hours, and Jelly Roll, a finalist for the National Book Award. His nonfiction books include Bunk and The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, Young has been honored with the Lenore Marshall Prize for Poetry, an American Book Award, and the Paterson Poetry Prize. Stones is the newest collection from Young, ''one of the poetry stars of his generation'' (Los Angeles Times). (recorded 10/18/2021)

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

The United States representative for California's 28th congressional district and the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Adam Schiff was the lead manager for the first impeachment proceedings against former President Donald Trump. He is a former member of the House Appropriations Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee, and served as an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles from 1987 to 1993 and a California state senator from 1996 to 2000. In Midnight in Washington, Schiff reveals an inside look at one of U.S. democracy's most challenging moments, his own path to becoming one of the former president's most prominent critics, and the principles we need in the struggle against autocracy. (recorded 10/18/2021)