Free Library Podcast

In conversation Trapeta Mayson, Philadelphia Poet Laureate

Former United States Poet Laureate Rita Dove won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Thomas and Beulah, a semi-fictional collection of verse that examined the lives of her grandparents. In addition to her many other collections, she is the author of an essay collection, stage play, novel, and short story collection. The only poet to win both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts, her other honors include the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University, the Wallace Stevens Award from the American Academy of Poets, and 28 honorary degrees. She has taught poetry at the University of Virginia for more than 30 years. In Playlist for the Apocalypse, Dove offers her thoughts about the state of global injustice, the United States's unsteady moral compass, and small moments of grace.

Books with signed book plates available from the Joseph Fox Bookshop

(recorded 8/11/2021)

In conversation with Benj Pasek, Tony Award-winning songwriter and New York Times bestselling author of Dear Evan Hansen

A celebrated director, playwright, screenwriter, and librettist, James Lapine earned three Tony Awards for ''Best Book of a Musical'' for Passion, Falsettos, and Into the Woods. His many other honors include the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, five Drama Desk Awards, a Peabody Award, and induction into the Theater Hall of Fame. He also directed the feature films Impromptu, Life with Mikey, and Earthly Possessions. Putting It Together is about Lapine's collaboration with Stephen Sondheim to create Sunday in the Park with George, their iconic 1984 Broadway musical based on Georges Seurat's painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

Benj Pasek is an Oscar, Grammy, Tony, and Golden Globe Award-winning songwriter and New York Times bestselling author. Along with frequent collaborator Justin Paul, he is best known for his work on Dear Evan Hansen, La La Land, and The Greatest Showman. The accompanying albums for each project have appeared in the top 10 of the Billboard 200, the latter of which is certified Platinum in over a dozen countries. He is on the board of the Dramatist Guild Foundation and the American LGBTQ+ Museum.

Books with signed book plates are available from the Joseph Fox Bookshop

(recorded 8/10/2021)

In conversation with David Clay Large, professor at the Fromm Institute, University of San Francisco, Senior Fellow at the Institute of European Studies, U.C. Berkeley, and author of ten books including Berlin, Where Ghosts Walked: Munich's Road to the Third Reich, and Nazi Games.

Rebecca Donner is the author of the ''remarkable debut'' (Baltimore Sun) novel Sunset Terrace, the story of a community of single mothers and kids in 1980s Los Angeles. Donner's other work includes the graphic novel Burnout, as well as essays, reviews, and articles that have appeared in a variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Believer, and Guernica. The recipient of a fellowship at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, Donner has taught writing at Columbia University, Wesleyan University, and Barnard College. In her latest book, Donner explores the remarkable life and brutal death of her great-great-aunt Mildred Harnack, the leader of one of Nazi Germany's most successful underground resistance groups and the only identified person from the United States to be a leader in the German resistance.

Books available through the Joseph Fox Bookshop

(recorded 8/9/2021)

In conversation with Andrea Mitchell, anchor of Andrea Mitchell Reports on MSNBC and NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent

Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker are the authors of the #1 bestselling book A Very Stable Genius, a ''taut and terrifying'' account of Donald Trump's ''shambolic tenure in office to date'' (The New York Times). In I Alone Can Fix It, they use in-the-room sources to offer a detailed account of Trump and his enablers' disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the public protests following Minneapolis Police Department Officers Derek Chauvin, Thomas Lane, J. Kueng, and Tou Thao's killing of George Floyd, and the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building.

A national investigative reporter at The Washington Post, Leonnig won Pulitzer Prizes in 2014 for revealing the U.S. government's secret domestic surveillance efforts and in 2015 for her coverage of the Secret Service's misconduct and security failures. Her reporting about the Secret Service was the basis of her New York Times bestselling book Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service. Leonnig offers on-air political analysis for NBC News and MSNBC.

The senior Washington correspondent at the Post, Rucker was part of a team of Post reporters, which also included Leonnig, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for its coverage of Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election. The recipient of the George Polk Award and the Aldo Beckman Award from the White House Correspondents' Association, Rucker also works as an on-air political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC.

Please allow three weeks for delivery. U.S. orders only. 

(recorded 7/28/2021)

Omar El Akkad is the author of American War, a ''poignant and horrifying'' (Washington Post) dystopian novel that imagines a future civil war born from the U.S.'s current destructive policies and impulses. It was an international bestseller, translated into 13 languages, and named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, NPR, and Esquire. Also an acclaimed journalist, El Akkad earned Canada's National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists for the reporting he did from locations such as Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. His new novel tells the story of the international refugee crisis through the experiences of Amir, a Syrian boy who washes up on the shore of a small island.

Books with signed book plates will be available from the Joseph Fox Bookshop

(recorded 7/22/2021)

In conversation with Resmaa Menakem, bestselling author of My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies

Robin DiAngelo's New York Times bestseller White Fragility, a ''methodical, irrefutable exposure of racism in thought and action'' (The New Yorker), explores the counterproductive white behaviors that help maintain racism and offers white people solutions to engage more responsibly in their work against white supremacy and racism. A professor of education at the University of Washington, DiAngelo has worked as a consultant and facilitator on issues of social and racial justice for more than 25 years, and is also the author of Is Everyone Really Equal? and What Does It Mean to be White? Her latest book builds on the framework of White Fragility to identify the ways in which well-intentioned white people create racial inequality.

For more information about each author, visit: Robin DiAngelo, Resmaa Menakem

A limited number of signed book plates will be available with a purchase of the authors books from the Joseph Fox Bookshop: Nice Racism | My Grandmother's Hands

(recorded 7/20/2021)

In conversation with adrienne maree brown

Internationally sought-after wellness expert Jessamyn Stanley is the author of Every Body Yoga, ''a clever memoir of a millennial woman's search for self-acceptance'' (Elle) wrapped inside a beginner's manual to asana yoga. A regular contributor to Self magazine, cohost of the Dear Jessamyn podcast, and founder of the wellness community The Underbelly, she has been featured in such publications as The New York Times, Good Morning America, and Sports Illustrated. In Yoke, Stanley explores the concept of the ''yoga of the everyday'' through a series of autobiographical essays about such varied topics as self-love, impostor syndrome, cannabis, and the missing spiritual element to Western yoga.

adrienne maree brown is a podcaster, public speaker, and the writer-in-residence at the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute.

Books with signed book plates available at the Joseph Fox Bookshop

(recorded 7/21/2021)

In conversation with Wendy Moffat, Professor of English and Curley Chair of Global Education at Dickinson College and author of the prize-winning biography, A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster

A professor in the Pennoni Honors College of Drexel University, William di Canzio has also taught writing and literature at Yale University, Smith College, and Haverford College. His plays Dooley and Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier have been staged in New York City, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, among many other places. He has been honored with the Julie Harris Playwright Award, a Brown Foundation Award, and residencies and fellowships from the MacDowell, the Eugene O'Neill Theater's National Playwrights Conference, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Alec, his debut novel, continues the story at the end of Maurice, E.M. Forster's tale of a gay romance.

Books with signed book plates are available from the Joseph Fox Bookshop

(recorded 7/15/2021)

In conversation with Tamala Edwards, anchor, 6ABC Action News morning edition

Celebrated for her ''stellar instincts, sturdy craftsmanship and penetrating wisdom'' (San Francisco Chronicle), Yaa Gyasi is the author of Homegoing. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for best first book and the PEN/Hemingway Award for a first book of fiction, this breakout debut follows two half-sisters on opposite sides of the 18th-century Ghanaian slave trade and their descendants. Gyasi, a native of Ghana who emigrated with her family to the U.S. in 1991, received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she earned a Dean's Graduate Research Fellowship. Her new novel, an instant New York Times bestseller and a Today show book club pick, finds a Ghanaian family living in Alabama grappling with grief, faith, and the search for a science–based explanation for suffering.

(recorded 7/14/2021)

A former bookseller turned flight attendant, T. J. Newman flew for Virgin America and Alaska Airlines from 2011 until this year. While her passengers were asleep on cross-country red-eye flights, she began to write a novel on whatever she could find during her shifts, including cocktail napkins. After being rejected by 41 agents, she sold Falling and the publishing rights for her second novel for a seven figure deal. Referred to by Don Winslow as ''Jaws at 35,000 feet,'' this ''stunning and relentless'' debut tells the story of a crowded L.A. to New York flight that the captain has to crash in order to save his kidnapped family. 

Books available from the Joseph Fox Bookshop

(recorded 7/13/2021)