Free Library Podcast

In conversation with Dr. Rachel Valletta, Environmental Scientist at The Franklin Institute and director of all climate change education and outreach programming.

A columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine, David Wallace-Wells has written extensively about the environment and the future of science, including a widely read-and hotly debated-2017 article about worst-case climate change scenarios. He formerly was a National Fellow at the New America Foundation and the deputy editor of the Paris Review. In his number-one New York Times bestseller The Uninhabitable Earth, Wallace-Wells issues a fervent call-to-arms to a world closer to the brink of climate-change Armageddon than many would care to admit. ''This generation's Silent Spring,'' (Washington Post), it is a travelogue of the crisis as it unfolds in real time and a rumination upon how it will affect the next generation.

(recorded 5/5/2020)

Frank B. Wilderson III spent more than five years in South Africa, where he was one of two Americans elected to the African National Congress during the country's transformation after apartheid. His books include Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid and Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, and he served as a dramaturge for the Lincoln Center Theater in New York and the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. Chair of African American Studies and professor in the Culture & Theory Doctoral Program at the University of California, Irvine, he has been honored with the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award for Creative Nonfiction and an NEA Literature Fellowship. In Afropessimism, Wilderson fuses innovative philosophy with trenchant memoir to argue slavery's unique historical social position and its pervasiveness even today.

(recorded 4/28/2020)

In conversation with New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

In her popular long-running blog, bitches gotta eat, Samantha Irby offers raw, humorous takes on her sometimes difficult personal life, pop culture, and, of course, food. She is also the author of three essay collections: Meaty; New Year, Same Trash: Resolutions I Absolutely Did Not Keep; and the New York Times bestseller We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. She has contributed work to a variety of publications and written an episode of the television show Shrill. In her new essay collection, Irby ponders inspirational Instagram infographics, being friendzoned by Hollywood, living in a red state, and the discomfort of life as a 40-year-old.

(recorded 4/30/2020)

Frank B. Wilderson III spent more than five years in South Africa, where he was one of two Americans elected to the African National Congress during the country's transformation after apartheid. His books include Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid and Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, and he served as a dramaturge for the Lincoln Center Theater in New York and the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. Chair of African American Studies and professor in the Culture & Theory Doctoral Program at the University of California, Irvine, he has been honored with the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award for Creative Nonfiction and an NEA Literature Fellowship. In Afropessimism, Wilderson fuses innovative philosophy with trenchant memoir to argue slavery's unique historical social position and its pervasiveness even today.

(recorded 4/28/2020)

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

A world-renowned leader in the Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement, featured in the new film Crip Camp, Judith Heumann has spent four decades working with a wide array of governmental agencies, activist groups, and NGOs on legislation and policy to benefit disabled people. Praised by Hillary Clinton for her ''insights, knowledge, sass, and wit,'' Heumann served in Bill Clinton's administration, shaping disability policy in the Department of Education, and was appointed by Barack Obama as the Special Advisor on Disability Rights for the State Department. She is also a former Senior Fellow at the Ford Foundation and advisor to the World Bank. Being Heumann is a memoir of her early struggle for education equality and lifelong crusade for inclusion and community for disabled people everywhere.

(recorded 4/16/2020)

A professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and associate director of the university's Orphan Disease Center, Dr. David Fajgenbaum holds an MBA from the Wharton School, earned a master of science at Oxford, and graduated from Georgetown, where he was a football quarterback. Renowned on the field and in school for his mental and physical stamina, he was blindsided by a mysterious illness that baffled doctors and left him near death. Not content to leave his life in the hands of a too-slow medical community, he developed a treatment that put his condition in remission. The cofounder and executive director of the Castleman Disease Collaborative Network, he was named to prestigious Forbes ''30 Under 30'' list. He details his journey in Chasing My Cure. (recorded 4/14/2020)

Named ''Woman of the Year'' by Latina magazine in 2000, poet, essayist, and fiction writer Julia Alvarez is renowned for her lyrical, poignant, politically insightful books, including How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, which details the lives of four sisters before and after their exile from the Dominican Republic; In the Time of the Butterflies, a million-copy bestseller; and Return to Sender, a novel about the families of undocumented Mexican workers in Vermont. Her many awards include the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature and the 2013 National Medal of Arts. Afterlife, her first adult novel in 15 years, considers our political moment and asks: What do we owe those in crisis in our families, including members of our human family? How do we live in a broken world without losing faith in one another or ourselves? And how do we stay true to those glorious souls we have lost?

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(recorded 4/7/2020)

Feminist author and journalist Kate Roiphe is the author of In Praise of Messy Lives, a ''daring, vivid, combative'' (Wall Street Journal) collection of essays that explores everything from Joan Didion to Mad Men. Her other books include The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism; The Violet Hour, and Uncommon Arrangements. Director of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, she has contributed articles to such varied publications as the New York Times, Esquire, Vogue, and the Paris Review. Presented as a series of journal entries, The Power Notebooks chronicles Roiphe's charged personal history, weaving it together with deeper insights into the ways in which famous female writers such as Sylvia Plath and Simone de Beauvoir repeatedly saw their own power subjugated.

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(recorded 3/31/2020)

In conversation with Beth Kephart,  the award-winning author of more than twenty-five books, including Going Over, Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir, and most recently The Great Upending.

A finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, Emily St. John Mandel's bestselling Station 11 vacillates in time between the world that we know and the dystopic travails of a Shakespearean acting troupe in the years following a global plague. Her other novels include Last Night in Montreal, The Lola Quartet, and The Singer's Gun, winner of the 2014 Prix Mystère de la Critique in France. She is a staff writer for art and culture magazine The Millions. In The Glass Hotel, Mandel tells a tale of a gargantuan Ponzi scheme, cryptic threats, and the clandestine landscapes that exist just below the veneer of ordinary life. (recorded 3/26/2020)

''Boisterous, highly entertaining,'' and ''altogether original'' (Washington Post), James McBride is the author of the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird, in which a young boy born into slavery joins abolitionist John Brown's doomed crusade. His nonfiction books include the New York Times bestselling memoir The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother and Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul. His other fiction includes the novels Miracle at St. Anna and Song Yet Sung, and the short-story collection Five-Carat Soul. Also an award-winning composer, screenwriter, and saxophonist, he received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2016. Deacon King Kong is a novel about a very public shooting in a 1960s Brooklyn housing project.

(recorded 3/11/2020)