Free Library Podcast

The Author Events Series presents Caro De Robertis | So Many Stars

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In Conversation with Dr. Michelle Taylor

So Many Stars knits together the voices of trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, and two-spirit elders of color as they share authentic, intimate accounts of how they created space for themselves and their communities in the world. This singular project collects the testimonies of twenty elders, each a glimmering thread in a luminous tapestry, preserving their words for future generations--who can more fully exist in the world today because of these very trailblazers.

De Robertis creates a collective coming-of-age story based on hundreds of hours of interviews, offering rare snapshots of ordinary life: kids growing up, navigating family issues and finding community, coming out and changing how they identify over the years, building movements and weathering the AIDS crisis, and sharing wisdom for future generations. Often narrating experiences that took place before they had the array of language that exists today to self-identify beyond the gender binary, this generation lived through remarkable changes in American culture, shaped American culture, and yet rarely takes center stage in the history books. Their stories feel particularly urgent in the current political moment, but also remind readers that their experiences are not new, and that young trans and nonbinary people today belong to a long lineage.

The anecdotes in these pages are riveting, joyful, heartbreaking, full of personality and wisdom, and artfully woven together into one immersive narrative. In De Robertis's words, So Many Stars shares "behind-the-scenes tales of what it meant--and still means--to create an authentic life, against the odds."

A writer of Uruguayan origins, Caro De Robertis is the author of six novels, including The Palace of Eros, Cantoras, and more. Their books have been translated into seventeen languages and have received numerous honors, including two Stonewall Book Awards, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, which they were the first openly nonbinary writer to receive. De Robertis is also an award-winning literary translator and a professor at San Francisco State University. They live in Oakland, California with their two children.

Dr. Michelle Taylor holds a Ph.D. in Africology & African American Studies from Temple University and is an educator, writer, and activist. She also earned an M.S.W. from CUNY-Hunter College and served her community as a social worker for eighteen years prior to entering academia. Dr. Taylor is the author of Reclaiming Our Space: How Black Feminists Are Changing the World from the Tweets to the Streets and her work focuses on African American women, mass media, and social justice. Dr. Taylor founded Sankofa Summer School, a  ritual Afrocentric academy that educates students about topics relevant to people of the African Diaspora. 

The 2024/25 Author Events Series is presented by Comcast.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

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

All tickets are non-refundable.

(recorded 6/2/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson  | Original Sin

Tickets to the Montgomery Auditorium are now sold out, but you can still get tickets for the simulcast live screening in Room 108. 

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In Conversation with Tamala Edwards

In Greek tragedy, the protagonist's effort to avoid his fate is what seals his fate. In 2024, American politics became a Greek tragedy.

Joe Biden launched his successful 2020 bid for the White House with the stated goal of saving the nation from a second Trump presidential term. He, his family, and his senior aides were so convinced that only he could beat Trump again, they lied to themselves, allies, and the public about his condition and limitations. At his debate with Trump on June 27, 2024, the consequences of that deception were exposed to the world. It was shocking and upsetting.

Now the full, unsettling truth is being told for the first time. Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson take us behind closed doors and into private conversations between the heaviest of hitters, revealing how big the problem was and how many people knew about it. From White House staffers at the highest to lowest levels, to leaders of Congress and the Cabinet, from governors to donors and Hollywood players, the truth is finally being told. What you will learn makes President Biden's decision to run for reelection seem shockingly narcissistic, self-delusional, and reckless-a desperate bet that went bust-and part of a larger act of extended public deception that has few precedents. The story the authors tell raises fundamental issues of accountability and responsibility that will continue for decades.

The irony is biting: In the name of defeating what they called an existential threat to democracy, Biden and his inner circle ensured it, tossing aside his implicit promise to serve for only one term, denying the existence of health issues the nation had been watching for years, dooming the Democrats to defeat. The decision to run again, the Original Sin of this president, led to a campaign of denial and gaslighting, leading directly to Donald Trump's return to power and all that has happened as a consequence. Rarely does hubris meet nemesis more explosively. Wherever you stand on the political spectrum, Original Sin is essential reading.

Tamala Edwards joined 6abc in January of 2005. She is the weekday co-anchor of Action News Mornings from 4 a.m to 7 a.m. and is a regular co-host of Inside Story, conducting probing interviews with newsmakers like Governor Tom Corbett, Senator Bob Casey, Mayor Michael Nutter and others, as well as moderating many election debates. Prior to joining 6abc, Tamala Edwards was the anchor of ABC's World News Now, and World News This Morning.

The 2024/25 Author Events Series is presented by Comcast.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

All tickets are non-refundable.

(recorded 5/29/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Senator Ron Wyden  | It Takes Chutzpah: How to Fight Fearlessly for Progressive Change

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In Conversation with Michael Solomonov 

Endowed Lecture: Pine Tree Foundation

It Takes Chutzpah is an inspirational call to action by a senior U.S. politician, describing how Americans of all age groups, persuasions, and occupations can defy convention, chart new pathways for their communities, schools, at work and in life. US Senator Ron Wyden is widely praised for coming up with sensible-sounding ideas no one else had thought of and making the counter-intuitive political alliances that prove helpful in passing bills. In It Takes Chutzpah, he offers a progressive leader's manifesto for being a courageous warrior during turbulent times.

"Chutzpah" is a Yiddish word that describes a trait that many Jews consider in-born. Ron explores chutzpah's long history and many interpretations and reclaims the word chutzpah for a new American generation, showing how it can be used for good to reclaim idealism and enact positive change. He shares "Ron's 12 Rules of Chutzpah" that enable any individual or group to achieve their objectives, including:

1. If you want to make change, you've got to make noise.

2.In a world where everyone thinks and acts for the short-term, always play the long game.

3. Leading is coaching: Whether in legislation or in life, you've got to bring people and ideas together around a shared goal.

Ron identifies several key values--free speech, health care, reproductive rights, a clean environment, and reigning in Big Tech--and draws on his decades of public service to stress that preserving those values means that loud brashness and boldness will be needed now more than ever.

The 2024/25 Author Events Series is presented by Comcast.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

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

All tickets are non-refundable.

(recorded 5/15/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Jonathan Capehart  | Yet Here I Am: Lessons from a Black Man's Search for Home

Tickets to the Montgomery Auditorium are now sold out, but you can still get tickets for the simulcast live screening in Room 108. 

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In Conversation with David Brooks

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, editor, and TV host Jonathan Capehart on growing up, coming out, finding his voice, battles lost and won, and the path to a meaningful life

Before meeting with success as a journalist, Jonathan Capehart struggled with his identity. Capehart grew up without his father and, as a child, lived with his mother in New Jersey and spent his summers living with relatives in North Carolina. Whether in the North or the South, Capehart had to contend with being told he was too smart or not smart enough, too black or not black enough. His was a struggle to identify and become.

Yet Here I Am takes us along Capehart's journey, from his years at Carleton College, where he learns to embrace his identity as a gay, black man surrounded by a likeminded community; to his decision to come out to his family, risking rejection; and finally, his move to New York City and where he landed his first break in television news. Capehart, gaining confidence, eventually found his singular voice – as a writer, editor, and broadcaster – and used it to propel himself and the causes of others. Indeed, it was his voice that helped him find his place in the world, contemplating the complexities of race, place, reporting, and home. Honest and endearing, Yet Here I Am is an inspirational memoir of identity, opportunity, and purpose. 

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jonathan Capehart is anchor of The Saturday Show and The Sunday Show on MSNBC. In the spring, he will become a co-host of the morning edition of The Weekend on MSNBC. Capehart is Associate Editor at the Washington Post, where he is also an opinion writer. He is also an analyst on The PBS News Hour. Capehart was deputy editorial page editor of the New York Daily News (2002-2004) and served on its editorial board (1993-2000). His editorial campaign in 1999 to save the Apollo Theater earned the board the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing.

David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times and a contributor to The Atlantic. He is a commentator on ''The PBS Newshour." His latest book is ''How To Know A Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.'' His previous three books were ''The Second Mountain,'' ''The Road to Character,'' and ''The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement,'' all #1 New York Times bestsellers. 

The 2024/25 Author Events Series is presented by Comcast.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

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

All tickets are non-refundable.

(recorded 5/22/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Paul Muldoon  | Joy in Service on Rue Tagore: Poems 

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In Conversation with Daisy Fried 

Since his 1973 debut, New Weather, Paul Muldoon has created some of the most original and memorable poetry of the past half century. Joy in Service on Rue Tagore sees him writing with the same verve and distinction that have consistently won him the highest accolades.

Here, from artichokes to zinc, Muldoon navigates an alphabet of image and history, through barleymen and Irish slavers to the last running wolf in Ulster. The search involves the accumulated bric-a-brac of a life, and a reckoning along the way of gains against loss. In the poet's skillful hands, ancient maps are unfurled and brought into focus--the aggregation of Imperial Rome and the dismantling of Standard Oil, the pogroms of a Ukrainian ravine and of a Belfast shipyard. Through modern medicine and warfare, disaster and repair, these poems are electric in their energy, while profoundly humane in their line of inquiry.

Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951. He now lives in New York. A former radio and television producer for the BBC in Belfast, he has taught at Princeton University for thirty-five years. He is the author of fourteen previous collections of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize.

Daisy Fried is the author of five books of poetry: My Destination (forthcoming next year from Flood Editions and Carcanet Press), The Year the City Emptied, Women's Poetry: Poems and Advice, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle, and She Didn't Mean to Do It. She has been awarded Guggenheim, Hodder and Pew Fellowships. A core faculty member in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and an occasional poetry critic for the New York Times, Poetry Foundation and elsewhere, she has lived in Philadelphia for decades, but will be moving to San Francisco at the end of the summer. 

The 2024/25 Author Events Series is presented by Comcast.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

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

All tickets are non-refundable.

(recorded 5/14/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Dr. Judith Joseph | High Functioning 

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Emcee - Dr. Dalesa Rueda

The first book to unmask the hidden face of depression. If you look fine on the outside but don't feel fine on the inside, learn five tools to break the cycle of High Functioning Depression and experience more joy in your life.

In High Functioning, Dr. Judith Joseph reveals that what we're feeling is not simply ''negativity'' or stress. Drawing on original research, client cases, and her personal experience with HFD, Dr. Judith radically shifts the way those of us with HFD see ourselves, and empowers us with five simple tools to reclaim our lives from this widespread yet poorly understood condition.

 By following her 5 V's - validation, venting, values, vision, and vitals - we can wake up happier, find more satisfaction in our relationships, and feel better in the present while also looking forward to the future.

Hannah Williams is a social activist and former data analyst tackling a major issue: salary transparency. After finding out she was underpaid, Hannah created Salary Transparent Street, a viral series interviewing strangers about their pay to help workers learn and earn more. She's testified in support of pay transparency bills in Virginia, Maryland, and DC, and her work has been featured by major media organizations like The Washington Post, TIME and BBC News. In 2023, she was named a Money.com Changemaker, and in 2024, she made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

Dr. Dalesa Rueda is a licensed marriage and family therapist and the founder of Inspired & Free, a multi-state virtual therapy practice rooted in culturally responsive care. With over 20 years of experience, she specializes in helping individuals and couples heal from anxiety, trauma, and relationship challenges. Known for her warm, relatable approach and deep community ties in Philadelphia, Dr. Dalesa is passionate about making emotional wellness accessible and empowering for all.

The 2024/25 Author Events Series is presented by Comcast.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

All tickets are non-refundable.

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

The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees.

(recorded 5/8/2025)

The Author Events Series presents  Elie Mystal  | Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America 

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In Conversation with Cherri Gregg

In Bad Law, the New York Times bestselling author of Allow Me To Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution brings his trademark legal acumen and passionate snark to a brilliant takedown of ten of what he considers the most egregiously awful laws on the books today. These are pieces of legislation that are making life worse rather than better for Americans, and that, he argues with trenchant wit and biting humor, should be repealed completely.

On topics ranging from abortion and immigration to voting rights and religious freedom, we have chosen rules to live by that do not reflect the will of most of the people. With respect to our decision to make a law that effectively grants immunity to gun manufacturers, for example, Mystal writes, ''We live in the most violent, wealthy country on earth not in spite of the law; we live in a first-person-shooter video game because of the law.''

But, as the man Samantha Bee calls ''irrepressible and righteously indignant'' and Matt Levine of Bloomberg Opinion calls ''the funniest lawyer in America,'' points out, these laws do not come to us from on high; we write them, and we can and should unwrite them. In a marvelous and original takedown spanning all the hot-button topics in the country today, one of our most brilliant legal thinkers points the way to a saner tomorrow most brilliant legal thinkers points the way to a saner tomorrow.

The 2024/25 Author Events Series is presented by Comcast.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

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

All tickets are non-refundable.

(recorded 4/30/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Mike Sielski  | Magic in the Air

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In Conversation with Buzz Bissinger

The evolution of basketball, and much of the social and cultural change in America, can be traced through one powerful act on the court: the slam dunk. The dunk's history is the story of a sport and a country changed by the most dominant act in basketball, and it makes Magic in the Air a rollicking and insightful piece of narrative history and a surefire classic of sports literature.

When basketball was the province of white men, the dunk acted as a revolutionary agent, a tool for players like Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell to transform the sport into a Black man's game. The dunk has since been an expression of Black culture amid the righteous upheaval of the civil-rights movement, of the threat that Black people were considered to be to the establishment. It was banned from college basketball for nearly a decade--an attempt to squash the individual expression and athleticism that characterized the sport in America's cities and on its playgrounds. The dunk nevertheless bubbled up to basketball's highest levels. From Julius Erving to Michael Jordan to the high flyers of the 21st century, the dunk has been a key mechanism for growing the NBA into a global goliath.

Drawing on deep reporting and dozens of interviews with players, coaches, and other hoops experts, Magic in the Air brings to life the tale of the dunk while balancing sharp socio-racial history and commentary with a romp through American sports and culture. There's never been a basketball book quite like it.

MIKE SIELSKI is a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer and the author of four books. The Associated Press Sports Editors voted him the country's top sports columnist in 2015, and his previous book, The Rise: Kobe Bryant and the Pursuit of Immortality, was published in 2022. Sielski lives in Bucks County, Pa., with his wife and two sons.

Buzz Bissinger is among the nation's most honored and distinguished writers. A native of New York City, Buzz is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Livingston Award, the American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award and the National Headliners Award, among others. He also was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He is the author of the highly acclaimed nonfiction books: Friday Night Lights, A Prayer for the City, Three Nights in August, Shooting Stars and Father's Day.

The 2024/25 Author Events Series is presented by Comcast.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

All tickets are non-refundable.

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

The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees.

(recorded 4/29/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Rhodri Lewis  | Shakespeare's Tragic Art

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In Conversation with Emily Wilson

In Shakespeare's Tragic Art, Rhodri Lewis offers a powerfully original reassessment of tragedy as Shakespeare wrote it-of what drew him toward tragic drama, what makes his tragedies distinctive, and why they matter.

After reconstructing tragic theory and practice as Shakespeare and his contemporaries knew them, Lewis considers in detail each of Shakespeare's tragedies from Titus Andronicus to Coriolanus. He argues that these plays are a series of experiments whose greatness lies in their author's nerve-straining determination to represent the experience of living in a world that eludes rational analysis. They explore not just our inability to know ourselves as we would like to, but the compensatory and generally unacknowledged fictions to which we bind ourselves in our hunger for meaning-from the political, philosophical, social, and religious to the racial, sexual, personal, and familial. Lewis's Shakespeare not only creates tragedies that exceed those written before them. Through his art, he also affirms and invigorates the kinds of knowing that are available to intelligent animals like us.

A major reevaluation of Shakespeare's tragedies, Shakespeare's Tragic Art is essential reading for anyone interested in Shakespeare, tragedy, or the capacity of literature to help us navigate the perplexities of the human condition.

After many years at the University of Oxford, Rhodri Lewis moved to Princeton in 2018-where he teaches English and comparative literature. His new book, Shakespeare's Tragic Art, was a New Yorker Book of the Year for 2024, and for the duration of the 2025-26 academic year he will be a Guggenheim Fellow. Previous books include Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (Princeton UP 2017) and Language, Mind, and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (Cambridge UP 2007). He is now at work on two projects: a biography of the great literary critic Frank Kermode, and a new edition (and translation) of Francis Bacon's Wisdom of the Ancients.

The 2024/25 Author Events Series is presented by Comcast.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

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

All tickets are non-refundable.

(recorded 4/23/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Rebecca Romney  | Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend 

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In Conversation with Allie Alvis 

Jane Austen's Bookshelf investigates the disappearance of Austen's heroes--women writers who were erased from the Western canon--to reveal who they were, what they meant to Austen, and how they were forgotten. Each chapter profiles a different writer including Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Smith, Hannah More, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth--and recounts Romney's experience reading them, finding rare copies of their works, and drawing on connections between their words and Austen's. Romney collects the once-famed works of these forgotten writers, physically recreating Austen's bookshelf and making a convincing case for why these books should be placed back on the to-be-read pile of all book lovers today. Jane Austen's Bookshelf will encourage you to look beyond assigned reading lists, question who decides what belongs there, and build your very own collection of favorite novels.

Rebecca Romney is a rare book dealer and the cofounder of Type Punch Matrix, a rare book company based in Washington, DC. Rebecca is the author Printer's Error: Irreverent Stories from Book History (HarperCollins; with JP Romney) and The Romance Novel in English: A Survey in Rare Books, 1769-1999; her current book is Jane Austen's Bookshelf (Simon & Schuster), chronicling her efforts to build a book collection of Austen's favorite women writers. Since 2011 she has appeared as the rare book specialist on the History Channel's show Pawn Stars; she was also featured in the 2019 documentary The Booksellers. 

Allie Alvis is Curator of Special Collections of the Winterthur Library, where they are responsible for the stewardship and engagement of the collection. They have previously worked as an antiquarian bookseller at Type Punch Matrix (Washington, DC) and as the special collections reference librarian for the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives. Allie's research is diverse and far-reaching, with interests in physical patterns of use in books, the history of ephemera, and Arts and Crafts bookbindings. They are particularly involved in the study and act of using social media for communicating book history, and maintain popular accounts across various platforms as Book Historia.

The 2024/25 Author Events Series is presented by Comcast.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

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

All tickets are non-refundable.

(recorded 4/24/2025)