Free Library Podcast

In conversation with Anusha Balasubramanian. Anusha spends her days as an executive assistant at a Philadelphia investment firm, but her greatest passions are books, cooking, and her mother's idli.

Lauded as the ''queen of Indian cooking'' (Saveur), Madhur Jaffrey is largely credited for bringing her home country's cuisine to America with 1973's An Invitation to Indian Cooking. She has since authored more than a dozen James Beard Award–winning cookbooks. Also an acclaimed actor, Jaffrey won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 1965 Berlin Film Festival for her role in the Merchant Ivory film Shakespeare Wallah. With more than 70 easy-to-replicate recipes, her new cookbook offers a guide to making Indian cuisine with one of America's new favorite kitchen gadgets. Join us to hear stories from her long and varied career.

(recorded 5/10/2019)

The first woman and the first life scientist to head the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Susan Hockfield now serves as the esteemed institution's President Emerita. A pioneering neuroscientist whose work included the discovery of a gene linked to the spread of brain cancer, she has earned the Edison Achievement Award, a number of honorary degrees, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the chairman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and recently served as science envoy with the U.S. Department of State. In The Age of Living Machines, Hockfield describes a contemporary biotech convergence leading to the bleeding edge products that will help us overcome some of our greatest human and environmental challenges.

 

(recorded 5/8/2019)

''A powerful storyteller, frankly sensual [and] mortally funny" (New York Times), Lorene Cary is the author of the novels Pride, The Price of a Child, If Sons, Then Heirs, and the memoir Black Ice. A senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania and the recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, she is the founder of SafeKidsStories.com and Art Sanctuary, a local African American lecture and performance program. In Ladysitting, Cary's irascible 100-year-old grandmother moves in, bringing with her tension, tenderness, and a unique perspective on forgiveness.

(recorded 5/7/2019)

Excavating the hidden corners of the human heart and acclaimed for their ''nuance, psychological acuity, and pitch-perfect writing'' (Los Angeles Times), Susan Choi's novels include the Asian American Literary Award-winning The Foreign Student; American Woman, a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize; A Person of Interest, a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award; and My Education, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction. A creative writing teacher at Yale, Choi has earned Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. Trust Exercise follows a star-crossed suburban teen romance in a 1980s performing arts high school.

Myla Goldberg is the author of the bestselling Bee Season, the story of a family's disintegration told through the lens of a young spelling prodigy. It was a New York Times Notable Book, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and was adapted into a film starring Richard Gere. Her other novels include The False Friend and Wickett's Remedy. Goldberg's new novel is a portrait of an ambitious 1950s-era photographer and mother formed through a collage of perspectives on the character's art and life.

(recorded 5/2/2019)

Inspired by the themes in the One Book, One Philadelphia 2019 selection, Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, a panel of formerly incarcerated community advocates were joined in conversation by District Attorney Larry Krasner and Chief Public Defender Keir Bradford-Grey. Their discussions about criminal and juvenile justice reform in Philadelphia were moderated by Claire Shubik-Richards, Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, and Arcadia University Professor Favian Martin. Panelists included Kempis Ghani Songster, Reuben Jones, and Cameron Holmes. (recorded 2/11/2019)

In conversation with Annette John-Hall, cohost and producer of The Why on WHYY

A 14-year veteran crime reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News, Nicole Weisensee Egan was the first journalist to delve into Andrea Constand's 2005 sexual assault allegations against Bill Cosby. As other news organizations lost interest, she dug deeper, developing sources and discovering details that ultimately influenced the prosecution of ''America's Dad'' a full decade later. Pulling back the curtain on pop culture, media responsibility, and an initially indifferent criminal justice system, Chasing Cosby is the ultimate insider's account of the stunning fall from grace of one of America most celebrated cultural icons.

(recorded 4/30/2019)

The national baseball writer for the New York Times since 2010, Tyler Kepner began his career as a teenager, interviewing players for a homemade magazine that garnered him national attention. His first book, The Phillies Experience: A Year-by-Year Chronicle of the Philadelphia Phillies, came out in 2013. Praised by Bob Costas as ''analytical and anecdotal, insightful and entertaining,'' K explores the evolution of pitching through archival research and more than three hundred interviews with Hall of Famers and contemporary stars.

(recorded 4/29/2019)

Ranked by Forbes as the third most powerful woman in the world, Melinda Gates has been on a 20-year mission to solve some of the world's most pressing problems. Through her work as co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-the world's largest philanthropic organization- one thing has become increasingly clear to her: If you want to lift a society up, invest in women. In The Moment of Lift, the former Microsoft executive introduces us to her heroes in the movement towards equality, offers startling data, shares moving conversations she's had with women from all over the world―and shows how we can all get involved.

John Green is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of six books, including The Fault in Our Stars  and Turtles All the Way Down . His books have been published in more than 55 languages, and adapted for popular feature films.

 

(recorded 4/25/2019)

In conversation with Catherine M. Recker.

''One of the most intense, visceral'' (Philadelphia Inquirer) writers of our time, Mark Bowden is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and Vanity Fair and is the author of numerous New York Times bestselling books of investigative journalism, including Black Hawk Down. His other books include 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. In The Last Stone, Bowden returns to a story he covered as a cub reporter in the 1970s as new evidence emerges in the case of two vanished children.

(recorded 4/24/2019)

In conversation with Concepción de León, the digital staff writer for the Books desk at The New York Times. She also writes "El Espace," a news and culture column for Latino.

A ''one-woman cultural collision'' (Los Angeles Times Book Review), poet, essayist, and fiction writer Julia Alvarez is renowned for her lyrical, poignant, politically insightful books, including How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, which details the lives of four sisters before and after their exile from the Dominican Republic; A Wedding in Haiti, an examination of three of Alvarez's most personal relationships; 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 Outstanding Achievement in American Literature and the 2013 National Medal of Arts. On the eve of the 25th anniversary of its publication, the new edition of Alvarez's novel In the Time of the Butterflies is a celebration of the four mariposa sisters who symbolized courage, love, and resistance.

(recorded 4/23/2019)