Free Library Podcast

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

''The ultimate Obama insider'' (New York Times), Valerie Jarrett was the longest serving advisor in the 44th President's administration. Born in Iran and raised in 1960s Chicago, Jarrett originally practiced corporate law and left to enter local politics, where in 1991 she interviewed an up-and-coming lawyer named Michelle Robinson. And the rest is history, one she tells in Finding My Voice, a memoir of her rise to become one of the most consequential women in the United States.

Barbara Gohn Day Memorial Lecture

(recorded 4/3/2019)

Barry Lopez won the National Book Award for Arctic Dreams, a ''rich, abundant, vigorously composed'' (Boston Globe) meditation on his travels in the barren but beautiful far North. His other work includes Of Wolves and Men, Crow and Weasel, and Resistance. Texas Tech University's Visiting Distinguished Scholar, he has earned Guggenheim, Lannan, and National Science Foundation fellowships. In Horizon, Lopez immerses readers in six far-flung regions of the world as he ponders man's explorations and exploitations of nature amidst a very personal search for purpose in a fractured world.

Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Endowed Lecture

(recorded 4/2/2019)

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

A ''heroine of the resistance'' (Vogue), Cecile Richards was the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund from 2006 to 2018. The daughter of legendary Ann Richards, she began her career in the labor movement, then helped her mother become Texas's first Democratic woman governor, and later served as Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi's Deputy Chief of Staff. One of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World, she serves on the board of the Ford Foundation and founded the Texas Freedom Network in order to counter the religious right. Make Trouble tells her indelible story and offers practical advice for a new generation of leaders.

Sandra Shaber Memorial Lecture (recorded 3/28/2019)

Nathan Englander is the author of the story collections For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. In addition to his widely anthologized short fiction, he is the author of the novels The Ministry of Special Cases and Dinner at the Center of the Earth. In Kaddish.com, to his Orthodox family's dismay, an atheist refuses to say the Jewish prayer for the dead for his recently departed father..

''Historical fiction that unfolds with the urgency of a thriller'' (Newsweek), Thomas Mallon's acclaimed novels include Dewey Defeats Truman, Watergate, and Fellow Travelers, which was adapted into a popular opera. For this work he has earned Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, the National Book Critics Circle award for reviewing, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for prose style. Landfall is a fictionalized account of the stormy George W. Bush years between 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.

(recorded 3/27/2019)

In conversation with award-winning journalist Tracey Matisak.

Falsely accused and convicted of a 1972 robbery in which a white guard was killed, Albert Woodfox served more than four decades in solitary confinement in Louisiana's notoriously brutal Angola prison. Finding solidarity and inspiration behind bars with members of the Black Panther Party, he was able to find inner peace and a spirit of resistance. After decades he was finally able to find a capable lawyer sympathetic to his plight, though it still took another 16 years to prove his innocence and gain his release. According to CNN's Van Jones, Woodfox's life and new memoir, Solitary, are an ''inspiring triumph of the human spirit and a powerful call for the necessity of prison reform.''

(recorded 3/26/2019)

''A heady amalgam of science, history, a little bit of anthropology and plenty of nuanced, captivating storytelling'' (The New York Times Book Review), Adam Rutherford's A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived delves into the ages-spanning story of our species through the field of genomics. A National Geographic Best Book of 2017, it was a nonfiction finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A University College London PhD and science writer for The Guardian, Rutherford has also written and hosted several programs for the BBC, including Inside Science, The Cell, and Playing God. His new book investigates just what it means to be human.

(recorded 3/21/2019)

In conversation with Beth Kephart, the award-winning author of twenty-four books, including Going Over, Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir, and Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River.

''An unflinching witness and eloquent mourner'' (The New Yorker), Carolyn Forché is the author of the poetry collections Blue Hour, The Angel of History, The Country Between Us, and Gathering the Tribes. For this body of work she has amassed an impressive list of honors, including fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Windham-Campbell Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. The Lannan Chair in Poetry at Georgetown University, Forché is also a respected translator, editor, and activist. What You Have Heard Is True tells the story of her journey with an enigmatic man into the chaos and horror of the Salvadoran Civil War.

(recorded 3/19/2019)

Renowned chef and restaurateur Lidia Bastianich is the owner and co-owner of celebrated Italian restaurants in Manhattan, Pittsburgh, and Kansas City. The author of a baker's dozen cookbooks, a judge on Masterchef Jr. Italy, and a regular contributor to television cooking shows for two decades, she currently hosts the Emmy-winning Lidia's Kitchen on PBS. Her other honors include recognition from the National Italian American Foundation, several James Beard Awards, and induction into the Culinary Hall of Fame. Her new memoir traces the route from her childhood in communist Yugoslavia and consequent emigration to New York at 12, to her first tentative steps in the restaurant business as a teen.

(recorded 3/18/2019)

Esteemed primatologist Frans de Waal is the author of The Bonobo and the Atheist, a ''tour de force'' (Nature) exploration of the biological roots of human morality found in primate social emotions, including empathy, reciprocity, and fairness. One of Time's 100 Most Influential People, de Waal is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, directs the Living Links at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, and is the C. H. Candler Professor in Emory University's psychology department. Positing that humans are not the only species capable of love, hate, and everything in between, Mama's Last Hug explores the profound emotional lives of animals.

(recorded 3/14/2019)

In conversation with Gene Seymour, contributor to The Nation and former film critic and jazz columnist for Newsday. He has written for Bookforum, CNN.com, and The Washington Post.

Author and spoken-word artist Darius James's 1992 masterpiece, the William S. Burroughs meets Thomas Pynchon meets Ishmael Reed fever-dream Negrophobia, is a raunchy, raucous, headlong dive into the many faces of American racism. With other works including That's Blaxploitation: Roots of the Baadassssss 'Tude, Voodoo Stew, and Froggy Chocolate's Christmas Eve, James is the cowriter and narrator of the of 2013 film The United States of Hoodoo. With a new introduction by film scholar Amy Abugo Ongiri and a new preface by the author, the multi-genre Negrophobia is dire, darkly comic, and more relevant than ever.

(recorded 3/12/2019)