Kevin Powers won the 2013 PEN/Hemingway Award  and the Guardian First Book Award for The Yellow Birds, ''the first great Iraq War novel'' (Rolling Stone), a work drawn from his experiences as a U.S. Army machine-gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar. After being honorably discharged, he earned an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow in Poetry. In A Shout in the Ruins, Powers reckons with America's legacy of slavery and violence as he follows the fates of the inhabitants and descendants of a Virginia plantation.

Director of the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Elise Juska is the author of the novels One for Sorrow, Two for Joy; The Hazards of Sleeping Alone; Getting Over Jack Wagner; and The Blessings, the ''bighearted ... moving, multifaceted'' (Philadelphia Inquirer) story of a close-knit Irish-Catholic Philadelphia family across two decades.  Juska's latest novel tells the tragically relevant story of an English professor whose former student commits a mass shooting at a mall in rural Maine.

(recorded 5/16/2018)

Kevin Powers won the 2013 PEN/Hemingway Award  and the Guardian First Book Award for The Yellow Birds, ''the first great Iraq War novel'' (Rolling Stone), a work drawn from his experiences as a U.S. Army machine-gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar. After being honorably discharged, he earned an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow in Poetry. In A Shout in the Ruins, Powers reckons with America's legacy of slavery and violence as he follows the fates of the inhabitants and descendants of a Virginia plantation.

Director of the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Elise Juska is the author of the novels One for Sorrow, Two for Joy; The Hazards of Sleeping Alone; Getting Over Jack Wagner; and The Blessings, the ''bighearted ... moving, multifaceted'' (Philadelphia Inquirer) story of a close-knit Irish-Catholic Philadelphia family across two decades.  Juska's latest novel tells the tragically relevant story of an English professor whose former student commits a mass shooting at a mall in rural Maine.

(recorded 5/16/2018)

In conversation with award winning broadcaster and journalist Tracey Matisak.

Political commentator Alex Wagner is co-host of Showtime's The Circus and a contributor to CBS News and The Atlantic. She previously hosted MSNBC's Emmy-nominated Now with Alex Wagner, among many other credits. From 2007 to 2009 she served as the executive director of Not On Our Watch, an international advocacy nonprofit dedicated to preventing mass human-rights violations and atrocities. In Futureface, she searches the globe for the secrets of her ancestry, along the way confronting foundational questions of immigration and identity.

(recorded 5/15/2018)

''A marvelous storyteller'' (Chicago Tribune), Mary Morris explores some of her favorite themes-away versus home, childhood memories, and the Midwest-in such works of fiction as A Mother's Love, House Arrest, and The Jazz Palace. The winner of the Rome Prize and the Ainsfield-Wolf Award for Fiction, she is also the author of the travel classic Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone. In Gateway to the Moon, Morris interweaves the stories of a secluded New Mexican town's present-day residents with those of its original settlers 500 years earlier. 

Nathaniel Popkin is the author and co-author of five books, including Lion and Leopard, Song of the City, and Philadelphia: Finding the Hidden City. He is also co-editor of the literary anthology Who Will Speak for America?, the fiction editor of Cleaver Magazine, and the writer/editor of the Emmy-winning documentary film series Philadelphia: The Great Experiment. In Everything is Borrowed, he ponders regret, history, and the intransigence of the urban landscape through the strangely parallel lives of two men separated by centuries.

(recorded 5/10/2018)

Celebrated by critics and readers alike for ''interweaving history, fascinating trivia and acute observation'' (New York Times Book Review), Simon Winchester is the bestselling author of the nonfiction books The Professor and the Madman, Krakatoa, The Men Who United the States, Atlantic, and Pacific. Formerly an Oxford-trained field geologist in Uganda and a war correspondent for The Guardian and The Sunday Times, he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2006. Stretching from the dawn of the Industrial Age to the bleeding edge tech of tomorrow, The Perfectionists tells the story of the engineers and instruments that gave birth to modern manufacturing.

(recorded 5/9/2018)

In Conversation with Kalela Williams, Director of Neighborhood Enrichment Programming

A ''hypnotic'' novelist whose ease with vernacular puts her ''in fellowship with such forebears as Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner'' (The New Yorker), Jesmyn Ward won the 2011 National Book Award for Salvage the Bones, the story of a pregnant teenager and her Mississippi family in the days surrounding Hurricane Katrina. Her elegiac 2013 memoir Men We Reaped was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Last year she won a stunning second National Book Award for Sing, Unburied, Sing, a 21st-century road novel about the difficulty of family bonds and the ugly underside of the American story.

*Spoiler alert: the first question during the Q&A (minute 42:00) reveals a critical event in the book.

(recorded 5/9/2018)

A fellow of the American Meteorological Society and director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, geographer Mark C. Serreze is one of the world's foremost experts on the planet's cryosphere-Earth's snow and ice cover-and its relatively recent changes. Spanning three decades of astonishing and alarming discovery, Brave New Arctic blends Serreze's research and experiences with that of other pioneering geographers and climatologists to explain the extraordinary circumstances of man-made global warming and the consequences to come. 

(recorded 5/8/2018)

Jake Tapper is anchor and Chief Washington Correspondent for CNN, where he hosts the weekday program The Lead with Jake Tapper and the Sunday morning show State of the Union. He is the former White House correspondent for ABC News and contributor to Good Morning America, Nightline, and World News with Diane Sawyer. His many honors include an unprecedented three Merriman Smith Awards for presidential coverage. Tapper is the author of The Outpost, the tragic but inspiring true story of a small U.S. military besieged by the Taliban. In The Hellfire Club-his debut political thriller-an unlikely 1950s congressman discovers a D.C. conspiracy that could change the course of history.

(recorded 5/3/2018)

The principal investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto, a planetary scientist, and an aerospace executive and consultant, Dr. Alan Stern has participated in a mind-blowing 29 space missions and has served in the loftiest strata of contemporary American space exploration. The chair of astrobiology at the U.S. Library of Congress, Dr. David Grinspoon studies climate evolution, the conditions for life elsewhere in the cosmos, and space-exploration strategy. He has consulted on interplanetary missions for several international space agencies and is on the team for NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover. He is the author of Earth in Human Hands, a ''remarkable synthesis of natural history, planetary science, extinction histories ... and the human effect on the world'' (Forbes). In Chasing New Horizons, Stern and Grinspoon go inside and then beyond the science, politics, and egos of the 3 billion-mile trip to the edge of our solar system for the once-in-a-lifetime 32,000-miles-per-hour flyby of Pluto.

(recorded 5/2/2018)

Jen Sincero is the no. 1 New York Times bestselling author of You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life, a sass-filled self-help book for people who want better lives but don't want to get caught reading a self-help book. She is a success coach and self-described ''motivational cattle prod'' whose work has transformed scores of personal and professional lives. In You Are a Badass at Making Money, her ''cheerful manifesto on removing obstacles between yourself and the income of your dreams'' (New York Magazine), Sincero draws on her own financial transformation to explain how to vault over the mental roadblocks that keep us from realizing our earning potential.

(recorded 4/26/2018)