December 2—Groundbreaking critic and revered scholar Helen Vendler could “second-guess the sixth sense of the poem,” wrote Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney. For Vendler, who died last year, the language and form of a poem can reveal its writer’s deepest thoughts and feelings—an empathic approach that found full expression in her last essays, collected in the new Library of America special publication Inhabit the Poem.

To celebrate these career-crowning pieces, four acclaimed poets, scholars, and former students of Vendler’s gather to reflect on her remarkable achievement: Harvard professor and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Stephanie Burt, celebrated poet-critic Dan Chiasson, Vendler’s literary executor Christopher Spaide, and essayist Kamran Javadizadeh, Professor of English at Villanova. Join us for a lively evening of personal remembrances and insights into the great critic’s assessments of poets from Walt Whitman to Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson to Ocean Vuong.

Monday, November 24—Like a signal from a distant star, Octavia E. Butler’s luminous fiction jumps galactic distances to relay searing, often surprising revelations about the universe we inhabit and the planet we call home. In Lilith’s Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy, just published by Library of America, three classics of Afrofuturist speculative fiction from the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award winner confront urgent questions about technology, hybridity, and the future of humankind.

To explore these prophetic masterworks and their inimitable creator, LOA LIVE presents two preeminent scholars and writers in conversation: Imani Perry, National Book Award winner and editor of the LOA Xenogenesis edition, and Tananarive Due, World Fantasy Award–winning novelist and a close friend of Butler’s, about whom she once wrote: “Sister, we got cities burning, they were telling her. And how dare she retreat into this world. But actually, she was showing us an even bigger world, something that we couldn't even wrap our minds around.”

Wednesday, September 10—Two centuries on, Alexis de Tocqueville’s brilliant Democracy in America remains the most prescient account of the virtues, and potential dangers, of our politics and culture. How do Tocqueville’s insights illuminate current events and political trends, both at home and abroad?

Join four distinguished scholars for a lively debate on the continued resonance of this enduring masterpiece: Yale professor Joanne Freeman (acclaimed author of The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War), Pulitzer Prize–winning NYU historian Steven Hahn (Illiberal America: A History), Harvard’s James T. Kloppenberg (Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought), and Olivier Zunz, Commonweath Professor at the University of Virginia and editor of the definitive LOA edition of Democracy in America, featuring Arthur Goldhammer’s celebrated translation.

Thursday, May 8—Eighty years ago the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany closed the curtain on six years of total war in Europe, a conflict that tested the courage and forever changed the lives of five young Americans who survived to write astonishing personal narratives of their experiences, from the frontlines of the Battle of the Bulge to the navigator’s seat of a B-17 bomber.

To mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day, West Point professor Elizabeth D. Samet, editor of World War II Memoirs: The European Theater, joins National Book Award–winning author and Marine veteran Phil Klay for a conversation about these classics of modern war literature: remarkable memoirs that capture the immediacy of history in the making and the impact of wartime on combatants and noncombatants alike.

The views expressed in this program do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

Thursday, April 17—Sylvia Plath’s bold and incandescent poems have struck a deep chord with generations of readers. A visionary writer who scaled astonishing literary heights in her short life, Plath may best be understood, says acclaimed classicist and Plath devotee Sarah Ruden, as a modern mythmaker: an artist who, at the peak of her powers, transcends autobiography to give us poems that describe the shape of our shared experience.

Ruden joins LOA LIVE for a conversation inspired by her book I Am the Arrow: The Life & Art of Sylvia Plath in Six Poems, published this April by Library of America, with Pulitzer-winning poet Diane Seuss and pre-eminent Plath scholars Heather Clark and Amanda Golden.

Tuesday, March 11—“The rise of totalitarian governments,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “is the central event of our world.” In her masterpiece, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt linked the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, seeing them as twin manifestations of a terrifying new political system that sought absolute control over all aspects of life. How does this book, which probed the psychology and pathology of the twentieth century, take on new relevance in today’s political landscape?

Join celebrated scholars David Bromwich, Seyla Benhabib, Roger Berkowitz, and Thomas Wild, editor of LOA’s new expanded and annotated edition of Arendt’s great work, for a riveting conversation about the causes, means, and ends of totalitarian regimes and the difficult, sometimes excruciating choices faced by those who live under them.

Thursday, November 14—Grief, Joan Didion wrote, “turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” In two luminous memoirs, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, collected in the capstone volume of Library of America’s Didion edition, she relates the twin tragedies of her husband and daughter’s deaths with stunning precision, poignancy, and power—a late flowering of her genius that won her millions of new readers.

Join Honor Moore and volume editor David L. Ulin—two acclaimed authors who have confronted grief in their own writing—for a free, virtual LOA LIVE program exploring Didion’s achingly beautiful accounts of bereavement and the ways literature can illuminate the search for meaning and consolation in the face of great loss.

LOA LIVE programs are made possible by contributions from friends like you, and we encourage you to consider making a donation to support future presentations. Visit loa.org/loalive to donate.

Tuesday, May 21—Published in 1961, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer announced a major new voice in American fiction. In this lush, New Orleans–based novel, the forty-four-year-old doctor-turned-writer set out to explore what he called “the strange spiritual malady of the modern age.” What he gave us, says writer Paul Elie, editor of a new LOA edition of Percy’s novels, is “the first work of what we call contemporary American fiction, the earliest novel to render a set of circumstances and an outlook that still feel recognizably ours.”

Join Elie, senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, and New York Times best-selling novelist Ayana Mathis (The Twelve Tribes of Hattie) for a conversation about faith, fiction, and the novel that established Percy as a peerless examiner of American alienation and redemption.

We thank our promotional partners: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers and SoLit.

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LOA LIVE programs are made possible by contributions from friends like you, and we encourage you to consider making a donation to support future presentations. Visit ⁠loa.org/loalive⁠ to donate.

Monday, April 15—Why does the poet Robert Frost continue to beguile and intrigue readers 150 years after his birth? What is it about the four-time Pulitzer winner’s poems—deceptively simple evocations of landscape, work, village life, and love suffused with remarkable power, subtlety, and complexity—that makes them so quintessentially American?

Join former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith and Jay Parini, poet, biographer, and author of the just published Robert Frost: Sixteen Poems to Learn by Heart, for a special National Poetry Month conversation about the beauty , wisdom, and hidden depths of three beloved Frost poems that evoke different seasons and their moods: “Putting in the Seed,” “After Apple-Picking,” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

We thank our promotional partners: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers, the Boutell-Day Poetry Center at Smith College, and the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University.

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Donate to support LOA LIVE programs: loa.org/loalive.

Wednesday, March 6—Brash, opinionated, funny, and an indefatigable champion of the vulnerable over the rich and well-connected, Jimmy Breslin brought heart and knockout prose to every column and book he wrote. From peerless coverage of the assassinations of JFK and Malcolm X to the plight of immigrants, the Mafia, and the AIDS crisis, Breslin’s instinct for a story’s untold, personal dimensions gives his writing enduring vitality and emotional power.

Join New York Times columnist Dan Barry, editor of the just-published LOA edition of Breslin’s essential writings, MSNBC’s Mike Barnicle, and NYT bestselling author Mike Lupica for a lively conversation and memorable stories about the larger-than-life New Yorker who raised deadline journalism to literary art.

We thank our promotional partners: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers, Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, and Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin.

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