Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

Sandra Beasley is author of three poetry collections: Count the Waves; I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize. Honors for her work include a 2015 NEA Literature Fellowship, the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Prize, and two DCCAH Artist Fellowships. She is also the author of the memoir Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life. She lives in Washington, D.C., and is on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program at the University of Tampa.Leslie Harrison is the author of Displacement, published by Mariner Books, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, in 2009. She holds graduate degrees from the Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Irvine. Her poems have appeared in journals including Poetry, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, FIELD, Subtropics, Pleiades, and Orion. Harrison has held a scholarship and fellowship at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a fellowship at the Bread Loaf Writers

DNA has been a master key unlocking medical and forensic secrets, but its genealogical life has also been notable. Genealogy is the second most popular hobby in the U.S., and the outpouring of interest in it from the African American community has been remarkable.After studying this phenomenon for more than a decade, Alondra Nelson realized that genetic testing is being used to grapple with the unfinished business of slavery. It is being used for reconciliation, to establish ties with African ancestral homelands, to rethink citizenship, and to make unprecedented legal claims for slavery reparations based on genetic ancestry. Arguing that DNA offers a new tool for enduring issues, Nelson shows that the social life of DNA is affecting and transforming 21st century racial politics.Alondra Nelson is professor of sociology and Dean of Social Science at Columbia University, where she has served as director of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.  She is the author of Body and Soul: The Black

In Naomi Jackson's debut novel, two sisters, ages 10 and 16, are exiled from Brooklyn to Bird Hill in Barbados after their mother can no longer care for them. The young Phaedra and her older sister Dionne live for the summer of 1989 with their grandmother, Hyacinth.Dionne spends the summer in search of love, testing her grandmother's limits, and wanting to go home. Phaedra explores Bird Hill, where her family has lived for generations, accompanies her grandmother in her role as a midwife, and investigates their mother's mysterious life. This coming-of-age story builds to a crisis when the father they barely know comes to Bird Hill to reclaim his daughters, and both Phaedra and Dionne must choose between the Brooklyn they once knew and loved or the Barbados of their family.Naomi Jackson was born and raised in Brooklyn by West Indian parents. She studied fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was awarded the Maytag Fellowship for Excellence in Fiction. Jackson travels to South African on a Fulbright s

Like many black Americans of the mid-twentieth century, Phyllis Lawson's parents moved from their hometown of Livingston, Alabama to the big city in search of a better life. However, it wasn't long before hardships left them unable to provide, and four-year-old Phyllis was sent to live with her grandmother Lulu on an Alabama farm with no electricity, plumbing, or running water.Thanks to the unconditional love of Grandma Lulu and the healing powers of an old tattered quilt, young Phyllis was able to adjust to her new life. In Quilt of Souls, Lawson documents her childhood growing up with the incredible woman who raised her and the powerful family heirloom that served as the cloth that would forever stitch their lives together.Now a Florida resident, Phyllis Lawson worked as a professional counselor for the State of Maryland and the Commonwealth of Virginia.The Brown Lecture Series is supported by a generous grant from the Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Foundation.Recorded On: Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Andy and Don is a lively and revealing biography of Andy Griffith and Don Knotts, celebrating the powerful real-life friendship behind one of America's most-iconic television programs.Andy and Don -- fellow Southerners born into poverty and raised among scofflaws, bullies, and drunks -- captured the hearts of Americans across the country as they rocked lazily on the front porch. But behind this sleepy, small-town charm, deVise reports explosions of violent temper, bouts of crippling neurosis, and all-too-human struggles with the temptations of fame. Although Andy and Don ended their Mayberry partnership in 1965, they remained best friends for the next half-century, with Andy visiting Don at his death bed.Daniel deVise, Don Knotts' brother-in-law, is an author and journalist who has worked at the Washington Post, the Miami Herald, and other newspapers in a 25-year career. He shared a 2001 Pulitzer Prize.Recorded On: Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Understanding Mass Incarceration describes in plain English the many competing theories of criminal justice -- from rehabilitation to retribution, from restorative justice to justice reinvestment. Author James Kilgore illuminates the difference between prisons and jails, probation and parole, laying out key concepts and policies such as the War on Drugs, broken-windows policing, three-strikes sentencing, the school-to-prison pipeline, recidivism, and prison privatization. He also addresses the rapidly increasing incarceration of women, Latinos and transgender people; the growing imprisonment of immigrants; and the devastating impact of mass incarceration on communities.James Kilgore is a writer, educator and social justice activist who teaches and works at the University of Illinois. He spent six years in prison, during which time he drafted his three published novels.Recorded On: Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Thurgood Marshall brought down the separate-but-equal doctrine, integrated schools, and not only fought for human rights and human dignity but also made them impossible to deny in the courts and in the streets. In this new biography, award-winning author Wil Haygood details the life and career of one of the most transformative legal minds of the past 100 years.Using the framework of the dramatic, contentious five-day Senate hearing to confirm Marshall as the first African-American Supreme Court justice, Haygood creates a provocative and moving look at Marshall's life as well as the politicians, lawyers, activists and others who shaped -- or tried to stop -- the civil rights movment of the 20th century.Wil Haygood is currently the Wiepking Visiting Distinguished Professor in the department of media, journalism and film at Miami University (Ohio). For nearly three decades he was a journalist, serving as a national and foreign correspondent at the Boston Globe, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and then at

Rita Gabis comes from a family of Eastern European Jews and Lithuanian Catholics. She was close to her Catholic grandfather as a child and knew one version of his past: prior to immigration he had fought the Russians, whose brutal occupation of Lithuania destroyed thousands of lives before Hitler's army swept in.Five years ago, Gabis discovered that from 1941 to 1943, her grandfather had been the chief of security police under the Gestapo in the Lithuanian town of Svencionys, near the killing field of Poligon, where 8,000 Jews were murdered over three days in the fall of 1941. Gabis felt compelled to find out the complicated truth of who her grandfather was and what he had done.Built around interviews in four countries, A Guest at the Shooters' Banquet is a history and family memoir, documenting "the holocaust by bullets."Rita Gabis is the author of two books of poetry and co-author of a book on the craft of writing. She teaches creative writing at Hunter College.The Schapiro Lecture Series is sponsored by a

James Arthur and Joseph Harrison read from and talk about their work.James Arthur’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and The American Poetry Review. He has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, and a Discovery/The Nation Prize. His first book, Charms Against Lightning, was published by Copper Canyon Press. Arthur lives in Baltimore and teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. During 2016 he will be the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast.Joseph Harrison is the author of Someone Else’s Name (2003), Identity Theft (2008), and Shakespeare’s Horse (2015), all published by Waywiser Press. Some of his early poems are anthologized in The Fly in the Ointment (20th anniversary edition, Syllabic Press, 2014). His honors include an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a fellowship in poe

Word Warrior documents the writing, life and times of a pioneering, yet overlooked, African American artist. Throughout Richard Durham's lifetime (1917-1984), this prolific Mississippi-born, Chicago-based writer used his eloquent literary voice and fierce determination to fight for freedom, equality and justice for all.Durham first authored engaging poetry and radio dramas during the 1930s and '40s. He may be best known for his award-winning "Destination Freedom" series featured on Chicago's NBC affiliate, WMAQ, from 1948-1950. The series took listeners on a weekly, half-hour journey through the lives and accomplishments of African American history makers and heroes -- a truly unique series on a medium that barely recognized and usually negatively stereotyped black citizens in a highly discriminatory America.Richard Durham also earned honors as an investigative reporter for the black-owned Chicago Defender. During the 1960s, he edited the Nation of Islam's Muhammad Speaks newspaper and served as lead writer f

Elizabeth Nix, professor of legal, ethical and historical studies at the University of Baltimore, will bring examples of structural racism and white privilege to light by talking about the history of Baltimore and how that history has resulted in discriminatory patterns and policies and segregation in Baltimore.Elizabeth Nix is co-editor of Baltimore'68: Riots and Rebirth in an American City.Talking About Race is presented in partnership with Open Society Institute-Baltimore.Recorded On: Tuesday, October 27, 2015

D. Watkins, a native son of the east side (the beast side) of Baltimore, has survived the kind of life in urban America that has claimed the lives of many of his friends and family members. He writes with the compassion and unsentimental clarity of a survivor -- of a man who is passionately determined to stop the cycles of violence and suffering that have long been inflicted on his community. Watkins' debut book, The Beast Side, is a rare, highly personal dispatch from the streets.When his older brother was shot down by business rivals, Watkins took over his drug racket, earning enough to continue his education. He eventually earned a master's of education from Johns Hopkins University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Baltimore. He now teaches creative writing at Coppin State University.Recorded On: Thursday, October 22, 2015

Rachel Carson, author of the 1962 bestseller, Silent Spring, was the first American to combine two longstanding, but separate, strands of American environmentalism -- the love of nature and a concern for human health. In Rachel Carson and Her Sisters, Robert K. Musil redefines the achievements and legacy of Carson, linking her work to a wide network of American women activists and writers, such as Ellen Swallow Richards, Dr. Alice Hamilton, Terry Tempest Williams, Sandra Steingraber, Devra Davis, and Theo Colborn, all of whom overcame obstacles to build and lead the modern American environmental movement.Dr. Musil is president and CEO of the Rachel Carson Council. He is also a senior fellow and adjunct professor at the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies, School of Public Affairs, American University. From 1992 to 2006, he served as executive director and CEO of Physicians for Social Responsibility.Recorded On: Wednesday, October 21, 2015

In 1886 New York, the son of John Cross, a respectable architect, racks up a sizeable gambling debt to Kent's Gents, a notorious gang of thieves and killers. To pay back the debt, Cross has to use his inside knowledge of high society mansions and museums to craft a robbery even the smartest detectives won't solve. Cross becomes invaluable to the gang, but his life has become a balancing act. It will only take one mistake for it all to come crashing down and for his family to go down too.An architect by profession, Charles Belfoure is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Paris Architect. Belfoure will talk about his inspiration for the book and his historical research process, plus provide insight into the architecture of the Gilded Age.Recorded On: Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts' new book, Grant Park, explores the last four decades of U.S. race relations through the interconnected stories of two Chicago journalists: Malcolm Toussaint, a celebrated black columnist, and Bob Carson, his unassuming white editor. The night before Election Day in 2008, Toussaint sneaks an incendiary, racially charged column into the paper, defying his editors' wishes, and then promptly disappears. The next morning, with Toussaint nowhere to be found, Carson is fired. Toussaint has been kidnapped off the street by a pair of white supremacists who scheme to bomb Barack Obama's Election Night rally in Grant Park. Carson, furious and determined to confront Toussaint, must also deal with the sudden reappearance of his lost love, a fellow former peace activist now working for the Obama campaign.Leonard Pitts' column appears in the Baltimore Sun. He is the author of the novels Freeman and Before I Forget, the memoir Becoming Dad, and Forward From This Moment: Selecte

The New Black is a documentary that tells the story of how the African American community is grappling with the gay rights issue. The film documents activists, families and clergy on both sides of the campaign to legalize gay marriage and examines homophobia in the black church, revealing the Christian right wing's strategy of exploiting this phenomenon in order to pursue an anti-gay political agenda.Following the screening, Dr. Anika Simpson, associate professor of philosophy and Coordinator, Women's and Gender Studies, Morgan State University, will moderate a panel discussion and conversation with audience members.Panelists include: Rev. Delman Coates, senior pastor, Mount Ennon Baptist Church, Clinton, MD; Sharon Lettman-Hicks, executive director & CEO of National Black Justice Coalition; and Samantha Master, African American Leadership & Engagement Specialist, Planned Parenthood Federation of America.Presented in partnership with the Maryland Commission on Civil Rights.Recorded On: Sunday, October

Ai-jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and Gustavo Torres, executive director of CASA, will talk about structural changes in the job market that have resulted in many day laborers, especially among immigrants and people of color. They will focus on how we can help build power, respect and fair labor standards for the 2.5 million nannies, housekeepers and elderly caregivers in the U.S.Ai-Jen Poo is co-director of the Caring Across Generations campaign. She has been organizing immigrant women workers since 1996. In 2000 she co-founded Domestic Workers United, the New York organization that spearheaded the successful passage of the state's historic Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in 2010.Gustavo Torres is the executive director of CASA, a multi-service Latino advocacy and support agency. He has been recognized nationally and internationally for his leadership and vision in the immigrant rights movement in the United States. He joined CASA's staff as a community organizer and has served a

Born in the Dominican Republic, Peralta came to the United States legally with his family when he was four years old. When their visas lapsed, his father returned to the Dominican Republic. Peralta and his family went into the city's shelter system where he met a young volunteer who noticed his sharp mind and interest in his studies and helped him obtain a scholarship to Manhattan's elite Collegiate School. Peralta received his BA summa cum laude from Princeton University, his MPhil from the University of Oxford, and his PhD in classics from Stanford University. He is currently a Mellon Research Fellow at Columbia University.Presented in partnership with Loyola University's Center for Innovation in Urban Education and the Espranza Center, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Library Association.Recorded On: Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Kathi Wolfe is a poet and writer. Wolfe's most recent collection, The Uppity Blind Girl Poems, winner of the 2014 Stonewall Chapbook Competition, was published by BrickHouse Books in 2015. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Wordgathering, Gargoyle, Poetry Magazine, and other publications. In 2013, Finishing Line Press published Wolfe's poetry chapbook The Green Light. Her collection Helen Takes the Stage: The Helen Keller Poems was published by Pudding House in 2008. She was a 2008 Lambda Literary Foundation Emerging Writer Fellow. Wolfe is a contributor to the groundbreaking anthology Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. She is a contributor to the Washington Blade, the acclaimed LGBT newspaper.David Eberhardt has published three books of poetry: The Tree Calendar, Blue Running Lights, and Poems from the Website, Poetry in Baltimore.He is at work on amemoir:For All the Saints. As a peace protester, Dave was incarcerated at Lewisburg Federal Prison in 1970 for 21 months for pouring blood on

At their New England art school, Paulina and Fran both stand apart from the crowd. Paulina is striking and sexually adventurous, a self-proclaimed queen bee with a devastating mean-girl streak. Fran, with her gorgeous untamed head of curly hair, is quirky, sweet and sexually innocent. An aspiring painter whose potential outstrips her confidence, she floats dreamily through criticism and dance floors alike. On a school trip to Norway, the girls are drawn together, each disarmed by the other's character.Though their bond is instant and powerful, it's also wracked by complications. When Fran winds up dating one of Paulina's ex-boyfriends, an incensed Paulina becomes determined to destroy the couple, creating a rift that will shape their lives well past their art school days.Paulina & Fran is the debut novel of a writer with rare insight into the complexities of obsession, friendship, and prickly ever-elusive love. Rachel Glaser has studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and fiction at the UMas