Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

Not every family legacy is destructive. From her parents, Talusan has learned to tell stories in order to continue. In excavating abuse and trauma, and supplementing her story with government documents, medical records, and family photos, Talusan gives voice to unspeakable experience, and shines a light of hope into the darkness.Grace Talusan was born in the Philippines and raised in New England. She graduated from Tufts University and the MFA Program in Writing at UC Irvine. She is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines and an Artist Fellowship Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Talusan teaches at Grub Street and Tufts.Decolonize Your Bookshelves is a book club founded by blogger and activist Eliza Romero, also known as Aesthetic Distance. The group will focus on Asian American writers who tell stories of struggle and triumph, and explore themes of civil unrest, assimilation, racism, and profound alienation. Because a disproportionate number East Asian writers are represe

Saeed Jones is in conversation with Clint Smith. Presented in partnership with CityLit Project.Haunted and haunting, How We Fight for Our Lives: tells the story of a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence—into tumultuous relationships with his mother and grandmother, into passing flings with lovers, friends and strangers. Each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another—and to one another—as we fight to become ourselves.Saeed Jones is the author of Prelude to Bruise, winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award. The poetry collection was also a finalist for the 2015 National

Marita Golden is an Alzheimer’s activist and editor of the multi-cultural anthology, Us Against Alzheimer’s: Stories of Family Love and Faith. The program will include readings by Katia D. Ulysse and Lauren Francis-Sharma.Co-founder and President Emeritus of the Zora Neale Hurston/ Richard Wright Foundation, Marita Golden is a veteran teacher of writing and an acclaimed award-winning author of seventeen works of fiction and nonfiction. As a teacher of writing she has served as a member of the faculties of the MFA Graduate Creative Writing Programs at George Mason University and Virginia Commonwealth University and in the MA Creative Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University. Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund. Re-opening activities are made possible in part by a generous gift from Sandra R. Berman.Recorded On: Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Lady Brion is in conversation with Reginald Dwayne Betts about his new poetry collection, Felon. The event was co-presented by OSI-Baltimore. A poet, essayist and national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice, Reginald Dwayne Betts writes and lectures about the impact of mass incarceration on American society. He is the author of three collections of poetry, Felon, Bastards of the Reagan Era, and Shahid Reads His Own Palm, as well as a memoir, A Question of Freedom. A graduate of Yale Law School, he lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with his wife and their two sons. Lady Brion is an international spoken word artist, activist, and 2015 OSI-Baltimore Community Fellow. She is a national poetry slam champion and the author of With My Head Unbowed. She received a bachelor's in communication from Howard University and a MFA in creative writing from University of Baltimore. She serves as a board member of DewMore Baltimore, the cultural ambassador for Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle and the founder of th

Celebrate the start of Baltimore Architecture Month learning about businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who was inspired by Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt to build over a thousand public libraries across America. Told in the context of library history, architectural history, and Baltimore’s growth, this program showcases original photographs of Pratt’s fourteen neighborhood branches built with Carnegie funds.Recorded On: Tuesday, October 1, 2019

Jona Colson’s first poetry collection, Said Through Glass, won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House. He received his BA in English and Spanish from Goucher College, a Master of Arts in Linguistics from George Mason University, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from American University. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. His translations and interviews can be found in Prairie Schooner, Tupelo Quarterly, and The Writer’s Chronicle. He is an associate professor of ESL at Montgomery College in Maryland and lives in Washington, D.C.Edgar Kunz is the author of the poetry collection Tap Out (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), a New York Times New & Noteworthy book. His work has been supported by fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the MacDowell Colony, Vanderbilt University, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He lives in

Brian Kuebler in conversation with Ed Slattery.The Long Blink is a narrative nonfiction book by Emmy Award-winning journalist, Brian Kuebler, who exposes the staggering cost of the American trucking industry’s rising crash rate through the intimate struggle of Ed Slattery, who is left to piece his family back together after a trucker fell asleep at the wheel and killed his wife and maimed his son. From the historic, public settlement with the trucking company and a bizarre confrontation with its driver to one father’s ongoing and, more recently, frustrating fight on Capitol Hill for safer roads, the Slattery’s story is a revealing, emotional look at the rapidly growing danger we all face from the passing lane each and every day.Brian Kuebler is an award winning investigative journalist for WMAR-TV in Baltimore, Maryland. Kuebler has been a television reporter for 18 years. He has written, published, and broadcast thousands of stories in his career and has risen to become a lead investigative reporter in one

Kate Black will be in conversation with Baltimore City Councilwoman Shannon Sneed, Baltimore City Councilwoman Danielle McCray, Maryland Delegate Stephanie Maddin Smith, and Maryland Delegate Brook Lierman. Presented in Partnership with Emerge Maryland.An energetic, interactive, and inspiring step-by-step guide, Represent teaches readers how to run for the approximately 500,000 elected offices in the US. Written with humor and honesty, it contains a plethora of information that will help any woman as she seeks political office. Structured around a 21-point document called “I’m Running for Office: The Checklist,” it covers everything from the nuts and bolts of where to run, fundraising, and filing deadlines, to issues like balancing family and campaigning, managing social media and how running for office can work in your real life plus infographics and profiles – including wisdom and advice - of various female politicians such as Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Lisa Murkowski and Ayanna Pressley. Kate Black is cu

The intertwining stories in The Great Believers take us through the heartbreak of the 80’s and the chaos of the modern world, as characters struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novels The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, as well as the short story collection Music for Wartime. The Great Believers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize, among other honors. Makkai is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University, and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.Recorded On: Wednesday, September 11, 2019

Saving Washington: The Forgotten Story of the Maryland 400 and The Battle of Brooklyn  blends real-life historical figures and events with richly developed fictional characters. On a marshy Brooklyn battlefield on August 27, 1776, four hundred men from Baltimore, Maryland assembled to do battle against a vastly superior British army. The novel follows young Joshua Bolton and his childhood friend Ben Wright, a freed black man, as they witness British tyranny firsthand, become enraptured by the cause, and ultimately enlist to defend their new nation in a battle that galvanized the American nation on the eve of its birth.Chris Formant is a student of history and former president of a multi-billion-dollar global business. This is his second novel.Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.Recorded On: Tuesday, August 20, 2019

The 2019 Enoch Pratt Free Library / Little Patuxent Review Poetry Contest finalists read along with one of the contest judges and one winner of the Poetry Contest in previous years.Jalynn Harris, the 2019 Poetry Contest winner, is a Baltimore native currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Baltimore where she is the inaugural recipient of the Michael F. Klein Fellowship for Social Justice. She is also the founder of SoftSavagePress, a press dedicated to promoting works by Black people. She received her BA in Linguistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her work has appeared in Transition, Gordon Square Review, Super Stoked Words, and Scalawag Magazine.Tom Large, 2019 Poetry Contest finalist, studied English literature at Swarthmore College and finished an MA in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars before shifting to the School of Medicine to train as a psychotherapist. Since 1977, he has been in private practice here in Baltimore. Although he has read and loved poetry since he was a t

Kim Paris Upshaw presents The Silent Women’s Club.In Sunshine and Daniel: Seeking Grace in Lost Motherhood, Kim Paris Upshaw takes us on a journey from loss to love, walking hand in hand with these women, our sisters. With each step along the pages of this unique storytelling-Bible study experience, these special mothers learn to be free from the shame, guilt and sadness of their loss to receive God's amazing grace, peace and love in their lives again.Kim Paris Upshaw lives in greater Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with her husband, Michael. Once weakened with the grief and shame of past choices, Kim desperately searched for answers and help after the loss of her children. During her quest for relief, she discovered great purpose from her pain. Passionately, Kim now shares how God's favor strengthens lives. Although she's a lawyer from 9 to 5, Kim makes up for it as a gospel recording artist and songwriter the rest of the day.Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Ad

Learn about Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Alexandrian Library), located in Baltimore's Sister City, Alexandria, Egypt. Presented by Heba El-Rafey.Heba El-Rafey is the Director of Public Relations and International Communications at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA), following a career with the organization that has spanned nearly 18 years, and in various leadership capacities. She is co-currently responsible for overseeing the BA Youth Activities Program which focuses on capacity building and engaging of young Egyptian; as well as being the main link with the International Friends of the BA Network. She has extensive hands-on experience in creating and engaging in cultural activities, event management and creating platforms for dialogue. Recorded On: Thursday, July 25, 2019

Baltimore, one of the South’s largest cities, was a crucible of segregationist laws and practices. Through the example of Baltimore, Maryland, David Taft Terry explores the historical importance of African American resistance to Jim Crow laws in the South’s largest cities. Terry also  adds to our understanding of the underexplored historical period of the civil rights movement, prior to the 1960s. Along the way, African Americans worked to define equality for themselves and to gain the required power to demand it. They forged the protest tradition of an enduring black struggle for equality in the urban South.  By the 1960s that struggle had inspired a national civil rights movement.David Taft Terry is an assistant professor of history at Morgan State University.Recorded On: Tuesday, July 16, 2019

Elizabeth Schmidt discusses her new book, Foreign Intervention in Africa After the Cold War, and refugee resettlement in Baltimore with Akalu Paulos.Elizabeth Schmidt is a professor emeritus of history at Loyola University Maryland. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin and has written extensively about US involvement in apartheid South Africa, women under colonialism in Zimbabwe, the nationalist movement in Guinea, and foreign intervention in Africa from the Cold War to the war on terror. Her books include: Foreign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror; Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea, 1946-1958; Mobilizing the Masses: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Nationalist Movement in Guinea, 1939-1958; Peasants, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870-1939; and Decoding Corporate Camouflage: U.S. Business Support for Apartheid.  Since the mid 1980s, Akalu Paulos has been an active participant in development programs as a practitioner, consul

Jericho Brown is the author of the collection The Tradition. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please, won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Time, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies. He is an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta.Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.Recorded On: Tuesday, June 25, 2019

Celebrate Juneteenth with Sheri Booker as she reads from her collection, One Woman One Hustle.A vibrant and uplifting collection of poems, One Woman One Hustle addresses the issues of today's young women. At the forefront of this collection are verses addressing self-identity, self-love, and the self-assurance needed to survive the current societal climate. With the world as her backdrop, Booker uses verse to tell the stories of women that look and love like her. She also addresses loss, pain, and survival. Parts autobiography and other parts anthropologic observations, the poems in this book pull the strings that control your heart, mind, and soul. This special edition includes over 30 new poems and spoken word pieces of empowerment.Sheri Bookerhas a BA in political science from Notre Dame of Maryland and an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College. She is a writer, poet, spoken word artist, and teacher.Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Program

Renee Brooks Catacalos is in conversation with Rev. Heber Brown III, founder of Black Church Food Security Network.In The Chesapeake Table, Catacalos examines the powerful effect of eating local in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC. Hooked on the local food movement from its early days, Catacalos opens the book by revisiting a personal challenge to only buy, prepare, and eat food grown within a 150-mile radius of her home near Washington, DC.Renee Brooks Catacalos is the former publisher of Edible Chesapeake magazine and former deputy director for Future Harvest - Chesapeake Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture. She is now Member and Strategic Partnerships Manager for the national philanthropy serving organization Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Funders. She also serves as a member of the Steering Team for the Chesapeake Foodshed Network, a regional food systems initiative. www.reneeeatslocal.comWriters LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programmi

Dan Rodricks is a long-time columnist (and podcast host) for The Baltimore Sun, and a local radio and television personality who has won several national and regional journalism awards over a reporting, writing and broadcast career spanning five decades. Rodricks has written some 6,000 columns for the Sun, and along the way he many times revealed his love of nature and of fishing. Rodricks embraced fly fishing in the early 1990s, and that style of fishing opened doors to new relationships with people and places--and one place in particular, the “secret” creek in Pennsylvania that, once allowed to recover from harmful over-fishing, became a trout paradise again.Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.Recorded On: Wednesday, June 12, 2019

Before Gina Apostol's fourth novel, Insurrecto, hit the shelves, Publishers' Weekly named it one of the Ten Best Books of 2018. Insurrecto was also named Buzzfeed's Best Books of 2018 and Autostraddle's 50 Best Feminist Books of 2018, among many other Best Lists.  Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, and others. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Philippines. She teaches at the Fieldston School in New York City.Decolonize Your Bookshelves is a book club founded by blogger and activist Eliza Romero, also known as Aesthetic Distance. The group will focus on Asian American writers who tell stories of struggle and triumph, and explore themes of civil unrest, assimilation, racism, and profound alienation. Because a disproportionate number East Asian writers are represented in the American mainstream compared with other Asians, the club will delve into the works of