Celebrate the finalists in the 2022 Poetry Contest with the Enoch Pratt Free Library and Little Patuxent Review! The three finalists, Maryland's Poet Laureate, and LPR’s head editor read.

Caitlin Wilson, the winner of the 2022 Poetry Contest, is a Maryland poet. She holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her writing has appeared in ENTROPY, filling Station, Iron Horse Literary Review, McNeese Review, RHINO, Rogue Agent, and Wildness. She was a 2021 Sewanee Writer’s Conference contributor and recipient of VCU’s 2021 and 2020 Graduate Poetry Awards, a 2019 AWP Intro Journals Project award, the 2018 Henrietta Spiegel Creative Writing Award, and a Jiménez-Porter Literary Prize for Poetry. She previously served as managing editor of Blackbird.

Alicia Potee, a 2022 Poetry Contest finalist, is a Maryland native and 2002 graduate of St. John’s College in Annapolis. Her poems have appeared in The Comstock Review, Hawaii-Pacific Review, and The Baltimore Review, among other places. She lives in Towson with her two kids and a rescued mutt named Romeo.

Robert Schreur, a 2022 Poetry Contest finalist, is a psychotherapist and clinical supervisor in community psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. A volume of his selected poems, That Said, was published in 2018. He has lived in Baltimore for 37 years.

Grace Cavalieri is Maryland’s tenth Poet Laureate. Her new books are Grace Art: Poems & Paintings and The Secret Letters of Madame de Stael (both 2021). She founded and produces The Poet and the Poem for public radio, now from the Library of Congress, celebrating 45 years on-air. This series of several hundred poets will be shot to the moon in the Lunar Codex in 2022 as the first podcast series on the moon. Grace’s forthcoming book is The Long Game: Selected and New Poems (2022). She has a poem in LPR's summer 2022 issue.

Chelsea Lemon Fetzer, a contest judge, holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and earned her MFA in Fiction at Syracuse University in 2008. She is a 2019 Rubys recipient for the Literary Arts and a recipient of the Maryland State Arts Council’s 2022 Independent Artist Award. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in journals such as Callaloo, Tin House, Mississippi Review, and Minnesota Review. Her essay “Speck” appears in The Beiging of America: Personal Narratives about Being Mixed Race in the 21st Century. Fetzer teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Baltimore, serves as vice chair on the board of CityLit Project, and is lead editor of the Little Patuxent Review.

Pictured: (top row) Alicia Potee, Caitlin Wilson, Robert Schreur, (bottom row) Grace Cavalieri, Chelsea Lemon Fetzer.

Recorded On: Tuesday, August 16, 2022

Join us for a reading by Lori Jakiela, who won the 2021 Wicked Woman Poetry Prize for her manuscript, How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?, and the contest judge, Nancy Naomi Carlson.

Lori Jakiela is the author of the memoir Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe (2016), which received the 2016 Saroyan Prize from Stanford University. She is also the author of the memoirs Miss New York Has Everything, The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious, and Portrait of the Artist as a Bingo Worker, as well as the poetry collections Spot the Terrorist! and How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen? Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and more. Recently, actress Kristen Bell chose Jakiela's New York Times' Modern Love essay, "The Plain Unmarked Box Arrived," to perform on the Times' Modern Love podcast. Jakiela writes a monthly column, Stories of Our Neighbors, for Pittsburgh Magazine and directs the undergraduate Creative and Professional Writing Program at The University of Pittsburgh's Greensburg campus. She lives in her hometown of Trafford, PA, with her husband, the author Dave Newman, and their children. For more, visit her author website at http://lorijakiela.net.

Nancy Naomi Carlson, twice an NEA literature translation grant recipient, has published eleven titles (seven translated). An Infusion of Violets (Seagull, 2019) was called “new & noteworthy” by The New York Times. An associate editor for Tupelo Press, her work has appeared in such journals as The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Paris Review, and Poetry. Learn more at www.nancynaomicarlson.com.

Doritt Carroll, BrickHouse Books Poetry Editor, and Clarinda Harriss, BrickHouse Books Director and Editor-in-Chief, hosts this event.

Read "Former 90s Supermodel Cindy Crawford Says People Shouldn’t Worry About Aging" by Lori Jakiela.
Read "Sequoia" by Nancy Naomi Carlson.
Learn more about the Wicked Woman Poetry Prize.

Recorded On: Thursday, October 14, 2021

Presented in partnership with CityLit Project.

Morgan Jerkins is in conversation with Teri Henderson about her work. In this talk, Jerkins discusses her literary journey, culminating in the release of her newest work, Caul Baby.

Following the critical and popular success of her first two books of nonfiction, New York Times bestselling author Morgan Jerkins returns with her electrifying fiction debut, Caul Baby, a family saga filled with secrets, betrayal, intrigue, and magic.

Desperate to be a mother after multiple pregnancies have ended in heartbreak, Laila turns to the Melancons, an old and powerful Harlem family known for their caul, a precious layer of skin that is the secret source of their healing power. When the deal for Laila to acquire a piece of caul to protect her baby falls through and her child is stillborn, she is overcome with grief and rage and blames the family for the loss.

What she doesn’t know is that she has another connection to the Melancons: her niece, Amara, an ambitious college student, soon secretly delivers a baby girl she names Hallow and gives her to the Melancons to raise as one of their own.

Hallow is special, born with a caul, and the Melancons’ matriarch believes she will restore the family’s waning prosperity. As a child, Hallow is sheltered in the Melancons’ decrepit brownstone, but as she grows up, she to become suspicious of the Melancon women, particularly wondering about Josephine, the woman she calls mother, and the matriarch, Maman, who only seems to care about Hallow’s caul.

As the Melancons’ desperation to maintain their status grows, Amara, now a successful lawyer running for district attorney, looks for a way to avenge her longstanding grudge against the family for their crime against her beloved aunt Laila.

When mother and daughter finally cross paths, Hallow must decide where her loyalty lies.

Morgan Jerkins is the author of Wandering in Strange Lands and the New York Times bestseller This Will Be My Undoing and a Senior Culture Editor at ESPN’s The Undefeated. Jerkins is a visiting professor at Columbia University and a Forbes 30 Under 30 leader in media, and her short-form work has been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Elle, Esquire, and the Guardian, among many other outlets. She is based in Harlem.

Teri Henderson (b. Fort Worth, TX, 1990) is a curator, co-director of WDLY, and writer. Henderson holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Texas Christian University. She formerly held a curatorial internship at Ghost Gallery in Seattle, Washington. During that time she also helped launch the social media campaign for the non-profit access to justice platform PopUpJustice!. She also previously served as the Art Law Clinic Director for Maryland Volunteer Lawyers For The Arts. She was published in the St. James Encyclopedia of Hip Hop Culture. Her work as co-director of WDLY addresses shrinking the gap between the spaces that contemporary artists of color inhabit and the resources of the power structures of the art world through the curation and artistic production of events. Henderson recently founded the Black Collagists Arts Incubator. Henderson is currently a staff writer for BmoreArt as well as the Connect+Collect gallery coordinator.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.

Recorded On: Tuesday, May 4, 2021

Embracing Sisterhood is a thought-provoking examination of black women’s intersecting challenges, tensions, and issues of class in the twenty-first century.  In this purported era of high-profile, mega-successful black women and growing socioeconomic diversity, Embracing Sisterhood seeks to determine where contemporary black women’s ideas of black womanhood and sisterhood merge with social class. 

Katrina Bell McDonald is Associate Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, Co-director of the Center for Africana Studies at the Johns Hopkins University and an Associate of the Hopkins Population Center.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.

Recorded On: Tuesday, January 15, 2019

Elizabeth Spires (born in 1952 in Lancaster, Ohio) is the author of seven poetry collections: Globe, Swan’s Island, Annonciade, Worldling, Now the Green Blade Rises, The Wave-Maker, and, newly published,  A Memory of the Future. She has also written six books for children, including The Mouse of Amherst and I Heard God Talking to Me: William Edmondson and His Stone Carvings. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and other magazines and anthologies.  She lives in Baltimore and is a professor at Goucher College where she co-directs the Kratz Center for Creative Writing.

David Yezzi’s most recent books of poems are Birds of the Air and Black Sea, both from Carnegie Mellon. His verse play, Schnauzer, is forthcoming later this year from Exot Books. He is chair of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and editor of The Hopkins Review.​

Read "The Streaming" by Elizabeth Spires.
Read "Crane" by David Yezzi.

Recorded On: Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Using gut-wrenching reportage, on-the-ground research, and personal accounts garnered from interviews with over 100 police and government officials around the country, Horace presents an insider's examination of police tactics, which he concludes is an "archaic system" built on a "toxic brotherhood" in The Black and the Blue: A Cop Reveals the Crimes, Racism, and Injustice in America's Law Enforcement. He dissects some of the nation's most highly publicized police shootings and crimes to explain how these techniques have had detrimental outcomes to the people that they serve. Horace provides fresh analysis on communities experiencing police brutality and disparate imprisonment rates due to racist policing such as Ferguson, New Orleans, Baltimore, and Chicago. 

Matthew Horace is a law enforcement and security contributor to CNN and The Wall Street Journal, and an internationally-recognized leadership expert in the field. http://matthewhorace.com/

Ron Harris is a former reporter and editor for the Los Angeles Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Currently, he is a professor at Howard University.

The Brown Lecture Series is supported by the Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Family Foundation.

Recorded On: Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Nic Stone will be in conversation with Rashad Staton, Youth Engagement Specialist for Baltimore City Public Schools.

One Book Baltimore is a new initiative that provides opportunities for Baltimore City 7th and 8th graders, their families, and community members to connect through literature by reading the same book. This year’s book is New York Times bestseller Dear Martin by Nic Stone. 

Nic Stone is a native of Atlanta and a Spelman College graduate. After working extensively in teen mentoring and living in Israel for a few years, she returned to the United States to write full-time. Dear Martin, her first novel, is loosely based on a series of true events involving the shooting deaths of unarmed African American teenagers. Shaken by the various responses to these incidents—and to the pro-justice movement that sprang up as a result—Stone began Dear Martin in an attempt to examine current affairs through the lens of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s teachings.

Rashad Staton is a proud product of Baltimore City Public Schools, graduate of Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, and alumn of Morgan State University. Rashad is a passionate leader who prides himself in knowing that he has the ability to spark and mold the minds of students and future young leaders. As a Youth Engagement Specialist for Baltimore City Public Schools, Rashad leads an innovative engagement initiative called YOU(th) UP -NEXT!, that upholds and promotes the importance of Student Wholeness, Literacy, and Leadership for City School's Middle and High School population. 

Find out more about One Book Baltimore

One Book Baltimore is generously supported by T. Rowe Price.

Recorded On: Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Drawing on path-breaking work in which she and her colleagues isolated significant communication effects in the 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns, the eminent political communication scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson marshals the troll posts, unique polling data, analyses of how the press used the hacked content, and a synthesis of half a century of media effects research to argue that, although not certain, it is probable that the Russians helped elect the 45th president of the United States. 

Jamieson explains how by changing the behavior of key players and altering the focus and content of mainstream news, Russian hackers reshaped the 2016 electoral dynamic. While the goal of these hackers was division and not necessarily focused on a particular outcome, the data suggests that many voters’ opinions were altered by Russia’s wide-ranging and coordinated campaign.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson is the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Pennsylvania and Director of its Annenberg Public Policy Center. Among her award winning Oxford University Press books are Packaging the Presidency, Eloquence in an Electronic Age, Spiral of Cynicism (with Joseph Cappella), and The Obama Victory (with Kenski and Hardy).

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund. 

Recorded On: Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Are you interested in screenwriting? Do you want tips and tricks on how to break into the screenwriting industry? Have you considered marketing strategies to become a successful screenwriter? Then join us for an exciting networking event and panel discussion with Q&A featuring local professors and screenwriters. Don’t forget to bring a pen and paper for notes, as well as business cards for networking!

Panelists include:

Joe Tropea, Curator of Films & Photographs and Digital Projects Coordinator at the Maryland Historical Society; former journalist, videographer, and editor for Baltimore¹s City Paper; co-creator of the documentaries Hit & Stay (2013) and Sickies Making Films (2018);

Dina Fiasconaro, creator of the feature documentary Moms and Meds (2015), available on Amazon; co-founder of the Baltimore Chapter of Film Fatales; recipient of the “Generation Next” screenwriting grant; currently teaches Film & Moving Image at Stevenson University;

David Warfield, feature credits include writer/director of Rows (2015), writer/co-producer Linewatch and Kill Me Again; member, WGAW; an American Film Institute fellow; currently an Associate Professor of screenwriting, film, and media arts at Morgan State University;

Jimmy George, co-writer and co-producer of WNUF Halloween Special (2013); co-writing and co-producing What Happens Next Will Scare You; awarded “Best Screenplay” at the 2013 Killer Film Fest;

Recorded On: Saturday, November 17, 2018

Porochista Khakpour's debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects was a New York Times Editor's Choice, one of the Chicago Tribune's Fall's Best, and the 2007 California Book Award winner in the 'First Fiction' category. Her second novel The Last Illusion was a 2014 "Best Book of the Year" according to NPR, Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Popmatters, Electric Literature, and many more. Among her many fellowships is a National Endowment for the Arts award. Her nonfiction has appeared in many sections of The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Elle, Slate, Salon, and Bookforum, among many others.

Sick is Khakpour's grueling, emotional journey - as a woman, an Iranian-American, a writer, and a lifelong sufferer of undiagnosed health problems - in which she examines her subsequent struggles with mental illness and her addiction to doctor prescribed benzodiazepines, that both aided and eroded her ever-deteriorating physical health. A story of survival, pain, and transformation, Sick candidly examines the colossal impact of illness on one woman's life by not just highlighting the failures of a broken medical system but by also boldly challenging our concept of illness narratives.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of a memoir and three novels, and the editor of five nonfiction anthologies. Her memoir, The End of San Francisco, won a Lambda Literary Award, and her most recent anthology, Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, was an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book. Mattilda's new novel, Sketchtasy, is out in October.

Sketchtasy brings 1990s gay culture startlingly back to life, as Alexa, an incisive twenty-one-year-old queen, and her friends grapple with the impact of growing up at a time when desire and death are intertwined. With an intoxicating voice and unruly cadence, this is a shattering, incandescent novel that conjures the pain and pageantry of struggling to imagine a future.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.

Recorded On: Wednesday, November 7, 2018

Joelle Biele's newest book is Tramp (LSU Press, 2018);  she is also the author of White Summer and Broom and the editor of Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence. A Fulbright professor in Germany and Poland, she has received awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Poetry Society of America. Her essays and fiction appear in American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Black Warrior Review, Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, and New England Review. She has taught American literature and creative writing at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland, Goucher College, the University of Oldenburg, Germany, and Jagiellonian University, Poland. She served as the 2017-2018 Howard County Poetry and Literature Society Writer-in-Residence.

Ann Bracken is an activist with a pen. She has started over more times than she can count and believes that she possesses a strong gene for reinvention driving her desire for change. Ann’s changed her job and her mind, but never wavers from her commitment to family, friends, writing, and social justice. She’s authored two poetry collections — The Altar of Innocence and No Barking in the Hallways: Poems from the Classroom. Ann currently serves as a contributing editor for Little Patuxent Review and runs poetry and writing workshops in libraries, community centers, and prisons. Her poetry and interviews have been published in numerous anthologies and journals. Please visit annbrackenauthor.com.

Ann Quinn’s poetry was selected by Stanley Plumly as first-place winner in the 2015 Bethesda Literary Arts Festival poetry contest, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work is published in Potomac Review, Little Patuxent Review, Beechwood Review, Haibun Today, and Snapdragon, and is included in the anthology Red Sky: Poetry on the Global Epidemic of Violence Against Women. Ann lives in Maryland with her family where she teaches music and plays clarinet with the Columbia Orchestra. Her degrees are in music performance;  she fell in love with poetry in midlife. Her chapbook, Final Deployment, is published by Finishing Line Press. Please visit online at www.annquinn.net.

Read "When You Were at Children's I Wanted to Go Back to When" by Joelle Biele.
Read "Walking by the School Yard" by Ann Bracken.
Read "Ma" by Ann Quinn.

Recorded On: Thursday, November 1, 2018

Recruited by the U.S. Army and Navy from small towns and elite colleges, more than ten thousand women served as codebreakers during World War II. While their brothers and boyfriends took up arms, these women moved to Washington and learned the meticulous work of code-breaking. Their efforts shortened the war, saved countless lives, and gave them access to careers previously denied to them. A strict vow of secrecy nearly erased their efforts from history; now, through dazzling research and interviews with surviving code girls, bestselling author Liza Mundy brings to life this riveting and vital story of American courage, service, and scientific accomplishment.

Liza Mundy is the New York Times bestselling author of The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love and Family and Michelle: A Biography. She was a long-time reporter at the Washington Post and has contributed to numerous publications including TheAtlantic, TIME, The New Republic, Slate, Mother Jones, and Politico. She is a frequent commentator on prominent national television shows, radio, and online news outlets. A senior fellow at New America, Mundy is one of the nation's foremost experts on women and work issues.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.

Recorded On: Thursday, October 18, 2018

This collection of insightful and searing essays celebrates the vibrancy and strength of black history and culture in America. In We Can't Breathe, Jabari Asim disrupts what Toni Morrison has exposed as the "Master Narrative" and replaces it with a story of black survival and persistence through art and community in the face of centuries of racism. In these wide-ranging and penetrating essays, he explores such topics as the twisted legacy of jokes and falsehoods in black life, the importance of black fathers and community, the significance of black writers and stories, and the beauty and pain of the black body. What emerges is a rich portrait of a community and culture that has resisted, survived, and flourished despite centuries of racism, violence, and trauma.

Jabari Asim was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. For eleven years, he was an editor at The Washington Post, where he also wrote a syndicated column on politics, popular culture and social issues. Since 2007 he has been the editor-in-chief of Crisis magazine, the NAACP's flagship journal of politics, culture and ideas. Asim is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Arts and the author of four books for adults, including The N Word, and six books for children.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.

Recorded On: Tuesday, October 16, 2018

Join us for readings and discussion inspired by the Washington Writers' Publishing House's new anthology, This Is What America Looks Like: Poetry and Fiction from DC, Maryland, and Virginia, 111 works by 100 writers. Editor Kathleen Wheaton describes this anthology as "a picture of our time, our shared losses, our shared life."

The event features a panel of writers representing the anthology.

Poet Sarah Browning’s books are Killing Summer and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden. She co-founded and for 10 years directed Split This Rock. Her fellowships include ones from the Lillian E. Smith Center, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Yaddo, Mesa Refuge, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Adirondack Center for Writing.

Hayes Davis is the author of Let Our Eyes Linger (Poetry Mutual Press, 2016). His work appears in many journals and anthologies. He was a member of Cave Canem’s first cohort of fellows. A high-school English teacher, he lives in Silver Spring with his wife, poet Teri Ellen Cross Davis.

Caron Garcia Martinez is a writer, teacher, and former diplomat who grew up in Los Angeles. A graduate of Williams College, the London School of Economics and Political Science (MS, Psychology), and George Mason University (MFA), Caron has taught at American University since 2008. Caron's published work is in short fiction and essays, and her current writing project is a novel set in Mexico in 1910, built on family stories recalled by her abuela, Celia.

Adam Schwartz’s debut collection of stories, The Rest of the World, won the Washington Writers' Publishing House 2020 prize for fiction. His stories have won prizes sponsored by Poets & Writers, Philadelphia Stories, and Baltimore City Paper and appeared in numerous literary journals. He has stories forthcoming in Raritan and Gargoyle. He has an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. For 23 years, he has taught high school in Baltimore.

Panel moderator Kathleen Wheaton grew up in California, studied at Stanford University, and worked for 20 years as a journalist in Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Bethesda, Maryland. Her fiction has appeared in many journals and three anthologies, and she is a five-time recipient of Maryland State Arts Council grants. Her collection, Aliens and Other Stories, won the 2013 Washington Writers' Publishing House Fiction Prize. Since 2014, she has served as president and managing editor of the Washington Writers’ Publishing House.

The anthology's poetry editor, Jona Colson, and fiction editor, Caroline Bock, will also feature in this event.

Learn more about This Is What America Looks Like.

Recorded On: Wednesday, April 21, 2021

Geraldine Connolly was born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. She is the author of a chapbook, The Red Room, and four full-length poetry collections: Food for the Winter (Purdue), Province of Fire (Iris Press), Hand of the Wind (Iris Press), and her new book, Aileron, published by Terrapin Books in 2018.

Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Cortland Review, and Shenandoah. It has been anthologized in Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High School Students;  Sweeping Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets Do Housework;  and The Doll Collection. She has won many awards, including two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Margaret Bridgman Fellowship of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a Maryland Arts Council fellowship, and the Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Ted Kooser's "American Life in Poetry" project and has been broadcast on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac, as well as Grace Cavalieri's The Poet and the Poem.

Doritt Carroll is a native of Washington, D.C.  Her poems have appeared in Coal City Review, Poet Lore, Gargoyle, Nimrod, and Slipstream, among others. Her collection GLTTL STP was published by Brickhouse Books in 2013. Her chapbook Sorry You Are Not An Instant Winner was published in 2017 by Kattywompus.  She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and works as a poetry editor for The Baltimore Review.  She also has served as poet in residence at the Shakespeare Theatre Company and runs the Zed’s reading series.

Read "The Summer I Was Sixteen" by Geraldine Connolly.
Read "medicare" by Doritt Carroll.

Recorded On: Wednesday, October 3, 2018

The ;conversation with Tim Mohr will be moderated by WBAL-TV anchor Andre Hepkins.

The story of East German punk rock is about much more than music; it is a story of extraordinary bravery in the face of one of the most oppressive regimes in history. It began with a handful of East Berlin teens who heard the Sex Pistols on a British military radio broadcast to troops in West Berlin in 1980, and it ended with the collapse of the East German dictatorship. When the East German punks became more numerous, more visible, and more rebellious, security forces—including the dreaded secret police, the Stasi—targeted them. They were spied on by friends and even members of their own families; they were expelled from schools and jobs; they were beaten by police and imprisoned. Instead of backing down, the punks fought back, playing an indispensable role in the underground movements that helped bring down the Berlin Wall.

Rollicking, cinematic, deeply researched, highly readable, and thrillingly topical, Tim Mohr's Burning Down the Haus brings to life the young men and women who successfully fought authoritarianism three chords at a time—and is a fiery testament to the irrepressible spirit of resistance.

Tim Mohr is an award-winning translator of authors, including Alina Bronsky, Wolfgang Herrndorf, and Charlotte Roche. He has also collaborated on memoirs by musicians Gil Scott-Heron, Duff McKagan of Guns n’ Roses, and Paul Stanley of KISS. His own writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine,and Inked, among other publications, and he spent several years as a staff editor at Playboy magazine, where he edited Hunter S. Thompson, John Dean, and Harvey Pekar, among others. Prior to starting his writing career he earned his living as a club DJ in Berlin.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund. 

Recorded On: Tuesday, October 2, 2018

On October 16, 1859, John Brown and his band of eighteen raiders descended on Harpers Ferry. In an ill-fated attempt to incite a slave insurrection, they seized the federal arsenal, took hostages, and retreated to a fire engine house where they barricaded themselves until a contingent of US Marines battered their way in on October 18.

The raiders were routed, and several were captured. Soon after, they were tried, convicted, and hanged. Among Brown’s fighters were five African American men -- John Copeland, Shields Green, Dangerfield Newby, Lewis Leary, and Osborne Perry Anderson -- whose lives and deaths have long been overshadowed by their martyred leader and who, even today, are little remembered. Only Anderson survived, later publishing the lone insider account of the event that, most historians agree, was a catalyst to the catastrophic American Civil War that followed. Five for Freedom: The African American Soldiers in John Brown's Army is the story of these five brave men, the circumstances in which they were born and raised, how they came together at this fateful time and place, and the legacies they left behind. 

Eugene L. Meyer is an award-winning journalist and author and a former longtime reporter and editor at the Washington Post. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, and many other national and regional publications. Meyer is also the author of Chesapeake Country (1990, 2015) and Maryland Lost and Found...Again (2003). He is a contributing editor for Bethesda magazine and lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund

Recorded On: Thursday, September 20, 2018

The 2018 Mencken Memorial Lecture presented by Dana Milbank of the Washington Post.

Dana Milbank is a nationally syndicated op-ed columnist. Before joining the staff of the Washington Post in 2005, he served as a senior editor at the New Republic and a reporter with the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of three books, including the national bestseller Homo Politicus.

Recorded On: Saturday, September 15, 2018

In 1844, Horace Wells, a Connecticut dentist, encountered nitrous oxide, or laughing gas -- then an entertainment for performers in carnival-like theatrical acts -- and began administering the gas as the first true anesthetic. His discovery would change the world, reshaping medicine and humanity's relationship with pain. But that discovery would also thrust Wells into scandals that threatened his reputation, his family, and his sanity -- hardships and triumphs that resonate in today's struggles with what hurts us and what we take to stop the hurt. In The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist: A Novel, Michael Downs mines the gaps in the historical record and imagines the motivations and mysteries behind Wells's morbid fascination with pain, as well as the price he and his wife, Elizabeth, paid -- first through his obsession, then his addiction.

Michael Downs is the author of The Greatest Show: Stories (2012) and House of Good Hope: A Promise for a Broken City (2007), which won the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. His debut novel, The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist (Acre Books, 2018) tells the story of the 19th-century man widely credited with discovering painless surgery. Downs is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council, and the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance. A former newspaper reporter, Downs is an associate professor of English at Towson University.

It is January 2017 and Bill has hit rock bottom. Yesterday, he was William M. Katzenelenbogen, successful science reporter at The Washington Post. But things have taken a turn. Fired from his job, aimless, with exactly $1,219.37 in his checking account, he learns that his college roommate, a plastic surgeon known far and wide as the “Butt God of Miami Beach,” has fallen to his death under salacious circumstances. With nothing to lose, Bill boards a flight for Florida’s Gold Coast, ready to begin his own investigation -- a last ditch attempt to revive his career. There’s just one catch: Bill’s father, Melsor.

Melsor Yakovlevich Katzenelenbogen -- poet, literary scholar, political dissident, small-time-crook -- is angling for control of the condo board at the Château Sedan Neuve, a crumbling high-rise in Hollywood, Florida, populated mostly by Russian Jewish immigrants. Melsor will use any means necessary to win the board election. And who better to help him than his estranged son? Featuring a colorful cast of characters, The Chateau injects the crime novel genre with surprising idiosyncrasy, subverting it with dark comic farce in a setting that becomes a microcosm of Trump’s America.

Paul Goldberg’s debut novel The Yid was published in 2016 to widespread acclaim and named a finalist for both the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the National Jewish Book Award’s Goldberg Prize for Debut Fiction. As a reporter, Goldberg has written two books about the Soviet human rights movement, and has co-authored (with Otis Brawley) the book How We Do Harm, an expose of the U.S. healthcare system. He is the editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter, a publication focused on the business and politics of cancer. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.

Recorded On: Thursday, September 13, 2018

In his new book, America: The Farewell Tour, Chris Hedges provides a provocative examination of America in crisis, where unemployment, deindustrialization, and a bitter hopelessness and malaise have resulted in an epidemic of diseases of despair -- drug abuse, gambling, suicide, magical thinking, xenophobia, and a culture of sadism and hate.

According to Hedges, America is convulsed by an array of pathologies that have arisen out of profound hopelessness, a bitter despair and a civil society that has ceased to function. The opioid crisis, the retreat into gambling to cope with economic distress, the pornification of culture, the rise of magical thinking, the celebration of sadism, hate and plagues of suicides are the physical manifestiations of a society that is being ravaged by corporate pillage and a failed democracy. As the society unravels, we also face global upheaval caused by catastrophic climate change.

Hedges argues that neither political party, now captured by corporate power, addresses the systemic problem. America: The Farewell Tour seeks to jolt us out of our complacency while there is still time.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the author of American Fascists, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, and War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.

Marc Steiner moderates the conversation with Chris Hedges.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.

Recorded On: Wednesday, September 5, 2018

The 2018 Enoch Pratt Free Library / Little Patuxent Review Poetry Contest winner shares the stage with a contest runner-up, two contest judges, and a Little Patuxent Review contributor.

Born in India and raised in Dubai, Poetry Contest winner Kanak (pronounced Kuh-nuck) Gupta is currently trying her luck in Baltimore, as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University. She likes reading, writing, and living stories (and poetry).

Runner-up Rachel E. Hicks’s poetry has appeared in Saint Katherine Review, Welter, Off the Coast, Gulf Stream Magazine, and other journals. She also writes essays and fiction, and works as a freelance copy editor. An associate editor at Del Sol Press, she also served as the 2018 Poetry Out Loud Regional Coordinator for the Maryland State Arts Council. After living in eight countries -- most recently China -- she now resides in Baltimore. Her career has included teaching (high school English and homeschool) and volunteering with an international relief and development agency. Find her online at rachelehicks.com.

Steven Leyva, Little Patuxent Review editor, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 2 Bridges Review, Fledgling Rag, The Light Ekphrastic, Cobalt Review, and Prairie Schooner. He is a Cave Canem fellow, the winner of the 2012 Cobalt Review Poetry Prize, and author of the chapbook Low Parish. Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an assistant professor in the School of Communication Design.

Chelsea Lemon Fetzer, a Little Patuxent Review Poetry Reader, holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA in Fiction from Syracuse University.  Her fiction and poetry have appeared in journals such as Callaloo, Tin House, Mississippi Review, and The Minnesota Review.  A selection of her poetry received the honor of finalist for the 2015 Venture Award and her debut pamphlet (chapbook) is in the works.  Her nonfiction essay “Speck” was published in The Beiging of America: Personal Narratives About Being Mixed Race in the 21st Century, an anthology published by 2Leaf Press in 2017. Committed to bringing the literary arts to communities of all means, Fetzer has led writing workshops through The Create Collective, PEN American Center's "Readers & Writers" Program, the Black Writers Conference at Medgar Evers College, the New York Writers Coalition, The University of Baltimore, and independently.  Fetzer currently lives in Baltimore where she is mothering, working on her first novel, and serving on the board of CityLit Project. 

Wallace Lane, a Little Patuxent Review contributor, is a poet and author from Baltimore, Maryland. He received his MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts from the University of Baltimore in May 2017. His poetry has appeared in Skelter, The Avenue, Welter, and Rise Up and is forthcoming in several other literary journals. Wallace also works as a teacher with Baltimore City Public Schools.

Runner-up Nancy Kang will not be able to attend this event, but you can learn more about her here.

Watch a video of Kanak Gupta reading her winning poem, "Death in Dubai."
Read "Chengdu Pastoral" by Rachel E. Hicks.
Read "'I know you're never gonna wake up'" and "Supremacy" by Steven Leyva.
Read "flare" by Chelsea Lemon Fetzer.
Watch a video of Wallace Lane reading from Jordan Year.
Read "Yellow Woman" by Nancy Kang.

Recorded On: Tuesday, August 21, 2018

The Third Hotel by Laura van den Berg is a propulsive, brilliantly shape-shifting novel. A widow tries to come to terms with her husband’s death -- and the truth about their marriage -- in this surreal, mystifying story of psychological reflection and metaphysical mystery. Shortly after Clare arrives in Havana, Cuba, to attend the annual Festival of New Latin American Cinema, she finds her husband, Richard, standing outside a museum. He’s wearing a white linen suit she’s never seen before, and he’s supposed to be dead. Grief-stricken and baffled, Clare tails Richard, a horror film scholar, through the newly tourist-filled streets of Havana, clocking his every move. As the distinction between reality and fantasy blurs, Clare finds grounding in memories of her childhood in Florida and of her marriage to Richard, revealing her role in his death and reappearance along the way. 

Laura van den Berg is the author of two story collections, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and The Isle of Youth, and the novel Find Me. She is the recipient of a Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bard Fiction Prize, an O. Henry Award, and a MacDowell Colony fellowship. Born and raised in Florida, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Nate Brown’s short stories have appeared in the Iowa Review, Mississippi Review, Five Chapters, REAL, and Carolina Quarterly, and his nonfiction has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Publisher's Weekly, and LitHub. The managing editor of the Austin-based literary journal American Short Fiction, he lives in Baltimore and teaches writing at Stevenson University and at the George Washington University in Washington, DC.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund. 

Recorded On: Thursday, August 9, 2018

Addiction is too often viewed only through the prism of sadness and pain.  At this event, you are invited to imagine the greater possibilities as we celebrate the creativity and optimism of the writers from The Imagination Lab.

The Imagination Lab is the brainchild of Karen Reese, Executive Director of Man Alive, Inc.—the first and longest running methadone maintenance clinic in Maryland.  The lab was created to explore and nurture the creative talents of those in medication-assisted treatment for substance use disorders. 

The program is hosted by Don Riesett, an accomplished writer and international business executive, who has for the past four years volunteered his time with The Imagination Lab.  The writers he has guided will share creative non-fiction selections of which they are rightfully proud.

Their work lends credence to Albert Einstein’s famous quote:  “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination.”  Work by collagists attending a Vision Board class will be on display as well.     

Recorded On: Wednesday, August 15, 2018

Curtis Black is no stranger to scandal. Throughout the decades, he has done much in the public eye, both good and evil. But what most people don't realize is that Curtis has been hiding a horrific childhood that has affected him in countless, unspeakable ways.

His buried past returns in an unwelcome visit when his estranged sister becomes alarmingly ill and his youngest child, twelve-year-old Curtina, becomes the kind of problem daughter that he never imagined she could be. This is only the beginning. The horror of Curtis's childhood secrets, as well as Curtina's wild and rebellious behavior, takes a critical toll on Curtis and the entire Black family. All the public scandals they've experienced over the years now seem like child's play compared to the turmoil they are facing in private. Who could have known that the deepest wounds would come from within?

Kimberla Lawson Roby is the New York Times bestselling author of the highly acclaimed Curtis Black series. She lives with her husband in Rockford, Illinois.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund. 

Recorded On: Wednesday, August 8, 2018

Do spirits return, and can we communicate with the dead? Baltimore’s Spiritualists thought so, but magicians worked to disprove them. Learn about spirit mediums, the Ouija Board, and Baltimore’s group of amateur magicians, the Demons Club.

Presented by Maryland Department librarian Julie Saylor. Q and A with Julie Saylor and Mike Rose. Mike Rose is a local magician, magic historian, and author of Maryland's Ambassador of Magic: Phil Thomas and the Yogi Magic Mart.

Recorded On: Monday, March 15, 2021

What makes a pink-haired queer raise his hand to enlist in the military just as the nation is charging into war? In his memoir, Out of Step, Anthony Moll tells the story of a working-class bisexual boy running off to join the army in the midst of two wars and the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" era. Set against the backdrop of hypermasculinity and sexual secrecy, Moll weaves a queer coming-of-age story. 

Out of Step traces Moll’s development through his military service, recounting how the army both breaks and builds relationships, and what it was like to explore his queer identity while also coming to terms with his role in the nation’s ugly foreign policy. From a punk, nerdy, left-leaning, poor boy in Nevada leaving home for the first time to an adult returning to civilian life and forced to address a world more complicated than he was raised to believe, Moll’s journey isn’t a classic flag-waving memoir or war story—it’s a tale of finding one’s identity in the face of war and changing ideals.

Anthony Moll is a Baltimore-based writer and educator. His creative work has appeared in Gertrude Journal, Assaracus, jubilat, and more. Moll holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts and has taught writing at both public and private universities.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund. 

Recorded On: Tuesday, July 31, 2018

In The Voting Rights War, Gloria Browne-Marshall examines voter laws posing challenges to American voters -- especially African Americans -- from slavery through current controversies of voter suppression, including grandfather clauses, literacy tests, felony disenfranchisement and photo identification requirements. She focuses on the NAACP's century-long struggle to achieve voting equality through efforts on the ground and in court, and the organization's often contentious relationship with the Supreme Court. Browne-Marshall tells the story of the civil rights attorneys who fought in court as well as the brave foot soldiers that paid for voting rights with their lives.

Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is an associate professor of constitutional law at John Jay College of the City University of New York and a civil rights attorney. She reports on the U.S. Supreme Court in her award-winning syndicated newspaper column and hosts the weekly radio program "Law of the Land with Gloria J. Browne-Marshall." She is the author of Race, Law, and American Society.

The Brown Lecture Series is supported by the Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Family Foundation.

Recorded On: Thursday, April 19, 2018

Kevin Shird traveled from Baltimore to Montgomery, Alabama, to meet 84-year-old Nelson Malden. In Malden's barbershop, leaders of the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King, Jr., gathered to organize protests and boycotts and to write the speeches that would help criminalize racial segregation and discrimination.

Shird and Malden talked about the significance of recent racially motivated events and how the demonstrations in Charlottesville, Ferguson, Baltimore and around the country help us understand today's second-wave civil rights movement and the urgent actions necessary for racial equality and change.

Kevin Shird is an activist, national youth advocate, public speaker and author of two previous books: Lessons of Redemption and Uprising in the City. Marc Steiner, radio and podcast host, will moderate the conversation with Kevin Shird.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.

Recorded On: Tuesday, April 17, 2018

The struggle to desegregate America’s schools was a grassroots movement, and young women were its vanguard. In the late 1940s, parents began to file desegregation lawsuits with their daughters, forcing Thurgood Marshall and other civil rights lawyers to take up the issue and bring it to the Supreme Court. After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, girls far outnumbered boys in volunteering to desegregate formerly all-white schools.

In A Girl Stands at the Door, historian Rachel Devlin tells the remarkable stories of these desegregation pioneers. She also explains why black girls were seen, and saw themselves, as responsible for the difficult work of reaching across the color line in public schools. Highlighting the extraordinary bravery of young black women, this bold revisionist account illuminates today’s ongoing struggles for equality.

Rachel Devlin is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund. 

Recorded On: Tuesday, June 12, 2018

Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity and Some Say the Lark, which was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Nation, Poetry, and A Public Space, and she has published essays on poetry and poetics in The Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, and The Volta. She co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman, an organization that supports Asian American writers, and teaches creative writing and literature at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017). Her honors include a 2015 Whiting Award and a 2016-17 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism, New England Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and at the Rainier Writing Workshop's MFA Program. 

Read "Again a Solstice" by Jennifer Chang.
Read "In the Dream" by Jenny Johnson.

Recorded On: Wednesday, June 13, 2018

When Darnell Moore was fourteen years old, three boys from his neighborhood tried to set him on fire. They cornered him while he was walking home from school, harassed him because they assumed he was gay, and poured a jug of gasoline on him. He escaped, but just barely. It wasn't the last time he would face death.

Three decades later, Moore is an award-winning writer and activist, a leader in the Movement for Black Lives, and a tireless advocate for justice and liberation. In No Ashes in the Fire, he sets out to understand how that scared, bullied teenager not only survived, but found his calling. Moore traces his life from his childhood in Camden, New Jersey, a city scarred by uprisings and repression; to his search for intimacy in the gay neighborhoods of Philadelphia; and, finally, to the movements in Newark, Brooklyn, and Ferguson where he could fight for those who, like him, survive on society's edges.

Darnell Moore will be in conversation with Hashim K. Pipkin.

Darnell L. Moore is an editor-at-large at CASSIUS (Urban One), a columnist at LogoTV.com and NewNextNow.com, and a contributor at Mic, where he hosted their widely viewed digital series The Movement. He writes regularly for Ebony, Advocate, Vice, and Guardian. Moore was one of the original Black Lives Matter organizers, organizing bus trips from New York to Ferguson after the murder of Michael Brown. Moore is a writer-in-residence at the Center of African American Religion, Sexual Politics, and Social Justice at Columbia University, has taught at NYU, Rutgers, Fordham, and Vassar, and was trained at Princeton Theological Seminary. In 2016, he was named one of The Root 100, and in 2015 he was named one of Ebony magazine's Power 100 and Planned Parenthood's 99 Dream Keepers. He divides his time between Brooklyn and Atlanta.

Hashim K. Pipkin is a content strategist and educator. He has led communications and engagement strategy for DC Government, the United Negro College Fund, and several start-ups in Silicon Valley. He is also a researcher who is interested in the interplay between sexual politics and social ethics in Black culture and the theological "slippages" in American political discourse. His writing has been featured in Mic, HuffPost, The Feminist Wire, and Ebony. He began his career as an elementary reading teacher. He is an honors graduate of Georgetown University and Vanderbilt University and recipient of the Robert W. Woodruff Fellowship at Emory University. He is at work on his first collection of essays, Surely Free: Courage and Black Love. 

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.

Recorded On: Tuesday, June 5, 2018

As people consider how to respond to a resurgence of racist, xenophobic populism, A Mouth Is Always Muzzled tells an extraordinary story of the ways art brings hope in perilous times. Weaving disparate topics from sugar and British colonialism to attacks on free speech and Facebook activism and traveling a jagged path across the Americas, Africa, India and Europe, Natalie Hopkinson argues that art is where the future is negotiated.

Part post-colonial manifesto, part history of the British Caribbean, part exploration of art in the modern world, A Mouth is Always Muzzled is an analysis of the insistent role of art in contemporary politics and life. It documents the artistic legacy generated in response to white supremacy, brutality, domination, and oppression. In well-honed prose, Natalie Hopkinson knits narratives of culture warriors: painter Bernadette Persaud, poet Ruel Johnson, historian Walter Rodney, novelist John Berger, and provocative African American artist Kara Walker.

A former staff writer, editor and culture critic at the Washington Post and The Root, Natalie Hopkinson is an assistant professor in Howard University's graduate program in communication, culture and media studies and a fellow at the Interactivity Foundation. She is the author of Go-Go Live and Deconstructing Tyrone (with Natalie Y. Moore).

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.

Recorded On: Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Between 1963 and 1972 America experienced over 750 urban revolts. Considered collectively, they comprise what Peter Levy terms a 'Great Uprising'. Levy examines these uprisings over the arc of the entire decade, in various cities across America. He challenges both conservative and liberal interpretations, emphasizing that these riots must be placed within historical context to be properly understood.

By focusing on three cities as case studies -- Cambridge and Baltimore, Maryland, and York, Pennsylvania -- Levy demonstrates the impact which these uprisings had on millions of ordinary Americans. He shows how conservatives profited politically by constructing a misleading narrative of their causes, and also suggests that the riots did not represent a sharp break or rupture from the civil rights movement. Finally, Levy presents a cautionary tale by challenging us to consider if the conditions that produced this 'Great Uprising' are still predominant in American culture today.

Peter B. Levy is a professor of history at York College of Pennsylvania where he teaches U.S. history. He is the author of Civil War on Race Street: The Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.

Recorded On: Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Nadine Strossen's new book, HATE, dispels misunderstandings plaguing our perennial debates about "hate speech vs. free speech," showing that the First Amendment approach promotes free speech and democracy, equality, and societal harmony.

U.S. law allows government to punish hateful or discriminatory speech in specific contexts when it directly causes imminent serious harm, but government may not punish such speech solely because its message is disfavored, disturbing, or vaguely feared to possibly contribute to some future harm. When U.S. officials formerly wielded such broad censorship power, they suppressed dissident speech, including equal rights advocacy. Likewise, current politicians have attacked Black Lives Matter protests as "hate speech."

"Hate speech" censorship proponents stress the potential harms such speech might further: discrimination, violence, and psychic injuries. However, there has been little analysis of whether censorship effectively counters the feared injuries. Citing evidence from many countries, Strossen shows that "hate speech" laws are at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive. Their inevitably vague terms invest enforcing officials with broad discretion; predictably, regular targets are minority views and speakers.

Therefore, prominent social justice advocates in the U.S. and beyond maintain that the best way to resist hate and promote equality is not censorship, but rather, vigorous "counterspeech" and activism.

Nadine Strossen is professor of constitutional law at New York Law School and the first woman national President of the American Civil Liberties Union, where she served from 1991 through 2008. A frequent speaker on constitutional and civil liberties issues, her media appearances include 60 Minutes, CBS Sunday Morning, Today, Good Morning America, and The Daily Show.

Strossen will be in conversation with Danielle Citron & Dwight Ellis.

Danielle Keats Citron is the Morton & Sophia Macht Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law where she teaches and writes about information privacy, free expression, and civil rights. Professor Citron is an internationally recognized information privacy expert and the author of the book Hate Crimes in Cyberspace (Harvard University Press) and more than 25 law review articles.  Professor Citron is an Affiliate Scholar at the Stanford Center on Internet and Society, Affiliate Fellow at the Yale Information Society Project, and Senior Fellow at the Future of Privacy, a privacy think tank. Professor Citron has advised federal and state legislators, law enforcement, and international lawmakers on privacy and free speech issues. Professor Citron works closely with tech companies on issues involving online safety and privacy. She serves on Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council and has presented her research at Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. In addition, Professor Citron is the Chair the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Board of Directors. She is a member of the American Law Institute and serves as an adviser to the American Law Institute’s Restatement Third Information Privacy Principles Project.

An experienced media professional in advancing social equity initiatives and strategies in the realms of government, business and education, Dwight Ellis is in his 11th year as full-time Lecturer in the Communications department of Bowie State University in Maryland and occasional consultant to the U.S. Department of State. Prior to his 25 years as vice president with the National Association of Broadcasters, he served as staff chief to Congresswoman Cardiss Collins (D-IL). A graduate of George Mason University Law School, Ellis’s professional record includes many affiliations, accomplishments, publications and recognitions.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.

Recorded On: Tuesday, May 8, 2018

During the Civil Rights Movement, African American women did not stand on ceremony; they simply did the work that needed to be done. Yet despite their significant contributions at all levels of the movement, they remain mostly invisible to the larger public. In Lighting the Fires of Freedom, Janet Dewart Bell shines a light on women's all-too-often overlooked achievements in the movement. Through wide-ranging conversations with nine women, several now in their nineties, with decades of untold stories, we hear what ignited and fueled their activism.

Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, Lighting the Fires of Freedom offers deeply personal and intimate accounts of extraordinary struggles for justice that resulted in profound social change.

Janet Dewart Bell is a social justice activist with a doctorate in leadership and change from Antioch University. She founded the Derrick Bell Lecture on Race in American Society series at the New York University School of Law. An award-winning television and radio producer, she lives in New York City.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.

Recorded On: Wednesday, May 9, 2018

Poets Joseph Ross and Michael Torres read from and discuss their new books.

Joseph Ross is the author of four books of poetry: Raising King (2020), Ache (2017), Gospel of Dust (2013), and Meeting Bone Man (2012). His poems appear in many places including The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, Poet Lore, Xavier Review, Southern Quarterly, and Drumvoices Revue. He has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations and won the 2012 Pratt Library / Little Patuxent Review Poetry Prize. He recently served as the 23rd Poet-in-Residence for the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society in Howard County, Maryland. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C., and writes regularly at www.JosephRoss.net.

Michael Torres was born and brought up in Pomona, California, where he spent his adolescence as a graffiti artist. His debut collection of poems, An Incomplete List of Names (Beacon Press, 2020), was selected by Raquel Salas Rivera for the National Poetry Series. His honors include awards and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the McKnight Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CantoMundo, VONA Voices, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, and the Loft Literary Center. Currently he’s an Assistant Professor in the MFA program at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and a teaching artist with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. Visit him at: michaeltorreswriter.com.

Read "On John Coltrane's 'After the Rain'" by Joseph Ross.
Read "Stop Looking at My Last Name Like That" by Michael Torres.

Recorded On: Wednesday, March 10, 2021

Lauren Haldeman is the author of Instead of Dying (winner of the 2017 Colorado Prize for Poetry, Center for Literary Publishing, 2017), Calenday (Rescue Press, 2014), and the artist book The Eccentricity is Zero (Digraph Press, 2014). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, Colorado Review, Fence, The Iowa Review, and The Rumpus. A comic-book artist and poet, she has taught in the U.S. as well as internationally. She has been a recipient of the 2015 Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, the Colorado Prize for Poetry, and fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. You can find her online at http://laurenhaldeman.com.

Kiki Petrosino is the author of three books of poetry: Witch Wife (2017), Hymn for the Black Terrific (2013), and Fort Red Border (2009), all from Sarabande Books. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, The Best American Poetry, The Nation, The New York Times, Fence, Gulf Coast, Jubilat, Tin House, and online at Ploughshares. She is founder and co-editor of Transom, an independent online poetry journal. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville, where she directs the Creative Writing Program. She also teaches part-time in the brief-residency MFA program at Spalding University. Her awards include a residency at the Hermitage Artist Retreat and research fellowships from the University of Louisville's Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and Society and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

Read "Nome, a Sonnet," by Lauren Haldeman.
Read "A Guide to the Louisa County Free Negro & Slave Records, 1770–1865," by Kiki Petrosino.

Recorded On: Wednesday, May 2, 2018

In her new book, The Woman's Hour, Elaine Weiss tells the story of the last six weeks in the fight for women's suffrage, when it all came down to one state, and in the end one man's vote.

By August 1920, 35 states had ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, 12 had rejected it or refused to vote, and one last state hung in the balance -- Tennessee. The suffragettes descended on Nashville to duke it out with their opposing forces -- politicians with careers at stake, liquor companies, railroad magnates, racists who didn't want to see black women win the vote, and the "Antis," women who vehemently opposed their own enfranchisement, fearing suffrage would bring about the moral collapse of the nation.

The Woman's Hour is a political thriller that follows three remarkable women as they lead their respective forces into the battle for -- and against -- suffrage. They all converge one hot summer for a vicious face-off replete with dirty tricks and cutting betrayals, sexist rancor, bigotry, booze, and the Bible.

Elaine Weiss is an award-winning journalist and writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper's, The New York Times, and The Christian Science Monitor. A MacDowell Colony Fellow and Pushcart Prize Editor's Choice honoree, she is the author of Fruits of Victory: The Woman's Land Army in the Great War.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.

Recorded On: Tuesday, April 3, 2018

In her new book, History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times, Dr. Mary Frances Berry examines instances of resistance during the times of various presidential administrations.

Despair and mourning after the election of a hostile president are part of the push-pull of American politics. But resistance to presidential administrations has historically led to positive change and the defeat of outrageous proposals, even in perilous times. And though conservative presidents require massive public protest to enact policy decisions, the same can be true of progressive ones. For instance, Barack Obama and the Indigenous protests against the Dakota pipeline is one modern example of resistance built on earlier actions. Resistance sometimes fails, but it has usually been successful, even if it does not achieve all of a movement's goals.

Dr. Mary Frances Berry is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the former chairwoman of the US Commission on Civil Rights, a Distinguished Fellow of the American Society for Legal History, the author of 12 books, and the recipient of 35 honorary degrees.

The Brown Lecture Series is supported by the Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Family Foundation.

Recorded On: Thursday, March 15, 2018

In the 1960s and '70s, a diverse range of storefronts -- including head shops, African American bookstores, feminist businesses, and organic grocers -- brought the work of the New Left, Black Power, feminism, environmentalism and other movements into the marketplace. Through shared ownership, limited growth, and democratic workplaces, these activist entrepreneurs offered alternatives to conventional profit-driven corporate business models. By the middle of the 1970s,  thousands of these enterprises operated across the United States. But only a handful survive today. Some, such as Whole Foods Market, have abandoned their quest for collective political change in favor of maximizing profits.

In From Head Shops to Whole Foods, Joshua Davis portrays the struggles, successes, and sacrifices of these unlikely entrepreneurs. The book challenges the widespread but mistaken idea that activism and political dissent are inherently antithetical to participation in the marketplace. Davis uncovers the historical roots of contemporary interest in ethical consumption, social enterprise, buying local, and mission-driven business.

Joshua Clark Davis is assistant professor of history at the University of Baltimore.

Marc Steiner, podcast host, radio host, and activist, introduces the event.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.

Recorded On: Tuesday, March 13, 2018

A 2018 Oprah's Book Club Selection!

Novelist Tayari Jones reads and discusses her new book, An American Marriage.

An American Marriage is a stirring love story and an insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control. Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career.

But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend and best man at their wedding. As Roy's time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center.

Tayari Jones is the author of three previous novels: Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling and Silver Sparrow. A winner of numerous literary awards, she is an associate professor in the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark University. She is spending the 2017-18 academic year as the Shearing Fellow for Distinguished Writers at Black Mountain Institute, University of Nevada Las Vegas. 

Presented in partnership with CityLit Project.

Recorded On: Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Ira's Shakespeare Dream is a book for children about Ira Aldridge, the celebrated African American Shakespearean actor. Written by Glenda Armand, the book is illustrated by the award-winning artist Floyd Cooper.

Listen to Glenda Armand and Floyd Cooper at this opening reception for the special exhibit of Cooper's illustrations from Ira's Shakespeare Dream. Floyd Cooper talks about his artistic process.

Arts at the Pratt is supported by the William G. Baker Memorial Fund, creator of the Baker Artist Portfolios, www.BakerArtist.org.

Recorded On: Wednesday, February 7, 2018

The other great Renaissance of black culture, influence, and glamour burst forth in what may seem an unlikely place – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – from the 1920s through the 1950s. Today black Pittsburgh is known as the setting for August Wilson’s famed plays, but this community once had an impact that rivaled the far larger black worlds of Harlem and Chicago. It published the most widely read black newspaper in the country, fielded two of the greatest baseball teams of the Negro Leagues, and introduced Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Pittsburgh was the childhood home of jazz pioneers Billy Strayhorn, Billy Eckstine, Earl Hines, Mary Lou Williams, and Erroll Garner.

Mark Whitaker's Smoketown is a captivating portrait of this unsung commuity and a vital addition to the story of black America. It depicts how ambitious Southern migrants were drawn to a steel-making city on a strategic river junction; how they were shaped by its schools and a spirit of commerce with roots in the Gilded Age; and how their world was eventually destroyed by industrial decline and urban renewal. 

The former managing editor of CNN Worldwide, Mark Whitaker was previously the Washington bureau chief for NBC News and a reporter and editor at Newsweek, where he rose to become the first African-American leader of a national newsweekly. He is the author of the memoir, My Long Trip Home.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.

Recorded On: Tuesday, February 6, 2018

David Cay Johnston first met Donald Trump in 1988 and has tracked him ever since. He wrote about Trump in two books: Temples of Chance and The Making of Donald Trump. He was also an uncredited source of documents and insight for major campaign reports by the Washington Post, New York Times, and network television. When Trump announced his campaign in June 2015, Johnston was the first national journalist to write about a potential Trump presidency.

In It's Even Worse Than You Think, Johnston examines the first one hundred days of Donald Trump's presidency, including a close look at what the mainstream press stopped covering years ago: the workings of the federal government agencies and how that touches the lives of all Americans. He also shows how our lives are affected by many actions that the new administration quietly approves without drawing the attention of the Washington press corps.

David Cay Johnston is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and bestselling author of The Making of Donald Trump. Founder and editor of DCReport.org, he has been a frequent guest on MSNBC, CNN, the BBC, ABC World News Tonight, Democracy Now and NPR’s Morning Edition, among other shows.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.

Recorded On: Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Cops, politicians, and ordinary people are afraid of black men. The result is the Chokehold: laws and practicees that treat every African American man like a thug. In his new book, former federal prosecutor Paul Butler shows that the system is working exactly the way it's supposed to. Black men are always under watch, and police violence is widespread -- all with the support of judges and politicians.

In his no-holds-barred style, Butler uses new data to demonstrate that white men commit the majority of violent crime in the United States. He also frankly discusses the problem of black on black violence and how to keep communities safer without relying as much on police.

Chokehold powerfully demonstrates why current efforts to reform law enforcement will not create lasting change. Butler’s controversial recommendations about how to crash the system, and when it’s better for a black man to plead guilty—even if he’s innocent—are sure to be game-changers in the national debate about policing, criminal justice, and race relations.

Paul Butler provides legal commentary for CNN, MSNBC, and NPR and has been featured on 60 Minutes and profiled in the Washington Post. A law professor at Georgetown University, he is the author of Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice, winner of the Harry Chapin Media Award. He has published numerous op-eds and book reviews, including in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Washington, D.C.

The Brown Lecture Series is supported by a generous grant from the Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Foundation.

Recorded On: Wednesday, December 13, 2017

During an illustrious four-decade career at NPR and PBS, John Merrow -- winner of the George Polk Award, the Peabody Award, and the McGraw Prize -- reported from every state in the union, as well as from dozens of countries, on everything from the rise of district-wide cheating scandals and the corporate greed driving an ADD epidemic to teacher-training controversies and America’s obsession with standardized testing. Along the way, he taught in a high school, at a historically black college, and at a federal penitentiary.

Now, Merrow distills his best thinking on education into a twelve-step approach to fixing a K–12 system that he describes as being “addicted to reform” but unwilling to address the real issue: American public schools are ill-equipped to prepare young people for the challenges of the twenty-first century.

This insightful book looks at how to turn digital natives into digital citizens and why it should be harder to become a teacher but easier to be one. Merrow offers smart, essential chapters -- including “Measure What Matters,” and “Embrace Teachers” -- that reflect his countless hours spent covering classrooms as well as corridors of power. His signature candid style of reportage comes to life as he shares lively anecdotes, schoolyard tales, and memories that are at once instructive and endearing.

John Merrow recently retired as education correspondent for the PBS NewsHour. He founded and until 2015 was the president of Learning Matters, a nonprofit media company. In 2012 Merrow became the first journalist to win the prestigious McGraw Prize in Education. He lives with his wife in New York City and his books include Choosing Excellence, Declining by Degrees, and The Influence of Teachers.

The evening is introduced by Dr. LaMarr Darnell Shields, a social entrepreneur, author, “Ubuntu” teacher, inspirational speaker, and educator who loves to create and build with purpose. As the Co-Founder and Senior Director of Education and Innovation at the Cambio Group, and former professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, Dr. LaMarr Darnell Shields has dedicated his life to inspiring adults and youth alike to pursue a higher purpose, achieve sustainable value for long-term success, and cope with adversity in order to create opportunities in their personal, professional and spiritual lives. As the Special Advisor to the Blue Ribbon Commission on Educational Equity, recipient of the 2015 Social Innovator Award, and 2016-2017 Open Society Institute Fellowship, Dr. Shields has been studying, writing about, and implementing change in schools and non-profit organizations for years.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund. 

Recorded On: Tuesday, December 5, 2017

CityLit Project joins the Enoch Pratt Free Library in presenting the CityLit Festival - Reimagined: a virtual celebration of the literary arts

In an exhilarating tale of colliding worlds, Emily St. John’s The Glass Hotel paints a breathtaking portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives. In Jenny Offill’s funny and urgent Weather, the foreboding sense of doom commands a family and presents a nation in crisis, and how we weather it. The authors will be in a conversation moderated by Marion Winik, author of The Big Book of the Dead.

Jenny Offill is the author of the novels Last Things (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the L.A. Times First Book Award); Dept. of Speculation, which was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Pen Faulkner Award and the International Dublin Award; and most recently Weather, an instant New York Times Bestseller. She lives in upstate New York and teaches at Syracuse University and in the low residency program at Queens University.

Emily St. John Mandel's five novels include The Glass Hotel and Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award and has been translated into thirty-two languages. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

University of Baltimore professor Marion Winik is the author of The Big Book of the Dead and winner of the 2019 Towson Prize for Literature. Among her ten other books are First Comes Love and Above Us Only Sky. Her award-winning Bohemian Rhapsody column appears monthly at Baltimore Fishbowl, and her essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, and elsewhere. A board member of the National Book Critics Circle, she writes book reviews for People, Newsday, The Washington Post, and Kirkus Reviews; she hosts The Weekly Reader podcast at WYPR. She was a commentator on NPR for fifteen years; her honors include an NEA Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction. More info at marionwinik.com.

The Writer's Room is a new Festival highlight designed to engage festival attendees, who are also writers, in an informal conversation with the featured guest authors.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.

Recorded On: Tuesday, March 2, 2021

Are you interested in learning how to save money without ruining your lifestyle? What about putting extra money aside for the holidays? If so, then join us for the Budgeting Basics program, featuring InvestEd, a local organization dedicated to spreading financial literacy.

Recorded On: Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Are you interested in the publishing world? Do you want tips and tricks on how to become a published author or how to self-publish? Have you considered marketing strategies and business plans? Then join us for a panel discussion and Q&A featuring local authors and editors.

Panelists include:

Sarah Pinsker, winner of the 2016 Nebula Award for her novelette Our Lady of the Open Road

Kenneth Rogers, Jr., author of seven books, including Thoughts in Italics and Raped Black Male

Ben Anderson, self-published author of The McGunnegal Chronicles

Christine Stewart, Editor-in-Chief of Del Sol Press, recipient of an Individual Artist Award in fiction from the Maryland State Arts Council, and writing teacher in the Johns Hopkins Odyssey program

Gregg Wilhelm, the co-founder of Woodholme Publishers, founder of the non-profit literary arts organization CityLit Project, and publisher of the CityLit Press imprint.

Recorded On: Saturday, November 18, 2017

Written by Dr. Lydia Kang, a practicing internal medicine physician, and Nate Pedersen, a librarian and historian, Quackery offers 67 tales of outlandish treatments complete with vintage illustrations, photographs, and advertisements of everything from the equipment needed for Tobacco Smoke Enemas (used to save drowning victims in the Thames River) to an ad for the morphine-laced Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup for children.

Looking back with fascination, horror, and dark humor, Quackery recounts the lively, at times unbelievable, history of medical misfires and malpractices. Ranging from the merely weird to the outright dangerous, here are dozens of outlandish, morbidly hilarious “treatments” -- conceived by doctors and scientists, by spiritualists and snake oil salesmen (yes, they literally tried to sell snake oil) -- that were predicated on a range of cluelessness, trial and error, and straight-up scams. Quackery seamlessly combines macabre humor with science and storytelling to reveal an important and disturbing side of the ever-evolving field of medicine.

Lydia Kang, MD, is a practicing internal medicine physician and author of young adult fiction and adult fiction. Her YA novels include Control, Catalyst, and the upcoming The November Girl. Her adult fiction debut is entitled A Beautiful Poison. Her nonfiction has been published in JAMA, the Annals of Internal Medicine, and the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

Nate Pedersen is a librarian, historian, and freelance journalist with over 400 publications in print and online, including in the Guardian, the Believer, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Art of Manliness. Nate is a contributing writer for the magazine Fine Books & Collections, where he investigates the strange and unusual side of the rare-book market. 

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund. 

Recorded On: Thursday, November 16, 2017