Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

Black History month is often relegated to a time when significant Black figures are highlighted and that Black people’s struggle for equality in America is emphasized. This rendering of Black History Month contributes to the dehumanization of Black people and undermines meaningful approaches to authentic empowerment of Black people. This event will address the relationship between the limits of mainstream approaches to honoring Black history, the challenges regarding education, and violence in the Black community. Presented by Dayvon Love, Director of Public Policy at Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle.Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle (LBS) is a grassroots think-tank which advances the public policy interest of Black people, in Baltimore, through: youth leadership development, political advocacy, and autonomous intellectual innovation.  Re-opening activities are made possible in part by a generous gift from Sandra R. Berman.Recorded On: Saturday, February 15, 2020

On the 10th anniversary of Lucille Clifton’s passing, join Enoch Pratt Free Library, the Clifton House, and Zora’s Den in a celebration of her generous spirit and writing. Writers will share poems and favorite memories of Lucille Clifton.Featured readers include:Abdul AliDiedre Badejo Linda Joy BurkeCarla Du PreeJessea GabbinJoanne GabbinMichael GlaserJalynn Harris Sharea HarrisZora’s Den (ZD) is a sacred space where Black women writers in search of encouragement and sisterhood can support one another in personal and professional growth. What started in January 2017, as an invitation-only Facebook group of twenty-two sister scribes, has grown to over two hundred women across the United States, and in various countries around the world. Zora’s Den welcomes and encourages its members to stand firmly in their identity as Black women writers.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 gi

Join Dr. Neal Barnard for a talk and demonstration of hormone balancing foods for the family inspired by his new book, Your Body in Balance: The New Science of Food, Hormones, and Health.Hidden in everyday foods are the causes of a surprising range of health problems: infertility, menstrual cramps, weight gain, hair loss, breast and prostate cancer, hot flashes, and much more. Few people realize that a simple food prescription can help you tackle all these and more by gently restoring your hormone balance, with benefits rivaling medications. Neal Barnard, MD, a leading authority on nutrition and health, offers insight into how dietary changes can alleviate years of stress, pain, and illness. Dr. Neal D. Barnard, FACC, is a faculty member of the George Washington University School of Medicine and President of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Dr. Barnard is editor-in-chief of the Nutrition Guide for Clinicians, a nutrition textbook given to all second-year medical students in the U.S. He is al

Caitlin Doughty is in conversation with author Sheri Booker.In Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?, Caitlin Doughty blends her mortician’s knowledge of the body and the intriguing history behind common misconceptions about corpses to offer factual, hilarious, and candid answers to thirty-five distinctive questions posed by her youngest fans.Caitlin Doughty is a mortician and the author of Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? as well as the New York Times best-selling books Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and From Here to Eternity. She is the creator of the “Ask a Mortician” web series and founder of The Order of the Good Death. She lives in Los Angeles, where she owns and runs a funeral home, Clarity Funerals.Sheri Booker is a poet, educator, and writer. A native of Baltimore, she spent nine years working in the funeral industry. She currently teaches writing and digital media at Morgan State University. Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund. Re-opening activiti

At once tragic and hopeful, The Birds of Opulence is a story about another time, rendered for our own. The Goode-Brown family, led by matriarch and pillar of the community Minnie Mae, is plagued by old secrets and embarrassment over mental illness and illegitimacy. Meanwhile, single mother Francine Clark is haunted by her dead, lightning-struck husband and forced to fight against both the moral judgment of the community and her own rebellious daughter, Mona. The residents of Opulence struggle with vexing relationships to the land, to one another, and to their own sexuality. As the members of the youngest generation watch their mothers and grandmothers pass away, they live with the fear of going mad themselves and must fight to survive.Crystal Wilkinson is the award-winning author of The Birds of Opulence (winner of the 2016 Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence), Water Street and Blackberries, Blackberries. Nominated for both the Orange Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, she has received reco

Featuring special guest, Reverend Al Hathaway from Union Bapist Church.Baltimore’s airport is named after Civil Rights giant Thurgood Marshall, and plaques in Fell’s Point show where Frederick Douglass took his stand against slavery and for equality. In addition to these well-known leaders, dozens of other Baltimoreans committed themselves to struggle for Civil Rights and helped shape The Movement locally and nationally. Reverend Harvey Johnson worked from Union Baptist Church on Druid Hill Avenue to create some of the first Civil Rights organizations in the country as early as the 1880s. Lillie Carroll Jackson, who headed Baltimore’s branch of the NAACP for 50 years, pioneered non-violent protest tactics that engaged young people. Clarence Mitchell led the NAACPs efforts to pass ground-breaking Civil Rights legislation in Congress in the 1960s. Baltimore Heritage has spent three years documenting Baltimore’s Civil Rights legacy for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. Join the organization’s

In their new book, The New Localism, urban experts Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak reveal where the real power to create change lies and how it can be used to address our most serious social, economic, and environmental challenges.Bruce Katz is the Founding Director of the Nowak Metro Finance Lab at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Previously he served as inaugural Centennial Scholar at Brookings Institution and as vice president and director of Brooking’s Metropolitan Policy Program for 20 years. He is a member of the RSA City Growth Commission in the United Kingdom and a Visiting Professor in Practice at London School of Economics. Katz previously served as chief of staff to the secretary of Housing and Urban Development and staff director of the Senate Subcommittee on Housing and Urban Affairs. Katz co-led the Obama administration’s housing and urban transition team. He is coauthor of The Metropolitan Revolution and The New Localism: How Cities Can Thrive in the Age of Populism, editor or coeditor of several

The panel will display Black Fathers/Father Figures in a light that they have rarely been shown in before, specifically in children's books. The discussion will highlight the abilities of Black Fathers and the super powers they possess: the ability to have a lifelong impact on our children. Featuring: Stephen McGill II, Sherman Barksdale, Kenji Jackson, Glen Mourning.Re-opening activities are made possible in part by a generous gift from Sandra R. Berman.Recorded On: Sunday, January 19, 2020

Join us for a conversation between creatives about Shinique Smith’s practice, and how growing up in Baltimore influenced her path as an artist. Shinique Smith is known for her monumental works of bundled fabric, calligraphy and collage inspired by the vast nature of ‘things’ that we consume and discard, which resonate on a spiritual and social scale. Her work demonstrates how connections can be made between materials in ways that challenge us to think differently about the life of our belongings. Based in Los Angeles, born and raised in Baltimore, Shinique Smith is an artist known for her monumental paintings and sculptures of  fabric, clothing, and calligraphy inspired by the wonder found within the vast nature of “things” we call belongings. Recent solo exhibitions include the California African American Museum, Museum of Fine Art, Boston; and an upcoming presentation with UBS Art Collection in Miami Art Basel and the UBS Art Gallery, NY. Her work is currently on view in Generations: A History of Black Abst

Taking us into detention centers, immigration courts, and the inner lives of Aida Hernandez and other daring characters, The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez reveals the human consequences of militarizing what was once a more forgiving border. With emotional force and narrative suspense, Aaron Bobrow-Strain brings us into the heart of a violently unequal America in this nonfiction account. He also shows us that the heroes of our current immigration wars are less likely to be perfect paragons of virtue than complex, flawed human beings who deserve justice and empathy all the same.Aaron Bobrow-Strain is a professor of politics at Whitman College, where he teaches courses dealing with food, immigration, and the U.S.-Mexico border. He is the author of White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf and Intimate Enemies: Landowners, Power, and Violence in Chiapas. In the 1990s, he worked on the U.S.-Mexico border as an activist and educator. He is a founding member of the Walla Walla Immigrant Rights Coalit

…and Other Disasters, the smart and moving collection of short fiction and poetry from acclaimed author Malka Older, examines otherness, identity and compassion across a spectrum of possible existence. In stories about an AI built for empathy, a corps of fighting midwives traveling to a new planet, and a young anthropologist who returns to study the cultures of a dying Earth, Older's characters grapple with what it means to belong and be othered, to cling to the past and face the future, all while navigating a precarious world, riddled with natural and man-made disasters.Malka Older is a writer, aid worker, and sociologist. Her science-fiction political thriller Infomocracy was named one of the best books of 2016 by Kirkus, Book Riot, and the Washington Post. With the sequels Null States (2017) and State Tectonics (2018), she completed the Centenal Cycle trilogy, a finalist for the Hugo Best Series Award of 2018. She is also the creator of the serial Ninth Step Station, currently running on Serial Box, and he

Join us for the annual Cave Canem poetry reading featuring Kyle Dargan and local Cave Canem fellows.Hosted by Reginald Harris from Poets House, New York City.Kyle Dargan is the author of the poetry collection Anagnorisis, which was awarded the 2019 Lenore Marshall Prize and longlisted for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His four previous collections, Honest Engine, Logorrhea Dementia, Bouquet of Hungers and The Listening–were all published by the University of Georgia Press. For his work, he has also received the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and grants from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Dargan has partnered with the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities to produce poetry programming at the White House and Library of Congress. He’s worked with and supports a number of youth writing organizations, such as 826DC, Writopia Lab, Young Writers Workshop and the Dodge Poetry high schools program. He is currently an Associate Professor of literature and Assi

This program is in conjunction with Undesign the Redline, exhibited at Central Library November 1, 2019-January 31, 2020.Lawrence Lanahan is the author of The Lines Between Us: Two Families and a Quest to Cross Baltimore’s Racial Divide. In his deeply reported, revelatory story, Lanahan chronicles how the Baltimore region became so highly segregated and why its fault lines persist today. Writing from the Fair Housing Act to the death of Freddie Gray and beyond, Lanahan describes epic efforts to desegregate the Baltimore region and deconcentrate poverty in West Baltimore. As Baltimoreans “cross the lines” in the book, one theme emerges repeatedly: the struggle for self-determination. During the attempted revitalization of 1990s Sandtown, for example, and during the protests following Freddie Gray’s death, neighborhood leaders in West Baltimore worked the lines trying to ensure that their communities remained in control of their own destiny.Lawrence Lanahan will speak with three Baltimoreans whose lives and wor

Rick Atkinson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning An Army at Dawn, has long been admired for his deeply researched, stunningly vivid narrative histories. Now he turns his attention to a new war, and in the initial volume of the Revolution Trilogy he recounts the first twenty-one months of America’s violent war for independence.Full of riveting details and untold stories, The British Are Coming is a tale of heroes and knaves, of sacrifice and blunder, of redemption and profound suffering. Rick Atkinson has given stirring new life to the first act of our country’s creation drama.Rick Atkinson is the bestselling author of the Liberation Trilogy―An Army at Dawn (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history), The Day of Battle, and The Guns at Last Light―as well as The Long Gray Line and other books. His many additional awards include a Pulitzer Prize for journalism, the George Polk Award, and the Pritzker Military Library Literature Award. A former staff writer and senior editor at The Washington Post,

Are you interested in getting your genre writing published? Do you want tips and tricks on how to become a published author or how to self-publish? Have you considered marketing strategies to become a successful writer? Then join us for a panel discussion and Q&A featuring local authors and editors.Panelists include:Sarah Pinsker, author of the novelette "Our Lady of the Open Road," winner of the Nebula Award, and over fifty other stories. Her first collection, Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea: Stories was published by Small Beer Press in March 2019, and her first novel, A Song For A New Day, was published by Berkley/Penguin/Random House in September 2019.Dave Ring, chair of the OutWrite LGBTQ Book Festival in Washington, DC. He has stories featured or forthcoming in a number of publications, including Speculative City, GlitterShip, and A Punk Rock Future. He is the publisher and managing editor of Neon Hemlock Press, as well as the editor of Broken Metropolis: Queer Tales of a City That Neve

Presented in partnership with Church of the Redeemer.The experience the first undergraduate women found when they stepped onto Yale's imposing campus was not the same one their male peers enjoyed. Isolated from one another, singled out as oddities and sexual objects, and barred from many of the privileges an elite education was supposed to offer, many of the first girls found themselves immersed in an overwhelmingly male culture they were unprepared to face. Yale Needs Women is the story of how these young women fought against the backward-leaning traditions of a centuries-old institution and created the opportunities that would carry them into the future. Anne Gardiner Perkins's unflinching account of a group of young women striving for change is an inspiring story of strength, resilience, and courage that continues to resonate today.Anne Gardiner Perkins is an award-winning historian and expert in higher education. She graduated from Yale University, where she won the Porter Prize in history and was elected

Kalman Hettleman will be in conversation with New York Times reporter Erica L. Green. They will discuss the education system and what can be done to improve the system.Kalman R. “Buzzy” Hettleman exposes the educational abuse suffered by tens of millions of struggling learners, including many who are “Mislabeled as Disabled” and dumped into special education. The majority of these students are not disabled in any medical or other clinical sense. Rather, in violation of federal law, they fail to receive proper instruction and fall farther behind, suffering stigma and segregation. Hettleman also shows how teachers are undervalued heroes denied the teaching tools to do the job right and, like students, are victimized by the system. This book is a call to everyone to become enraged, and then engaged in the struggle for reform.Kalman R. Hettleman is an acclaimed expert and author on special education and struggling learners. He has represented pro bono over 200 students and been instrumental in policy reforms at t

A Real Whole Lot: A World War II Soldier's Love Letters to His Wife contains about 200 transcribed v-mail letters and a dozen or so letters on paper found while Dr. Jacqueline Kane was going through family papers after both of her parents' deaths. The letters are largerly from her father to her mother while he was serving in the Army during World War II. In the pages of the book, in a manner seemingly long past, is an opportunity to share the feelings that the couple strove to communicate with each other during their separation at this unforgettable historical moment. Dr. Jacqueline A. Kane, better known as Dr. Jackie, was born and raised in Bronx, New York. She is active in numerous community and professional organizations, including the Association of Black Women in Higher Education, Inc. and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. 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 San

Dorothy Butler Gilliam, whose 50-year-career as a journalist put her in the forefront of the fight for social justice, offers a comprehensive view of racial relations and the media in the U.S.Told with a pioneering newspaper writer's charm and skill, Gilliam's full, fascinating life weaves her personal and professional experiences and media history into an engrossing tapestry. With the distinct voice of one who has worked for and witnessed immense progress and overcome heart-wrenching setbacks, this book covers a wide swath of media history--from the era of game-changing Negro newspapers like the Chicago Defender to the civil rights movement, feminism, and our current imperfect diversity. This timely memoir, which reflects the tradition of boot-strapping African American storytelling from the South, is a smart, contemporary consideration of the media.The Brown Lecture Series is supported by the Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Foundation.Re-opening activities are made possible in part by a generous gift from Sand

Before language existed to identify persons whose gender expression and/or sexuality were non-conforming, nineteenth and early twentieth century local newspapers offered tantalizing clues that all was not straight and narrow.  A few decades later, the late 1920s and early 1930s previewed the openness of recent times before giving way to a darker, more perilous era for LGBTQ+ people in the 1950s. After reviewing these twilight years, this program will look at the beginnings of the current movement toward LGBTQ+ visibility and rights. Presenters include Baltimore Heritage LGBTQ+ History Walking Tour guides, Richard Oloizia and Louis Hughes, Preservation Maryland Intern and EPFL Staff Member, Ben Egerman, and EPFL Maryland Department Librarian, Lisa Greenhouse.  Recorded On: Thursday, October 24, 2019