Aloud @ Los Angeles Public Library

In 1939, Union Station opened on the former site of Los Angeles’s original Chinatown—displacing thousands of Chinese and Chinese Americans. The new station fulfilled the vision of civic leaders who believed that an impressive gateway was critical to the growth of Los Angeles. In place of Chinatown, a distinctive Mission Revival station proudly stands as the centerpiece of our regional transportation system. Yet balances of power and political economies were disrupted; financial and legal battles raged on for years. This panel—including members of the Union Station Master Plan team, an architectural historian (and exhibition curator), and the vice-president of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California—will discuss the history of this architectural icon and share visions for its future.Presented in conjunction with the Getty Research Institute's exhibition of the same name in Central Library's Getty Gallery.*Click here to see photos from the program!

“Form is an Extension of Content,” wrote Charles Olson.  What is a writer’s relationship to form? Three accomplished, innovative and genre-crossing writers explore the power and influence of structure, starting with the sentence, in revealing and shaping their material. *Click here to see photos from the program!

On the occasion of her new memoir, one of America’s most beloved and accomplished classical singers shares her life story: a descendant of generations of hardworking slaves and free ancestors who grew up amid the challenges of Jim Crow racism in the south as the civil rights movement was at its nascence. Nurtured by a close family and a tight-knit community centered on the local church, Jessye Norman grew up singing songs and spirituals within a tight-knit community. Decades later, after a meteoric rise at the Berlin Opera, a debut at the Metropolitan Opera and forays into blues, jazz and other roots music she has become one of America’s cultural treasures. Join us for an evening with an inspiring artist who has lead an astonishing life.*Click here to see photos from the program!

Whitehead, the bestselling author of Zone One and an amateur player, lucked into a seat at the biggest card game in town—the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. In this raucous social satire—equally exhilarating for those who’ve played cards their whole life or who have never picked up a hand—he chronicles the gritty subculture of high-stakes Texas Hold-em.*Click here to see photos from the program!

One of America’s most talented pianists (Musical America’s 2014 Instrumentalist of the Year), and thought-provoking writers on music, Jeremy Denk (2014 Ojai Music Festival Music Director) expounds upon the magic of music making—from learning how to practice and the daily rites of discovery, to the mastery of reasoning with your muscles and the sheer joy of no longer needing to think. Denk illuminates the paradox of seeking perfection while full knowing the possibilities are infinite.*Click here to see photos from the program!

The Poetry of America’s 2014 national series The Voice of Women in American Poetry celebrates an enormous literary heritage. Distinguished contemporary poets—both male and female—will gather in five cities around the country to pay tribute to the immense achievement of a wide range of poets, from Phyllis Wheatley and Anne Bradstreet to Adrienne Rich and Lucille Clifton.  In Los Angeles, join poets Marilyn Chin on Ai, Toi Derricotte on Anne Sexton and Percival Everett on Gertrude Stein.  

What are the ideas, forms, questions, syntaxes, images, and narratives of our immediate future? Who better as our compass in the wilds of the now than emerging writers? Join students from five Southland graduate writing programs—CalArts, Otis College, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, and USC—as they share recent writings and tune our ears to the future of language. *Click HERE to see photos from the program!

In the summer of 1998, Kirn—then an aspiring novelist struggling with impending fatherhood and a dissolving marriage—set out on a peculiar, fateful errand: to personally deliver a crippled hunting dog from his home in Montana to the New York apartment of one Clark Rockefeller, a secretive young banker and art collector who had adopted the dog over the Internet. In this true and chilling story of a writer being duped by a real-life Mr. Ripley, Kirn invites us into the fun-house world of an eccentric son of privilege who would one day be unmasked as a serial impostor and a brutal double-murderer. *Click HERE to see photos from the program!

Join us in a celebration of Bark, a new collection of stories (the first in fifteen years, since Birds of America) by one of America’s most beloved and admired short-story writers. With her singular wisdom and in her inimitable voice—“fluid, cracked, mordant, colloquial” (The New York Times Book Review)—Moore plumbs the public and private absurdities of American life in a heartrending mash-up of the tragic and the hilarious. *Click HERE to see photos from the program!

How do you write/convey/film the story of a visionary figure with tragic flaws who founded a labor union, launched a movement, and inspired a generation? Biographer Miriam Pawel, playwright/director Luis Valdez (Teatro Campesino) lend their perspective on the crusades of an unlikely American hero who ignited one of the great social movements of our time.

From the MacArthur Award-winning writer, comes a subtle and quietly devastating new novel about love, exile and the fragmentation of lives that straddle countries and histories. All Our Names is a tale of friendship between two young men who come of age during an African revolution and the emotional and physical boundaries that tear them apart--one drawn into peril, the other into the safety of the American Midwest. In this political novel, Mengestu presents a portrait of love and grace, of self-determination, of the names we are given and the names we earn. *Click here to see photos from the program!

In 2009, three American hikers (and UC Berkeley grads) hiking in Iraqi Kurdistan unknowingly crossed into Iran and were captured by a border patrol. Accused of espionage, they were incarcerated in Tehran’s infamous Evin Prison—Sarah, for fourteen months and Josh and Fattal, for two long years. This poignant memoir is their story, as told through a bold and innovative interweaving of the authors’ three voices that recounts the psychological torment of interrogation and the collective strength of will that kept them alive. *Click here to see photos from the program!

This National Book Award-winning account illuminates the erosion of the social compact --the collapse of farms, factories, public schools--that had kept the United States stable and middle class since the late 1970s. In The Great Unwinding, Packer probes the seething undercurrents of American life, offering an intimate look into the lives that have been transformed by the dissolution of our economic glue. From unchecked banks to the rise of Walton's Walmart, this retelling of American history through Packer's voice offers “…a sad but delicious jazz-tempo requiem for the post-World War II American social contract.” (David M. Kennedy) *Click here to see photos from the program!

Imagine that Plato came to life in the twenty-first century and embarked on a multicity speaking tour. How would he handle the host of a cable news program who denies there can be morality without religion? How would he mediate a debate between a Freudian psychoanalyst and a tiger mom on how to raise the perfect child? Philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein provides an original plunge into the drama of philosophy, revealing its hidden role in today’s debates on religion, morality, politics, and science. Does philosophy itself ever make progress? And if it does, why is so ancient a figure as Plato of any continuing relevance? Plato at the Googleplex is Goldstein’s startling investigation into these conundra. *Click here to see photos from the program!

In this revelatory study of Muslim youth movements that have emerged in cities around the world in the years since 9/11 and in the wake of the Arab Spring, Aidi illuminates the unexpected connections between urban marginality, music, and political mobilization.  By examining both secular and religiously-fueled movements as a means of protest against the policies of the “War on Terror,” he explains how certain kinds of music—particularly hip hop, but also jazz, Gnawa, Andalusian, Judeo-Arabic, Latin, and others—have come to represent a heightened racial identity and a Muslim consciousness that crisscrosses the globe.*Click here to see photos from the program!

On February 21, 2012, five young women entered the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow wearing neon-colored dresses, tights, and balaclavas to perform a “punk prayer” beseeching the “Mother of God” to “get rid of Putin.” What transformed a group of young women into artists with a shared vision, and what gave them the courage to express that vision and to deal with the subsequently devastating outcomes? Through the trial of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot, Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen, author of Putin: The Man Without a Face, tells a larger story about Vladimir Putin’s Russia, with its state-controlled media, pervasive corruption, and pliant judiciary. *Click here to see photos from the program!

Artist Jeff Koons and filmmaker/author/photographer John Waters discuss Koon’s innovative and ever-changing art making practice, which ranges from sculpture to painting to digital media. Like Waters, Koons’s art comments on the notion of “good taste,” as well as the decadence of capitalist culture, the innocence of childhood, and beauty’s eternal resonance. Waters will speak with Koons about the inspiration and ideas behind his iconic works such as Michael Jackson and Bubbles, Balloon Dog (Blue), and Girl with Dolphin and Monkey Triple Popeye (Seascape), all of which are part of the Broad's collection.*Click HERE to see photos from the program! 

Walter Mosley, one of America’s most admired crime novelists joins one of its newest stars – Attica Locke – for a conversation about noir, race and writing in and from Los Angeles. Presented in collaboration with the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, the evening kicks off Tales from Two Cities: Writing from California, a free two-day conference at the downtown Central Library spotlighting the writers who help define Los Angeles as a place with a language, culture, and aesthetic all its own.

Frenkel, one of the 21st century’s leading mathematicians, works on one of the biggest ideas to come out of mathematics in the last 50 years: the Langlands Program. In his lyrical autobiography, he reveals a side of math we’ve never seen, suffused with all the metaphysical beauty and elegance of a work of art. Known for his controversial erotic film about math, Frenkel believes a mathematical formula can carry a charge of love. Frenkel is joined by screenwriter and “The X-Files” creator Chris Carter to discuss how mathematics reaches to the heart of all matter, uniting us across culture, time, and space. *Click here to see photos from the program!

William Burroughs was the original cult figure of the Beat Movement, author of Naked Lunch, and influence to scores of artists, writers, and musicians. For the centennial celebration of Burroughs’ birth, beat historian and biographer Barry Miles discusses the long-term cultural legacy of Burroughs and his literary risk-taking. Click here to see photos from the program!