Aloud @ Los Angeles Public Library

Award-winning Los Angeles-based visual artist Alison Saar explores her own artistic practice and that of the Luba people of Central Africa with African art scholar and curator Polly Nooter Roberts. Using memory and the use of the female body as a mnemonic for social and political history, they explore race and gender through this conversation on artistic form.*Click here to see photos from the program!

Kennedy—a Harvard Law professor, former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and author of the New York Times best-seller Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word—ponders the future of affirmative action and offers a definitive reckoning with one of the most explosively contentious and sharply divisive issues in American society.*Click here to see photos from the program!

Wilson: An Intimate PortraitA. Scott BergIn conversation with Jim Newton, editor-at-large, LA TimesPulitzer Prize-winning biographer A. Scott Berg clears away myths and misconceptions in this penetrating portrait of one of America’s most influential yet often misunderstood presidents. This deeply emotional study reflects the whole of Wilson’s life, accomplishments and failings- from designing the ill-fated League of Nations, using his trailblazing ideas that paved the way for the New Deal, to his denouement as a politician whose partisan battles left him a broken man. *Click here to see photos from the event!

Co-presented with The BroadThe Un-Private Collection: A New Museum for Los AngelesEli and Edythe Broad with Joanne HeylerIn conversation with Inge Reist, director, The Frick Collection's Center for the History of CollectingLos Angeles is a city of renowned private collections that have become public museums: The Getty, the Hammer, the Norton Simon, The Huntington, and soon, The Broad. Consisting of over 2,000 artworks by established and emerging international artists, The Broad will add significantly to the contemporary art holdings on view to the Southern California public. Inge Reist will lead a discussion with the Broads and The Broad museum director Joanne Heyler about how their aesthetic tastes and social and political viewpoints have informed their collection as well as the decision to build a new museum as an investment in downtown’s Grand Avenue and the cultural life of Los Angeles.*Click here to see photos from the program!

The Blank Page: Literature, Hip-Hop and FreedomMK AsanteIn conversation with Jeff Chang, author and director, Institute for Diversity in the Arts, Stanford UniversityIn MK Asante’s new memoir Buck, the award-winning writer, filmmaker, poet and professor scripts his rise from Philadelphia dealer and delinquent to the passionate and driven artist he is today. To share his powerful story of redemption, Asante sits down to rap with Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, on how he was transformed by the most unconventional teachers and the freedom to create on the blank page. *Click here to see photos from the program!

What might our city look like if the master plans of prominent architects had been brought to fruition? This panel—including architects, an architectural curator and the L.A. Times’ architecture critic-- looks at those visionary works, which held great potential to re-form Los Angeles, yet were undermined by institutions and infrastructure. Can L.A.’s civic future be shaped from these unrealized lessons of the past? *Click here to see photos from the program!

In March of 1928, the St. Francis Dam north of Los Angeles—designed by William Mulholland as a reservoir for the California Aqueduct—collapsed. The largest engineering disaster in California history is inextricably woven into the epic history of water in Los Angeles. In this centennial year of the California Aqueduct, join us for a discussion of the St. Francis tragedy and its enduring catastrophic and cultural significance. *Click here to see photos from the program!

The recently published Songs in the Key of Los Angeles showcases the rich sheet music collection of the Los Angeles Public Library, and is the fruit of a collaboration between USC Professor Kun, his students and the Library Foundation. Join us for a night of rare L.A. musical history, in which the Los Angeles Public Library’s sheet music archive will come alive in story and song when Kun is joined by beloved, GRAMMY-winning Los Angeles band Quetzal. *Click here to see photos from the program!

 Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:To make a poet black, and bid him sing!Countee Cullen (1925)In this Los Angeles segment of the Poetry Society of America’s 2013 national series, three distinguished poets will celebrate the lives and poetry of major 20th century figures— James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, and Gwendolyn Brooks-—discussing their influence, and reading poems of their own in tribute.*Click here to see photos from the program! 

In his newest book, Senegal Taxi, California’s Poet Laureate—and teacher and activist—turns his gaze to Africa. For this special evening, Herrera invites two talented younger poets to join him for a foray into what he calls: “the Plankton-like, Picasso-Like, Kandinsky-like chromatics of heart fire, short line enlightenment meditations… double shocked to the present life of what is going on in our diagonal world, war here, peace there—making it all right with these oceanic voices.” *Click here to see photos from the program!

On the morning of November 7, 1938, a seventeen-year-old Jewish refugee, Herschel Grynszpan, walked into the German embassy in Paris and assassinated Ernst vom Rath, a low-level Nazi diplomat. Two days later, the Third Reich exploited the murder to inaugurate its long-planned campaign of terror against Germany’s Jewish citizens—what became known as Kristallnacht. On the seventy-fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht, Kirsch— lawyer and bestselling author—unpacks the moral dimensions of one of the most enigmatic cases of World War II. *Click here to see photos from the program!

Imagine a rain-soaked Beckett knocks on your door with a new manuscript. What was it like to collaborate with, publish, and know the genius? Seaver (who with her husband discovered and published Beckett’s early work) and Mandell (an actor directed by the playwright himself) team up to read both Beckett’s work and the Seavers’ memoir about the golden age of publishing—and to discuss how the unconventional writer came to be revered by audiences everywhere. *Click here to see photos from the program!

The award-winning author of Half a Yellow Sun delivers a powerful new story of love and culture clash between two Nigerian friends across several decades and three different continents—keenly observing race, identity, and belonging in today’s globalized world. *Click here to see photos from the program!

Fifteen years ago, in Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson, critically acclaimed poet, essayist, translator and classics professor, wrote about a boy named Geryon and his love affair with Herakles. In her newest work Red Doc>, Carson revisits these characters in later life, yet creates a dreamlike offshoot, abandoning her previous style and narrative threads while moving towards the perilous edge of living past the end of one’s myth.*Click here to see photos from the program!

Holt, an irreverent detective of metaphysics and science, dives deep into conversation with Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll, to try and answer the most persistent mystery of existence: Why should there be a universe at all, and why are we a part of it? why is there Something rather than Nothing? Join us for a discussion of time, infinity, consciousness, the multiverse, and the haunting possibility of Absolute Nothingness.*Click here to see photos from the program!

Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues and the new memoir In the Body of the World, discusses the female body and the world’s responsibility to protect it with Jody Williams, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for her work banning landmines.  Williams’ memoir, My Name is Jody Williams, promotes civil society's power to help change the world. These two remarkable women discuss activism, their collaboration on ending violence against women, and bringing women together through the International Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict and One Billion Rising. *Click here to see photos from the program!

Weaving her own experience with remarkable new discoveries, Grandin brings her singular perspective to the thrilling journey through the revolution in the understanding of autism. She introduces advances in neuroimaging and genetic research that link brain science to behavior, even sharing her own brain scans from numerous studies. *Click here to see photos from the program!

Basking in the golden age of the graphic novel, a group of talented visual artists teamed up to adapt the greatest literature of all time. The Graphic Canon, a visual literary anthology, is a three-volume epic that spans from Greek tragedy to David Foster Wallace. Join us for a look at this stunning work with the editor and illustrators of Zora Neale Hurston, Thomas Pynchon and more, as they unlock the literary canon for a new generation of readers. *Click here to see pictures from the event!

Co-presented with LéaLA, Feria del Libro en Español de Los ÁngelesThe Making of the Great Bolaño: The Man and the MythPanel discussion with author Ben Ehrenreich; Barbara Epler, president, New Directions; author Mónica Maristain; and poet-translator David ShookModerated by Héctor Tobar, staff writer, Los Angeles Times"Books are the only homeland of the true writer, books that may sit on shelves or in the memory," wrote Roberto Bolaño. Ten years after his death, the legacy of Chilean author Roberto Bolaño lives not just in his poetry and prose, but also in the myth that surrounds a man who has come to define 21st century Latin American literature. This panel delves into the Bolaño mystique, convening the voices that have engaged both with his words and his ghosts. *Click here to see photos from the program!

In 1983, Granta devoted an entire issue to new fiction by 20 of the ‘Best of Young British Novelists,’ and did so again 10 years later. From Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, to Zadie Smith, these lists have offered a revealing snapshot of a generation of writers about to come into their own. Join us for a reading and discussion with some of Britain’s best, including a judge of the 2013 series and this year’s newly announced novelists.*Click here to see photos from the program!