Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

Since drawing her first Sylvia strip in 1979, the nationally syndicated cartoonist Nicole Hollander has channeled her ascerbic wit and razor-sharp sensibilities through the incomparable and irascible Sylvia, a Chicago original whose hilarious commentary on American life has won over millions of readers. Charting 30 years of fashion, food, sexual mores, and political hypocrisy, The Sylvia Chronicles is nothing less than a jaded history of our times.Nicole Hollander has published 16 collections of Sylvia strips, as well as Female Problems and My Cat's Not Fat, He's Just Big-Boned.Recorded On: Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Poet Lucille Clifton was a mentor, friend, and teacher to scores of writers in Maryland and around the country. Clifton served as Poet Laureate for the State of Maryland and was Distinguished Professor of Humantities at St. Mary's College of Maryland. She received the National Book Award for her poetry collection, Blessing the Boats (2000). Clifton wrote more than 16 books for children. She served as trustee of the Enoch Pratt Free Library from 1975 to 1984.Join us for this celebration of the life of Lucille Clifton. Poets from Baltimore and around the state will raise their voices to honor the memory of Clifton's life and works. We invite you to bring your favorite Lucille Clifton poem to share.Recorded On: Thursday, June 24, 2010

Join us for a morning of dynamic speakers, and stimulating conversation with experts, educators and service providers committed to eradicating intergenerational illiteracy, addressing the learning differences that challenge low literacy adults and promoting lifelong reading and learning.The Moderator was Marcy Kolodny leading a panel including: Ulysses D. Archie Jr., Kalman R. Hettleman and   Ben Shifrin.Why Can't Grandma Read: Intergenerational Illiteracy in Baltimore was a conference presented by the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore Reads, Inc., and the Dyslexia Tutoring Program.Recorded On: Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Food writer Novella Carpenter tells how she turned a vacant lot in one of the worst parts of Oakland, California, into a working mini-farm, complete with vegetables, herbs, chickens, ducks and bees. Her success led to raising rabbits and pigs as well, plus a month-long plan to eat from her own garden. Carpenter's farm is now 10 years old, and her neighbors still think she's crazy!Novella Carpenter grew up in Idaho and Washington, graduated from the University of Washington, and studied with Michael Pollan at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. Her writing has appeared in Salon.com, Saveur.com, sfgate.com, and Mother Jones.Recorded On: Wednesday, June 9, 2010

The never-say-die actress/singer/icon opens up and lets the world into her life to witness her triumphs, failures, challenges, and loves -- which include the likes of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Freddie Prinze, Sr., and Richard Pryor. She also talks in detail about a couple of well-heeled mystery suitors. This saga of one of the world's most beautiful women, and the overcoming every hurdle that gets in her way, will bring tears and cheers as she survives everything, even a bout with cancer.Pam Grier began her acting career and achieved fame in the early 1970s when she starred in a number of popular films including Coffy, Foxy Brown, and Sheba Baby. In the 1980s, she worked alongside Paul Newman in Fort Apache: The Bronx, starred in Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, and earned an NAACP Image Award for Best Actress in a play, Fool for Love by Sam Shepard. In the 1990s her performance as the title character in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown earned her nominations for Best Actress from the Hollywood Fore

Dr. Hubert G. Locke will discuss the Holocaust and Jewish-Christian relations. Dr. Locke is Provost Emeritus for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Evan School of Public Affairs, University of Washington, Seattle, and member of the Committee on Church Relations and the Holocaust at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.Dr. Locke's appearance in Baltimore is sponsored by the Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies and the Committee on Church Relations and the Holocaust, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.Partners include: Associated Black Charities; THE ASSOCIATED: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore; Baltimore Community Foundation; and Open Society Institute-Baltimore.  Recorded On: Thursday, June 24, 2010

Two boys from Baltimore with the same name -- one becomes the first African American Rhodes Scholar ever from Johns Hopkins University while the other boy serves a life sentence in prison. Violence, drugs, single mothers, uninformed choices, all played critical roles in their development, but they have radically different futures.Wes Moore wrote to the other Wes Moore in prison, the beginning of a deepening relationship consisting of letters and visits. Wes Moore served as an Army Officer in Afghanistan and worked as a special assistant to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He works as an investment professional in New York.Recorded On: Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Since January, 2000, the online journal Beltway Poetry Quarterly has showcased the richness and diversity of authors who live or work in the Washington, DC area. Beltway has published academic, spoken word, and experimental authors, as well as poets whose work defies categorization.Joining editor Kim Roberts will be poets Holly Bass, Grace Cavalieri, Tina Darragh, Joel Dias-Porter, Daniel Gutstein, and Merrill Leffler. Hosted by Reginald Harris, poet and author of 10 Tongues.Recorded On: Wednesday, May 12, 2010

In the first comprehensive, single-volume biography since David Herbert Donald's in 1996, Ronald White offers a fresh definition of Lincoln as a man of integrity whose moral compass holds the key to understanding his life. Using newly available resources such as the Lincoln Legal Papers and recently discovered letters and photographs, White shows Lincoln's personal, political and moral evolution.Ronald C. White, Jr. is the author of two bestselling books on Abraham Lincoln: The Eloquent President and Lincoln's Greatest Speech, a New York Times Notable Book. White earned his Ph.D. at Princeton and has lectured on Lincoln at hundreds of universities and organizations, at Gettysburg and the White House. He is a Fellow at the Huntington Library and a visiting professor of history at UCLA.www.ronaldcwhitejr.comRecorded On: Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Against the backdrop of today's increasingly multicultural society, are America's elite colleges admitting and succeessfully educating a diverse student body?Thomas Espenshade, professor of sociology at Princeton University, pulls back the curtain on the selective college experience and takes a rigorous and comprehensive look at how race and social class impact application and admission, enrollment, and student life on campus. Based on data provided by the National Survey of College Experience and more than 9,000 student interviews, Espenshade and coauthor Alexandria Walton Radford discover that students from different racial and social classes do not mix as one might expect.Recorded On: Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Immediately after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Baltimore's liberal school board voted to desegregate and adopted a free choice policy that made integration voluntary. Baltimore's school desegregation proceeded peacefully, without the resistance or violence that occurred elsewhere. However, few whites chose to attend school with blacks, and after a few years of modest desegregation, schools resegregated and became increasingly segregated. The school board never changed its policy. Black leaders had urged the board to adopt free choice, and, despite the limited desegregation, continued to support the policy and never sued the board to do anything else.Howell S. Baum is professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Maryland. He is the author most recently of Community Action for School Reform and The Organization of Hope: Communities Planning.Recorded On: Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, and professor at New York University School of Law, and Renee Hutchins, professor at the University of Maryland School of Law, will discuss how race affects attitudes and outcomes in the criminal justice system.Part of "Talking About Race," a year-long speaker series, presented in partnership with Open Society Institute-Baltimore.Recorded On: Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Stanley Plumly has written six collections of poetry, including The Marriage in the Trees and Out-of-the-Body Travel (1977) which won the William Carlos Williams Award and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His most recent book is Argument & Song: Sources & Silences in Poetry. Plumly edited the Ohio Review (1970-75) and the Iowa Review (1976-78). He has taught at Louisiana State University, Ohio University, Princeton, Columbia, and the Universities of Iowa, Michigan and Houston, as well as at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill Foundation Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Plumly is professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park.Recorded On: Saturday, April 17, 2010

Masha Hamilton is the author of four novels, most recently 31 Hours (2009), a Washington Post selection for one of the best novels of the year and an Indie Choice pick by independent booksellers. Her previous novels include Staircase of a Thousand Steps, The Distance Between Us, and The Camel Bookmobile. A former foreign correspondent, Hamilton is the founder of two world literacy programs: the Camel Book Drive, begun in 2007, and the Afghan Women's Writing Project, begin in 2009 to foster creative and intellectual exchange between Afghan women writers and American women authors and teachers. She teaches for Gotham Writers' Workshop and has taught at the 92nd Street Y in New York City and at other writers' workshops around the country.Thrity Umrigar's most recent novel is The Weight of Heaven, published in 2009. She is the author of three other novels -- The Space Between Us, If Today Be Sweet, and Bombay Time -- and the memoir First Darling of the Morning. A journalist for 17 years, Umrigar is the winner of

Reginald Harris serves as host for readings by these poets:Ron Egatz, Beneath Stars Long Extinct (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE3DE103CF933A15750C0A9639C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all);John Murillo, Up Jump the Boogie (http://www.myspace.com/johnmurillo);Paul Nelson, A Time Before Slaughter (http://www.americansentences.com/paul-nelson.html);January G. O'Neil, Underlife (http://poetmom.blogspot.com/); andShelley Puhak, Stalin in Aruba (www.shelleypuhak.com) Recorded On: Saturday, April 17, 2010

Nearly half of all young black men in America are behind bars, on parole or probation. Legal scholars Michelle Alexander and Paul Butler argue that the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a system of racial control, targeting black men and decimating communities of color.In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans -- employment and housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote and educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion of jury service.Paul Butler's book, Let's Get Free: A Hip Hop Theory of Justice, offers a powerful new vision of

Baltimore is the setting for this examination of bigotry and residential segregation. Antero Pietila shows how continued discrimination practices toward African Americans and Jews has shaped the cities in which we live.Eugenics, racial thinking, and white supremacist attitudes influenced even the federal government's actions toward housing in the 20th century. The Federal Housing Administration continued discriminatory housing policies even into the 1960s, long after civil rights legislation. This all-American tale is told through the prism of Baltimore, from its early suburbanization in the 1880s to the consequences of "white flight" after World War II and into the first decade of the 21st century. Pietila's narrative centers on the human side of residential real estate practices, whose discriminatory tools were the same everywhere: restrictive covenants, redlining, blockbusting, predatory lending.Antero Pietila spent 35 years as a reporter with the Baltimore Sun, most of it covering the city's neighborhoods

Through a series of fictional episodes about a small Midwestern town, Jabari Asim brings into focus how the tumultuous events of 1968 affected real people's lives. The 16 connected stories are set in one of the most turbulent years in modern history, 1968, in the fictional town of South Gateway, where second-generation offspring of the Great Migrators have pieced together a thriving if uneasy existence. Centered on the lives of a diverse cast of well-drawn characters, the stories evoke a uniquely American epoch. With police brutality on the rise, the civil rights movement gaining momentum, and wars raging at home and abroad, the community Asim has conjured stands on edge.Jabari Asim is the author of What Obama Means, The N Word, and several books for children. He is a scholar-in-residence at the University of Illinois and editor-in-chief of The Crisis. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Essence, Ebony, and other publications. He recently was honored wit

Young urban black men are overwhelmingly the victims and perpetrators of violent crime in the U.S. Troubled by this tragedy -- and his medical colleagues apparent numbness in the face of it -- Dr. Rich, a black man who grew up in relative comfort, reached out to many of these young patients to learn why they lived in a seemingly endless cycle of violence and how it affected them.Dr. John A. Rich is the chair of and a professor in the Department of Health Management and Policy at the Drexel University School of Public Health, where he is also the director of the Center of Academic Public Health Practice. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2006 and is the former medical director of the Boston Public Health Commission and the Young Men's Health Clinic in Boston.Joining Dr. Rich at this program: Roy Martin, a senior youth development specialist in the Youth Development Network, Boston Public Health Commission. He helps connect young men with health and social services they desperately need. Previously Martin work

Five women writers from various regions of the globe discuss the voice and role of women past, present and future, on the page and living life as only women can. The conversation will be moderated by Linda A. Duggins, Hachette Book Group (pictured.) Authors include:Connie May Fowler, How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly (Grand Central Publishing)Iris Gomez, Try to Remember (Grand Central Publishing)Elizabeth Nunez, Anna-In-Between (Akashic Press)Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Wench (Amistad/HarperCollins)Tiphanie Yanique, How to Escape From a Leper Colony (Graywolf Press) Connie May Fowler is an award-wining novelist, memoirist, and screenwriter. She is the author of seven books, including her new novel, How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly, which will be released in April. Her books have received the Chautauqua South Literary Award, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, and the Francis Buck Award; three of her novels have been Dublin International Literary Award nominees. (www.conniemayfowler.com) Iris Gomez is the aut