ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library

In this #1 New York Times bestseller, Michael Pollan offers a mind-bending investigation into the medical and scientific revolution taking place around psychedelic drugs—and the spellbinding story of his own life-changing psychedelic experiences as he set out to research the active ingredients in magic mushrooms. Blending science, memoir, travel writing, history, and medicine, How to Change Your Mind is a triumph of participatory journalism through Pollan’s discovery of how these remarkable substances are improving the lives not only of the mentally ill, but also of healthy people coming to grips with the challenges of everyday life. Sharing his deep dive into altered states of consciousness, Pollan discusses this unexpected new frontier in our understanding of the mind, the self, and our place in the world.

In an impassioned call to action for elites and everyday citizens alike, former New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas shines a light on the shady side of philanthropy. Winners Take All offers a scathing investigation of how the global elite’s efforts to “change the world” preserve the status quo and obscure their role in causing the problems they later seek to solve. This bestselling groundbreaking book poses many hard questions like: Why should our gravest problems be solved by the unelected upper crust instead of the public institutions it erodes by lobbying and dodging taxes? Giridharadas shares with us some of his bold answers, including how we must take on the grueling democratic work of building more robust, egalitarian institutions to truly change the world.

Rachel Cusk is an international literary superstar. Her most recent trilogy–Outline, Transit, and Kudos–draws its hero, Faye, through a collage of vignettes. Through tales told by the people Faye encounters–an airline companion, a disgruntled neighbor, and a fellow writer, among others–Faye’s own haunting past is stealthily revealed, making for an artful and hypnotic reading experience. “After her controversial memoirs of motherhood and marriage, the writer has a new design for fiction,” writes Judith Thurman in the New Yorker in a profile titled “Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel.” Now, the UK-based writer brings the work that has captivated the writing (and reading) community to Los Angeles for a rare Stateside reading and conversation.

On the heels of one of last year’s boldest, most celebrated novels, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, join us to hear from Ottessa Moshfegh for a celebration of a new edition of her groundbreaking debut novella, McGlue. Set in Salem, Massachusetts, 1851—the same year as the publication of Moby Dick—McGlue follows the foggy recollections of a hard-drinking seafarer who may or may not have killed his best friend. Discussing her sharply observational body of work that illuminates the exhilaratingly dark psychologies of wayward characters, Moshfegh will share the stage with Amanda Stern, the author of Little Panic, a fiercely funny new memoir on anxiety.

As the Executive Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Joel Simon spends his time taking action on behalf of journalists who are targeted, attacked, imprisoned, or killed. He is an expert on how countries around the world handle the kidnapping of their nationals, including how they analyze and respond to intelligence and provide support for the hostage families. At a time when journalists are in greater danger than ever before, Simon’s newest book draws on his extensive experience interviewing former hostages, their families, employers, and policy makers to lay out a new approach to hostage negotiation. He is joined onstage by Sewell Chan, deputy managing editor at the Los Angeles Times, as well as Federico Motka, an Italian aid worker who spent a year as a hostage of Isis in Syria.

What might Marilyn Monroe, Cesar Chavez, Susan Sontag, Albert Einstein have to say about Los Angeles?  Their diary entries, along with those of other actors, musicians, activists, cartographers, students, geologists, cooks, merchants, journalists, politicians, composers, and many more—provide a kaleidoscopic view of Los Angeles over the past four centuries, from the Spanish missionary expeditions of the 16th century to the present day. Book editor, critic and Los Angeles native David Kipen has scoured the archives of libraries, historical societies, and private estates to assemble a remarkably eclectic story of life in his beloved Los Angeles. Join us for a special staged reading of these first person accounts—representing a range of experiences and voices as diverse as Los Angeles itself. 

Bestselling author Reyna Grande’s newest memoir, A Dream Called Home, offers an inspiring account of one woman’s quest to find her place in America as a first-generation Latina university student and then pursue her dream of writing. Award-winning writer Jean Guerrero’s Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir tries to locate the border between truth and fantasy as she explores her troubled father’s life as an immigrant battling with self-destructive behavior. Octavio Solis, one of the most prominent Latino playwrights in America, turns to nonfiction in Retablos: Stories From a Life Lived Along the Border, a new collection of stories about growing up brown at the U.S./Mexico border. At this most urgent time of family separation through borders, join us for a unique evening of storytelling as we welcome these three fierce voices to share from their work that breaks down the walls of the immigrant experience. 

The Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur-winning photojournalist and New York Times bestselling author Lynsey Addario has captured audiences with her highly compelling and beautifully harrowing photographs from war zones across the globe. With her uncanny ability to emotionally connect with her subjects and to personalize even the most remote corners and unimaginable circumstances, Addario offers a stunning new selection of work from the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa that documents life in Afghanistan under the Taliban, the stark truth of sub-Saharan Africa, and the daily reality of women in the Middle East. Of Love and War weaves Addario’s dramatic photographs with revelatory essays from fellow journalists such as Dexter Filkins, Suzy Hansen, and Lydia Polgreen, as well as her own letters, emails, and journal entries to illuminate the conflict facing people around the world today. Discussing this new book with an interlocutor, Addario will share images that capture a profound sense of humanity on the battlefield—and her own quest as a photojournalist to document injustice.  

Who do you think you are? What do you think you are? These questions of gender, religion, race, nationality, class, culture, and all our polarizing, contradictory natures permeate Kwame Anthony Appiah’s newest book. In The Lies That Bind, Appiah, the author of the Ethicist column for the New York Times, challenges our assumptions of identities—or rather mistaken identities. Njideka Akunyili Crosby, a MacArthur Award-winning Nigerian born visual artist who lives in Los Angeles, meshes painting, printmaking, photography, and collage to create large-scale mixed media works bursting with multinational perspectives. Speaking with the Hammer Museum’s Erin Christovale about 21st century identity politics and the appropriation of culture, Appiah and Crosby will share from their own work to consider how our collective identities shape—and can bring together—our divisive world. 

Join us for a special program on the 25th anniversary of the reopening of the Los Angeles Central Library that brings home the inspiring story of how Central Library rose from the ashes after the catastrophic fire of April 29, 1986. In a new book by New Yorker staff writer and author of seven books, including Rin Tin Tin and The Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean offers a profoundly moving cultural history of the Los Angeles Public Library and its critical civic role since its inception in 1872. Reexamining the unsolved mystery of the biggest library fire in American history that destroyed or damaged more than one million books, Orlean investigates if someone purposefully set fire to the Library—and if so, who? Through this behind-the-scenes look at the Los Angeles Public Library system, Orlean weaves her life-long love of books and reading with the fascinating legacy of libraries across the world. In a conversation with author and Library Foundation Board Member Attica Locke and a surprise librarian guest, Orleans shares from The Library Book—a testament to the importance of all libraries and an homage to a beloved institution that remains a vital part of the heart, mind, and soul of our community today.

Technology has made possible new forms of transnational investigative journalism and fueled the rise of new digital media organizations in the US and around the world. Yet more journalists are imprisoned around the world than at any time in recent history; censorship is on the rise; and government-run disinformation campaigns are undermining public understanding and fueling distrust in the media. Two leading figures in global journalism help make sense of this confusing and contradictory environment, and discuss how their organizations find unique opportunities to make an impact within this challenging and ever-changing landscape. Gerard Ryle is the director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which collaborates teams of journalists to pursue groundbreaking investigations, like the Panama Papers. Joel Simon is the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which fights for press freedom and the rights of journalists in the United States and around the world.Co-presented with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association

“Édouard Louis uses literature as a weapon,” says a recent New York Times profile of the internationally bestselling French author. Louis, whose highly acclaimed first autobiographical novel, The End of Eddy, confronts both the institution of discrimination as he experienced it first-hand, growing up in a small town in Northern France where he was bullied and forced to conceal his homosexuality and as well, the violence perpetrated on his hardscrabble community by an indifferent state. Now in his second book, the writer delivers another unsparing examination of survival—this time the story of his own rape and near murder by a stranger on Christmas Eve in 2012. In History of Violence, Louis copes with his post-traumatic stress disorder as he moves seamlessly and hypnotically between past and present, between his own voice and the voice of an imagined narrator to understand how such violence could occur. In a conversation with poet Steve Reigns, the City of West Hollywood’s first Poet Laureate, Louis examines his own complicated search for justice in a political system that marginalizes its citizens through class inequities and leaves entire communities vulnerable, powerless, and feeling neglected. 

Tommy Orange’s There There is an extraordinary portrait of America like we’ve never seen before. Orange, an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma who grew up in Oakland, brings an exhilaratingly fresh, urgent, and poetic voice to the disorienting experiences of urban Indians who struggle with the paradoxes of inhabiting traditions in the absence of a homeland, living both inside and outside of history. In his debut bestselling novel, a cast of 12 Native American characters each contending with their own demons converge and collide on the occasion of the Big Oakland Powwow. Orange visits the ALOUD stage following recent Indigenous authors Layli Long Soldier, Natalie Diaz, and Terese Marie Mailhot who are collectively redefining not only contemporary Native American writing, but the entire canon of American literature as we know it. 

Miriam Pawel, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of the definitive biography, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez, continues to chronicle the fascinating history of California and the exceptional people who have shaped our state. In Pawel’s newest work, she demystifies transformative moments of California history—from the Gold Rush to Silicon Valley—as she considers the significant impact of one family dynasty. Beginning with Pat Brown, the beloved father who presided over California during an era of unmatched expansion, to Jerry Brown, the cerebral son who became the youngest governor in modern times—and then returned three decades later as the oldest, Pawel traces four generations of this influential family and will be joined on the ALOUD stage by Kathleen Brown, Pat’s youngest child and former California State Treasurer. Before Californians take to the polls for a very important November election, join us for an inside look at the past and present of state politics. 

On the centenary of Nelson Mandela’s birth, comes a new portrait of one of the most inspiring historical figures of the twentieth century. Arrested in 1962 as South Africa’s apartheid regime intensified its brutal campaign against political opponents, forty-four-year-old lawyer and African National Congress activist Nelson Mandela had no idea that he would spend the next twenty-seven years in jail. During his 10,052 days of incarceration, Mandela wrote hundreds of letters to unyielding prison authorities, fellow activists, government officials, and most memorably to his wife, Winnie, and his five children. Now, 255 of these letters—a majority of which were previously unseen—provide an intimate view into the uncompromising morals of a great leader. In this special evening at ALOUD, Sahm Venter, the editor of this collection and a former Associated Press reporter who covered and was witness to Mandela’s release from prison in 1990, along with Zamaswazi Dlamini-Mandela, the granddaughter of Nelson and Winnie who wrote the foreword, will share the stage with writers to bring these deeply moving letters to life. Co-presented with PEN America Image source: Inspiration Now, Marco Cianfanelli

In the 1970’s Bruce Lee captivated African American audiences with his stylish and philosophical kung fu movies. Lee was a rarity—a non-white leading man fighting oppression, crime, and racism at a time when there were still signs that read: “No dogs or Chinese Allowed” and “Whites Only.” Through the physical, mental, and spiritual embodiment of martial arts, Lee modeled an intense pride in his own cultural heritage that was an inspiration to all people of color—especially young African American men. In a special gathering to commemorate the 45th anniversary of Lee’s passing, Emmy Award-winning comedian and author W. Kamau Bell, Bruce Lee biographer and cultural critic Jeff Chang, Bruce Lee’s daughter Shannon Lee, along with moderator and cultural anthropologist Sharon Ann Lee will explore Bruce Lee’s long-lasting legacy and how he became an unexpected icon for Afro-Asian unity.

The dramatic story of the Flint water crisis is one of the signature environmental disasters of our time—and at the heart of this tragedy is an inspiring tale of scientific resistance by a relentless physician and whistleblower who stood up to power. What the Eyes Don’t See is the personal story of how Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha—accompanied by an idiosyncratic team of researchers, parents, friends, and community leaders—proved that Flint’s kids were exposed to lead despite the state’s assurance that the water was safe. Paced like a scientific thriller, Dr. Mona’s new book shows how misguided austerity policies, the withdrawal of democratic government, and callous bureaucratic indifference placed an entire city at risk. Named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2016, Dr. Mona will visit ALOUD to share her journey as an Iraqi-American immigrant, doctor, scientist, and mother whose family’s activist roots sparked her pursuit of justice—a fight for the children of Flint that she continues today.

The New York Times bestselling memoir Heart Berries is the powerful, poetic meditation of a woman’s coming-of-age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder, Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot’s mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father―an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist―who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame. “Here is a wound. Here is need, naked and unapologetic. Here is a mountain woman, towering in words great and small,” writes the bestselling and award-winning author Roxane Gay on Heart Berries. Gay will join Mailhot on the ALOUD stage to discuss the journey of discovering one’s true voice to seize control of your story.

For most of the twentieth century, politics and sports were as separate as church and state. Today, with the transformation of a fueled American patriotism, sports and politics have become increasingly more entwined. However, as sports journalist Howard Bryant explores in his new book, this has always been more complicated for black athletes, who from the start, were committing a political act simply by being on the field. Bryant’s new book The Heritage traces the influences of the radical politics of black athletes over the last 60 years, starting with such trailblazers like Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, as well as Tommie Smith and John Carlos —the track stars who 50 years ago this summer made world history for raising their fists with bowed heads while receiving the gold and bronze medals at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. This peaceful protest instantaneously became a historical symbol of the fight for human rights, although the athletes faced a severe blacklash. In a timely conversation moderated by Dr. Todd Boyd, Bryant and Carlos will discuss the collision of sports and political culture, kneeling for the national anthem, and the fervent rise of the athlete-activist.

From the author of several collections of poetry and memoirs, including the New York Times “Notable Book of the Year” Planet of the Blind, Stephen Kuusisto discusses his latest book, Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey, a lyrical love letter and “a dog-driven invitation to living full forward.” Born legally blind, Kuusisto was raised in the 1950s before the Americans with Disability Act, and was taught to deny his blindness in order to “pass” as sighted. For most of his life, he coped with his limited vision through tricks like memorization, but when at the age of 38, he’s laid off from his teaching job in a small town, he must alter his way of being in the world. Discussing his resonant memoir with author Louise Steinman, Kuusisto recounts how an incredible partnership with a dog changed everything and sent him on a wondrous, spiritual midlife adventure.

Between his tenure as the director of the FBI from 2013 to 2017 under the appointment of President Obama, to his roles as the U.S Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the United States Deputy Attorney General in the administration of President George W. Bush, James Comey has been involved in some of the most consequential cases and policies of recent history. On the occasion of his new book following his highly contentious firing, Comey will take the ALOUD stage and share for the first time anecdotes and reflections from his high-stakes career. From prosecuting the mafia, to helping to change Bush administration policies on torture and electronic surveillance, to overseeing the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation as well as ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, Comey will discuss the challenges of leading the American government through times of ethical crisis.

What happens when you take on the establishment? Renowned economist and former finance minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis gives a blistering account of his momentous clash with the mightiest economic and political forces on earth when he attempted to re-negotiate Greece’s relationship with the EU in 2015, sparking a spectacular battle with global implications. In a special lunchtime talk, Varoufakis offers an inside look at an extraordinary story fueled by hypocrisy and betrayal that shook the global establishment to its foundations and shares an urgent warning about how the policies once embraced by the EU and the White House have spawned instability throughout the Western world.

Greece’s former finance minister, international bestselling author, and an activist working for the revival of democracy in Europe, Yanis Varoufakis pens a series of letters to his young daughter, educating her about the business, politics, and corruption of world economics. In this intimate new book, written to his teenage daughter, Varoufakis uses clear language and vivid examples to explain heady economic theories, the historical origins of inequality, and our rising global instability. Join us as Varoufakis shares from these important and urgent lessons to equip our future generation with the knowledge to question the current failures of our world economic systems and to find a way to more democratic alternatives.

From the twice National Book Award–nominated and bestselling author of The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner offers a heart-stopping new novel, The Mars Room, that straddles the inside—and outside—of protagonist Romy Hall’s reality: an inmate beginning two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley, where “you do not see a single star.” With great humor and precision, Kushner moves between Hall’s polar worlds: the severed world of her past in San Francisco with her young son and her present institutional living with its absurdities and the thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive. Kushner will discuss this emotionally acute yet unsentimental story with writer Danzy Senna, who frequently writes about race in America.

Two of the world’s greatest living poets come together for a rare Los Angeles reading and conversation. The work of Robert Hass, former U.S. Poet Laureate and long-time translator of Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz, speaks to us of love and loss, of the hopefulness and the limitations of intimacy, of our humanness laid bare in the midst of art, the natural world, and each other. His most recent essay collection, A Little Book on Form, illuminates the impulses that underlie great poetry. Adam Zagajewski, whose outlook was formed in the aftermath of the Second World War and the occupation of Poland, negotiates the earthbound and the ethereal in poems that can be as arresting as they are luminous, as witty as they are serious. His recent memoir, Slight Exaggeration, is a wry and philosophical defense of mystery. During a time when our world feels deeply damaged and charged with uncivil discourse, these two masters of language will explore poetry’s enduring inclination to marvel, with novelist Andrew Winer serving as interlocutor.

In a special Los Angeles visit, human rights activists Robert King and Albert Woodfox, the two surviving members of the Angola 3, known for having served the longest solitary confinement sentences in U.S. history, share their remarkable story of survival and advocacy.  As comrades inside Louisiana State Penitentiary—the largest prison in the U.S. and former slave plantation known as “Angola”- they jointly established a chapter of the Black Panther Party within the prison and led peaceful non-violent protest against the racist and cruel conditions inflicted upon prisoners. Together with Herman Wallace (released 2013, deceased 2013) they collectively spent 114 years in solitary confinement. Since being released, King (released 2001) and Woodfox (released 2016) travel the globe campaigning for limits to solitary confinement and an end to the 13th amendment allowance for the enslavement of prisoners.  These two unbreakable spirits shed light on the reality of the American criminal justice system and represent the struggle of everyone unjustly incarcerated.

New York Times bestselling author Mohsin Hamid returns to ALOUD to discuss his latest novel Exit West, a visionary love story that imagines the forces that drive ordinary people from their homes into the uncertain embrace of new lands. Infusing the stark reality of a refugee narrative with the hopeful fantasy of a fairy tale, Exit West follows the journey of two young lovers who flee an unnamed country on the brink of civil war through a magical door that transports them to other places. A profound exploration of immigration and the universal human need to search for a better world, Pakistan-based author Hamid discusses this timely story with Viet Thanh Nguyen, a MacArthur Award-winning novelist who has also written eloquently about the refugee experience.

During his long tenure on the Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia—engaging as well as caustic and openly ideological—moved the Court to the right. In this eye-opening new book, legal scholar Richard L. Hasen analyzes Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s complex legacy as a conservative legal thinker and disruptive public intellectual who was crucial to reshaping jurisprudence on issues from abortion to gun rights to separation of powers. Hasen is joined by Erwin Chemerinsky in a special lunchtime conversation about the complex legacy of one of the most influential justices ever to serve on the United States Supreme Court.

“What if, for once in history, a woman’s story could be untethered from what we need it to be in order to feel better about ourselves?” writes visionary author Lidia Yuknavitch in her latest work, The Book of Joan. In this provocatively reimagined Joan of Arc story set in the near future, the world is ravaged by war, violence, and greed, and it brings into question art, sex, gender, and what it means to be human. Amber Tamblyn, widely known for her work as a director and actress, including her role as a modern-day Joan of Arc in the television series Joan of Arcadia, has also written several acclaimed collections of poetry. Yuknavitch and Tamblyn, two misfits who have spurned literary, cultural, and societal expectations to explore unlikely creative worlds, share the stage with fellow misfit Ann Friedman, journalist and co-host of the popular podcast Call Your Girlfriend, to discuss the art of nonconformity.

In his new book, UCLA law professor Adam Winkler offers a revelatory portrait of how U.S. corporations have seized political power over time. He traces the 200-year effort of pro-business court decisions that give corporations the same rights as people and details the deep historical roots of recent landmark cases like Citizens United and Hobby Lobby. For a special lunchtime conversation, Winkler discusses with author Rick Wartzman of the Drucker Institute how businesses have transformed the Constitution and changed the course of American politics today.

For award-winning writer and former agent for the United States Border Patrol Francisco Cantú, the border is in his blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. His new book, The Line Becomes A River: Dispatches from the Border, is haunted by the stories he experienced both while working for the Border Patrol—where he hauled in the dead and delivered to detention those he found alive—and also as a civilian after he abandoned the Patrol and helped an immigrant friend return to Mexico to visit his dying mother. Join us for an eye-opening look at the devastation the border wreaks on both sides as Cantú shares this deeply personal work with journalist Ruxandra Guidi, who frequently reports on immigration from the U.S.-Mexico border region.

What moved humans to create cultures—intelligent systems including the arts, morality, science, government, and technology? The answer to this question has typically been the human faculty of language, but preeminent neuroscientist, professor, and director of USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute Antonio Damasio argues that feelings―of pain and suffering or of anticipated pleasure―were the prime engines that stirred human intellect in the cultural direction. In his newest book The Strange Order of Things, Damasio traces the need for cultures back to one-cell organisms, long before there were nervous systems and conscious minds. Damasio will be joined by Manuel Castells, one of the world’s leading sociologists, for a fascinating conversation on the origins of life, mind, and culture that spans the biological and social sciences to offer a new way of understanding the world and our place in it.

Bassem Youssef, a satirist who rose to international fame in the middle of the Egyptian Revolution with his incendiary brand of comedy and his knack for unabashedly mocking dictators, has been dubbed “the Jon Stewart of the Arabic world.” In his new book, Revolution for Dummies: Laughing Through the Arab Spring, Youssef chronicles his transformation from a heart surgeon who filmed YouTube skits in the laundry room of his home to the host and creator of the popular Egyptian television show, AlBernameg (“The Program”). Youssef’s provocative political commentary quickly incensed the authoritarian government, who accused him of insulting the Egyptian presidency and Islam, and he was arrested and interrogated by the police. While his case was eventually dismissed, his television show was terminated, and Youssef, fearful for his safety, fled his homeland. Now living in exile in Los Angeles, Youssef will take the ALOUD stage to discusses his tumultuous—and hilarious—journey through a revolution that illuminates how jokes are often mightier than the sword.

Because of its similar celebration of the beauty of the natural world and focus on compactness, contemporary Zapotec-language poetry shares much in common with the Japanese haiku. Poet Víctor Terán—who’s performed his work from Oaxaca to London—will share some of his translations of the Japanese masters of the form alongside his own original Zapotec haiku, and American poet Jane Hirshfield will discuss both the haiku form and the way that the natural world informs her own work. The program will culminate with the presentation of Terán’s new translation into Zapotec of a poem by Hirshfield and a conversation between the two poets, moderated by David Shook—translator, poet, and publisher of Phoneme Media. Bilingual program Spanish/English with simultaneous interpretation by Antena Los Ángeles. This program is produced as part of the Getty's initiative Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA.

Winner of a 2017 Pulitzer Prize, historian Heather Ann Thompson sheds new light on the infamous 1971 Attica Prison riot as one of the most important civil rights stories of the last century. Chronicling the horrific conditions that led to 1,300 prisoners taking over the upstate New York correctional facility and how the state violently retook the prison—killing thirty-nine men and severely wounding more than a hundred others—Blood in the Water also confronts the gruesome aftermath. From brutal retaliation against the prisoners, to corrupt investigations and cover-ups, and civil and criminal lawsuits, Thompson meticulously follows the ensuing forty-five-year fight for justice. In a conversation with Kelly Lytle Hernandez, a professor and director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, Thompson discusses the impact of what this tragic historic moment can teach us about racial conflict, failures in mass incarceration, and police brutality in America today.

Last fall’s presidential election brought a range of impassioned voices to the national stage, but one of the most captivating speakers rose above petty politics with a deeply personal and very different view of what it means to be American. You may recall the Muslim parent Khizr Khan from the DNC when he spoke about his son, a U.S. Army Captain who was killed while protecting his base camp in Iraq. In Khan’s inspiring new book, An American Family: A Memoir of Hope and Sacrifice, he reflects on his grief for his son as well as his family history of pursuing the American dream during these tumultuous times. From humble beginnings on a poultry farm in Pakistan to obtaining a degree from Harvard Law School and raising a family in America—Khan shows what it means to leave the limitations of one’s country behind for the best values and promises of another. Khan will now take the ALOUD stage to discuss the realities of life in a nation of immigrants and the daily struggles of living up to our ideals.

What lies at the heart of humanity’s ability―and drive―to create? New York Times bestselling author and neuroscientist David Eagleman teams up with internationally acclaimed composer and Associate Professor at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music Anthony Brandt in a wide-ranging exploration of human creativity. In their new book, The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World, the pair studies hundreds of examples of human creativity from landing on the moon to paintings by Picasso to connect what creative acts have in common. By uncovering the essential elements of human innovation and examining them through the lens of cutting-edge neuroscience, Eagleman and Brandt consider how we can harness creativity to better our lives, schools, businesses, and institutions. Join us for an inspiring look at humanity’s unique ability to use the powerful tools of arts, technology, science, and more to improve our future.

Why has our society become so punitive? In recent years, critics have assailed the rise of mass incarceration, emphasizing its disproportionate impact on people of color. However, many African American leaders in the nation’s urban centers supported the war on crime that began in the 1970s. James Forman, Jr., a professor of law at Yale Law School and former D.C. public defender, wrestles with the complexities of race and the criminal justice system in his new book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. Chronicling riveting stories of politicians, community activists, police officers, defendants, and crime victims, Forman illustrates with great compassion how racism plagues our current system of tough-on-crime measures. In an eye-opening conversation with Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA Robin D.G. Kelley, Forman shines a light on the urgent debate over the future of America’s criminal justice system.

L.A.’s own Janet Fitch, the mega-bestselling author of White Oleander and Paint It Black, returns to ALOUD with her newest work, a sweeping historical saga of the Russian Revolution. Beginning on New Year’s Eve in 1916 St. Petersburg, The Revolution of Marina M. follows the mesmerizing coming-of-age story of a young woman of privilege who aches to break free of the constraints of her genteel life, a life about to be violently upended by the vast forces of history. Joining Fitch to discuss this epic journey through some of the most dramatic events of the last century is Boris Dralyuk, Russian literature scholar and executive editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, who helped Fitch with the Russian translations for her book. 

The program is conducted in both Spanish and English.  Anthropologists have traced the Meso-American acceptance of people of mixed gender back to pre-Columbian Mexico accounts of Aztec priests and Mayan gods who cross-dressed and were considered both male and female. In the shifting landscape of gender identity, what might we learn from the indigenous Zapotec people of Oaxaca’s isthmus region, who embrace a third gender—the muxe—within their communities? Zackary Drucker, transgender multimedia artist and producer of the Amazon series Transparent moderates a conversation with Victor Cata, Zapotec historian, writer, and linguist; Bamby Salcedo, founder of the Los Angeles-based TransLatin@Coalition, and Maritza Sanchez, Embajadora de los muxes en el exterior (Ambassador of Muxes in the Exterior.) Simultaneous interpretation was provided by Antena Los Ángeles. This program was produced as part of The Getty's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LAinitiative.

This program was conducted in both Spanish and English. Join us for an evening celebrating indigenous poetry from the United States and Mexico with three major poets—Natalie Diaz (member of the Mojave and Pima Indian tribes, winner of the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, language activist and educator), Layli Long Soldier (an Oglala Lakota poet, writer, and artist whose debut poetry collection WHEREAS is short-listed for the National Book Award), and Natalia Toledo (a Mexican poet and translator who writes in Spanish and Zapotec and won the Nezhualcóyotl Prize, Mexico’s highest honor for indigenous-language literature). Each poet will read from their distinctive work that moves across many languages and lands, exploring what it means to be an indigenous woman writer in today’s world. This special program will also feature a performance by Cahuilla Bird singing master Michael Mirelez and company, who are part of a long, inter-generational tradition of culture bearers within the local California Indian community. Simultaneous interpretation was provided by Antena Los Ángeles. This program was produced as part of The Getty's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative.  

Caitlin Doughty, a mortician, best-selling author, blogger, YouTube personality, and director of the nonprofit funeral home, Undertaking LA, has long been fascinated by death, what it means to treat the dead with dignity, and why we are so afraid of dead bodies. Her new book, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death, sets out on a global journey to discover how other cultures care for their dead. With curiosity and morbid humor, Doughty encounters a range of rituals from a grandpa’s mummy being cared for in a family home in rural Indonesia to a Japanese practice of using chopsticks to pick bones from cremation ashes. As many cultures around the world celebrate their ancestors this time of year, join us for a refreshing look at death practices, mourning rituals, and how we might bring life to the way we think about death.

No American city was more important to the Nazis than Los Angeles, home to Hollywood, the greatest propaganda machine in the world. There were Nazi plots to hang prominent Hollywood figures like Charlie Chaplin, gun down Jews in Boyle Heights, and plans to sabotage local military installations. As law enforcement agencies were busy monitoring the Reds instead of Nazis, an attorney named Leon Lewis and his ring of spies entered the picture. Acclaimed historian and USC Professor Steven J. Ross’ new book, Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America, tells this little-known story of Lewis, whose covert operation infiltrated every Nazi and fascist group in the area to disrupt their plans. Ross is joined by the Jewish Journal’s former Editor-in-Chief Rob Eshman, for a fascinating look at how a daring group of individuals banded together to confront the rise of hate.

New York Times bestselling author Roz Chast returns to ALOUD with her hilarious new graphic memoir, Going Into Town: A Love Letter to New York. Chast is a native Brooklynite and quintessential New Yorker whose street cred is regularly on display in The New Yorker, where she’s published over 1,000 cartoons. But when she moved to the suburbs, navigating life filled with trees instead of garbage was surreal— although her kids would grow-up thinking the opposite was true. On the occasion of her daughter leaving the suburbs to attend college in the city, Chast was inspired to create a city guide to her beloved home turf to help ease her daughter’s cultural shock. Filled with laugh-out-loud drawings, stories, maps, and more, Chast will take us on her personal tour of Manhattan.Many of the wonderful cartoons referenced by Chast in this podcast recording can be perused on her website, at rozchast.com.

This program was conducted in both Spanish and English.  The essence of who we are is wrapped up in our language. What human knowledge is lost when a language goes extinct? Why should we care? Join ALOUD for a freewheeling conversation among language activists working to reclaim indigenous languages in California and Mexico. For the first time together on stage, this unique group of participants includes: master linguist and language preservationist Leanne Hinton; Native California language activist Vincent Medina and Virginia Carmelo; Odilia Romero Hernández, Zapotec language rights activist; and poet/activist Bob Holman, co-producer of the PBS documentary, Language Matters. Simultaneous interpretation was provided by Antena Los Ángeles. This program was produced as part of The Getty's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative.  

“Is there anything Egan can’t do?” asked The New York Times Book Review. In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize–winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan masters her first historical novel. Beginning during the middle of the Great Depression, Manhattan Beach follows the story of Anna Kerrigan, a young girl who comes of age with a country at war. Inheriting the role of providing for her mother and sister after her father mysteriously disappears, Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. Sharing from this hauntingly beautiful new work, Egan takes us back to a moment in time when in the lives of women and men, America and the world transformed forever.

There’s one major aspect of the popular Gold Rush lore that few Californians today know about: during that period, California’s Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000, much of the decline from state-sponsored slaughter. Addressing the aftermath of colonization and historical trauma, a leading scholar explores the miraculous legacy of California Indians, including their extensive contributions to our culture today. Join us for a conversation with UCLA historian Benjamin Madley, author of the groundbreaking study: An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873. This program was produced as part of The Getty's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative.  

Stephen Greenblatt—the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author of The Swerve and Will in the World—investigates the life of one of humankind’s greatest stories. His newest book, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, explores the enduring narrative of humanity’s first parents. Tracking the tale into the deep past, Greenblatt uncovers the tremendous theological, artistic, and cultural investment over centuries that made these fictional figures so profoundly resonant in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim worlds and also so very “real” to millions of people even in the present. In a conversation with Jack Miles, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of God: A Biography, Greenblatt will demystify how—for better or worse—the biblical origin story permeates our lives today.

In Danielle Allen’s elegiac family memoir, Cuz: On the Life and Times of Michael A., she tries to make sense of a young African American man’s tragic coming-of-age in Los Angeles. Allen, a Harvard professor and author of Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, became the “cousin-on-duty” when her younger cousin Michael was released from prison. Arrested at fifteen, tried as an adult—three years after his release, Michael was shot and killed. Why? Allen’s deeply personal and poignant story is an unwavering look at a world transformed by the sudden availability of narcotics and the rise of street gangs, drugs, and the failures of mass incarceration. Rallying an urgent call for system-wide reform, Allen discusses her new work with Franklin Leonard, a film executive who founded The Black List, a yearly publication featuring Hollywood’s most popular unproduced screenplays.

The program was conducted in both Spanish and English.  With the likes of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, Mexico has a long tradition of politically engaged public art which has often depicted—with varying degrees of accuracy—the country’s indigenous population. Two gifted young artists from the collective Tlacolulokos have been commissioned to create a new artwork in the Central Library’s Rotunda in juxtaposition to the 1933 historic Cornwell murals. They will discuss their new work as well as their street-level actions in their hometown of Tlacolula, Oaxaca, with the godfather of Cholo writing, Chaz Bojórquez and project curator Amanda De La Garza. What is the role of clandestine art actions as a form of political dissent? How effective is it? What are the parallels and differences between how street art is used in Mexico and the United States? Simultaneous translation was provided by Antena Los Ángeles. This program was produced as part of The Getty's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative. 

Two generations of African writers—Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, an elder statesman from Kenya, and Richard Ali A Mutu, a young novelist from the Democratic Republic of the Congo—discuss the politics of writing in African languages, the vibrancy of the continent’s cultural output, and exciting new trends in East, West, and Central African writing. Thiong’o and Mutu will be joined for a rare look at groundbreaking indigenous voices by David Shook, the founding editor of Phoneme Media and publisher of Mutu’s debut novel, Mr. Fix-It, the first novel written in Lingala to be translated into English.