Free Library Podcast

The Author Events Series presents Geraldine Brooks | Memorial Days  In Conversation with Tamala Edwards Barbara Gohn Day Memorial Lecture A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey towards peace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Horse. Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz – just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy – collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk. After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha's Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at the beach. But all of this ended abruptly when, on Memorial Day 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf. Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the various ways in which cultures grieve and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony's death. A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls that exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life. Geraldine Brooks is the author of six novels, including Horse, People of the Book, Year of Wonders, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning March. She has also written acclaimed works of nonfiction, including Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages and have sold millions of copies around the world. Born and raised in Australia, Brooks divides her time between Sydney and Martha's Vineyard. Tamala Edwards joined 6abc in January of 2005. She is the weekday co-anchor of Action News Mornings from 4 a.m to 7 a.m. and is a regular co-host of Inside Story, conducting probing interviews with newsmakers like Governor Tom Corbett, Senator Bob Casey, Mayor Michael Nutter and others, as well as moderating many election debates. Prior to joining 6abc, Tamala Edwards was the anchor of ABC's World News Now, and World News This Morning. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 4/30/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Ben Crump | Worse Than A Lie First 100 people to arrive onsite receive a free copy of the book. It's the night of November 4, 2008. America's first Black president has just been elected. And fifty-three-year-old Hollis Montrose-a Black ex–police officer from the suburbs of Chicago-has become the latest victim of a brutal attack. As the result of a traffic stop gone wrong, Hollis is shot ten times in cold blood, by four white men who could have been his colleagues back in his police days. Beau Lee Cooper was born serious, as if on an urgent mission with little time to waste. Raised in the tumultuous world of 1970s Texas, he always dreamed of becoming a lawyer and fighting for what's right, ever since he was a little boy reading To Kill a Mockingbird. And now, ten years into running his own law firm with his best friend and partner in crime, Nelson ''Nellie'' Rivers, and his suave right-hand-man, Brent ''Cape'' Capers, he feels he's finally making a difference. When Beau Lee learns about Hollis's situation, he's determined to help. Miraculously, Hollis survives the encounter, but the Chicago police department has already spun the narrative in its favor, and Hollis is given a wrongful prison sentence with an unreasonable bail. What really happened that night the car was pulled over? Was it random or was Hollis targeted? Beau Lee knows he's treading in dangerous waters, and finding evidence of the truth will be his biggest challenge yet, but with troubling powers at play, one innocent man's life hangs in the balance. Named to the TIME100 list of the 100 most influential people in 2021 and The NNPA Top Black Newsmaker of the 21st Century in 2026, Attorney Ben Crump is known as "Black America's Attorney General" and has established himself as one of the nation's foremost lawyers and advocates for social justice. He has represented families in the most high-profile cases in the country, including Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tyre Nichols, and Henrietta Lacks in a landmark medical reparations case. Crump is co-founder of DreamFi, a financial empowerment platform, and author of Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People and debut novel Worse Than a Lie. As founder of Ben Crump Law, he continues fighting for justice nationwide. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 3/10/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Amitav Ghosh | Ghost-Eye In Conversation with Brooke O'Harra Past and present collide in a novel about a girl who might just be a "case of the reincarnation type." Varsha Gupta wants fish for lunch. Her family is shocked; the three-year-old has never tasted fish in her life. The Guptas are strict vegetarians and don't allow it inside their Calcutta mansion. But Varsha claims she can remember another life, in a mud house by a river where she caught and cooked fish with a different mother. Perplexed, the Guptas turn to Dr. Shoma Bose, a psychologist who has been investigating what are known as "cases of the reincarnation type" for years. But her understanding of the world is changed forever by Varsha's revelations. Half a century later, Varsha's case file catches the attention of a group of environmental activists, and Shoma's nephew Dinu is drawn inexorably into their plans. As Dinu finds himself caught up in the search for Varsha, buried memories of his own past begin to surface. Traveling between late 1960s Calcutta and present-day Brooklyn, Amitav Ghosh's Ghost-Eye is an urgent and expansive novel from one of our greatest living storytellers, about family, fate, and our fragile planet. Amitav Ghosh is the author of the bestselling Ibis Trilogy, composed of Sea of Poppies (short-listed for the Man Booker Prize), River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire. His other novels include The Circle of Reason, which won the Prix Médicis étranger, and The Glass Palace. He is also the author of many works of nonfiction, including The Great Derangement, The Nutmeg's Curse, and Smoke and Ashes. In 2018, Ghosh became the first English-language writer to win the Jnanpith Award, India's highest literary honor. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Brooke O'Harra (she/her) is a professional director, artist and writer. Brooke and Amitav collaborated with musician Ali Sethi in May 2022 to stage a musical performance of Ghosh's book Jungle Nama. Brooke O'Harra is a queer autuer theater director who often works in collaboration with poets, writers, composer and musicians. O'Harra's current projects include the upcoming performance of Be Holding, to be performed at 59th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh 2026. O'Harra (director) co-created the project with poet Ross Gay, composer Tyshawn Sorey, and the new ensemble Yarn/Wire.  She is also commissioned to develop an original performance work with the museum docents for the 59th Carnegie International. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 6/16/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Danielle Allen | Radical Duke An explosive, deeply revisionist work that reveals how a renegade English Duke and Thomas Paine, the firebrand polemicist, almost brought the American Revolution to Britain. When Danielle Allen discovered a parchment of the Declaration of Independence buried away in Sussex, England, little did she know that she had stumbled onto a larger story that fundamentally changes our understanding of eighteenth-century British and American history. Demonstrating in Radical Duke that the Age of Revolution began neither with Boston patriots nor with Parisian Jacobins, Allen shows how Charles Lennox, the progressive Third Duke of Richmond, along with radical pamphleteer Thomas Paine secretly fomented a political revolution in which they supported their rebelling American brethren, led the first proposals for universal manhood suffrage, and argued for freedom of the press and religious toleration. Identifying for the first time the anonymous authors of Britain's seditious Junius letters and revealing that Paine cowrote The Juryman's Touchstone of 1771, Radical Duke sets the historical record straight, conjoining radical thought in America and Britain and revealing the complex foundation of modern constitutional monarchy and our own age. Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and author of Justice by Means of Democracy, Cuz, and Our Declaration, winner of the Parkman Prize. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Academy of Sciences and Letters, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 6/9/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Matt Haig | The Midnight Train In Conversation with Katy Waldman When your life flashes before your eyes, where would you stop? No one can change the past, but the Midnight Train can take you there. The chance to re-live the moments that meant most. To see what kind of person you really were. For Wilbur his best days were with Maggie, the love of his life. On his honeymoon in Venice. Before he gave it all away. He wishes he could go back and live differently. But to do so risks everything . . . A magical, time-travelling love story, from the world of The Midnight Library. Matt Haig is the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of the novels The Midnight Library, The Life Impossible, and How to Stop Time, along with four other novels, the acclaimed memoirs Reasons to Stay Alive and Notes on a Nervous Planet, and several award-winning children's books. His work has been published in fifty territories across the world. Katy Waldman is a staff writer at The New Yorker, for which she writes about books, culture, and more. Previously, she was a staff writer at Slate and the host of the ''Slate's Audio Book Club'' podcast. She won the National Book Critics Circle's Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing in 2019 and the American Society of Magazine Editors's award for journalists under thirty in 2018; her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York magazine, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband and dog in Washington, D.C. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. If you'd like to purchase two tickets but only one copy of the book, please email authorevents@freelibrary.org Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 6/4/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Barbara McQuade | The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government In Conversation with Zane Memeger In The Fix, McQuade draws on her decades of experience as a federal prosecutor to reveal how systems of organized crime and political opportunism exploit the levers of power-using corruption, cruelty, and chaos as tools to dominate institutions and eliminate accountability. With clarity, precision, and moral force, she exposes the tactics of today's far-right MAGA system: information warfare, aggressive retribution, conformism enforced by fear, and pervasive dismantling of legal checks and balances necessary to defend the public interest and uphold justice. Weaving together courtroom stories, real-time political analysis, and cautionary lessons from history and democratic backsliding abroad, McQuade makes the case that the threats we face are not future possibilities-they're already here. Yet The Fix is not just a warning; it is a call to action. In the book's final chapters, McQuade outlines common-sense reforms and strategies that can reclaim the rule of law and recenter democracy with the power of the people. Accessible, eye-opening, and grounded in constitutional faith, The Fix is essential reading for everyone concerned about the future of America-and ready to work together to take a stand for it. Barbara McQuade is a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, where she teaches criminal law and national security law. She is also a legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. From 2010 to 2017,  McQuade served as the U.S Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. She was appointed by President Barack Obama, and was the first woman to serve in her position. McQuade also served as vice chair of the Attorney General's Advisory Committee and co-chaired its Terrorism and National Security Subcommittee. She and her husband live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and have four children. Zane Memeger is the Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Innocence Project; a non-profit organization focused on exonerating those convicted of crimes they did not commit and helping the wrongfully convicted transition to freedom. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 6/2/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. | America, U.S.A.  In Conversation with Senator Cory Booker SOLD OUT Celebrated public intellectual Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. presents a groundbreaking analysis of the vicious cycles of American history and the country's enduring refusal to face its true nature-especially at the moments when national anniversaries steer us back toward the mythology meant to disguise the truth. America, U.S.A., deliberately formulated and beautifully written, details a heart-wrenching exploration of America's legacy. It is a magnificently complex combination of lessons and voices-from W.E.B. DuBois and John Dos Passos to Herman Melville and Martin Luther King, Jr.-that, together, paint a sprawling and honest tableau of the United States, its complicated past, and ever more tenuous future. Glaude's is a powerful voice of conscience in our tumultuous world. He pulls no punches, calling on us to interrogate our conceptions of innocence and freedom and the stories we tell ourselves about our past and present. Centered around the major celebrations of America's milestone birthdays across 250 years of history, the book offers a riveting look at the battles over who has a stake in writing the American story. Devastatingly candid, profoundly moving, and deeply reflective, America, U.S.A. is a shining meditation on how we must reckon with a grim past in order to strive for the better angels of our future. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton University and author of New York Times bestselling Begin Again and Democracy in Black. Senator Cory Booker is the senior United States Senator from New Jersey. He served as mayor of Newark before becoming New Jersey's first Black senator and only the fourth popularly elected Black senator in US history.  Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 5/27/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Jodi Kantor | How to Start Join Jodi Kantor and Michael Solomonov for a discussion of the question: how, in these challenging times, can anyone discover and begin their life's work? Jodi Kantor's groundbreaking reporting has toppled media magnates, sparked reform worldwide, and foretold many of the unsettling changes we see in the workplace today. But before all of this, Kantor was kicked off her college newspaper. Society expects perfection, but Kantor knows those first professional steps are often rocky. She also knows that young people are facing new and frightening terrain, with political upheaval, skyrocketing costs of living, and the unknowns of AI. Kantor casts aside platitudes and false hope to offer tangible help. Work is how we spend much of our time. It's our engine of progress: how cancer therapies are invented, political campaigns won, thrilling art created and matched with an audience. Instead of letting cynicism take over, Kantor identifies two principles to help young people discover their life's work: craft and need. By pairing the two, they can navigate tough, sensitive choices: how to think about money. How much risk to take on. When to buck what others are saying. Powerful and provocative, How to Start is a statement of faith for young people as they make their way through uncertain times, offering wisdom, strategy, and a set of aspirations to launch their careers and last their whole lives. Jodi Kantor is a New York Times investigative reporter who has revealed hidden truths about power, technology, gender, law, and employment. In 2017, she and Megan Twohey exposed Harvey Weinstein's treatment of women, setting off the worldwide #Metoo reckoning. They were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and co-authored She Said, a book taking readers inside their investigation, also made into a film. Recently, she has been working to illuminate one of our most secretive and critical institutions, the Supreme Court. Kantor lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her husband Ron Lieber and their two children. She began her journalism career by dropping out of law school, and she speaks at campuses across the country about finding work of meaning. As chef of the trailblazing restaurant Zahav, and co-owner of CookNSolo Restaurants with his twenty-year business partner Steve Cook, Michael Solomonov has redefined Israeli cuisine in the U.S. and beyond. With five James Beard Awards, including Zahav's ''Outstanding Restaurant'' accolade in 2019, he is celebrated for honoring Israel's diverse culinary traditions through innovative flavors and vibrant settings. Solomonov's Philadelphia-based group includes beloved concepts like Dizengoff, Goldie, K'Far and Laser Wolf, with recent expansions in New York and Miami's 1 Hotel South Beach. Through his acclaimed cookbooks and the launch of Zahav Restaurant Recipe Hummus at Whole Foods, he continue to share his signature approach to Israeli flavors with a nationwide audience. Outside of the restaurants, you can often find Michael with Steve at Pho 75 in South Philly, working out the kinks in their Israeli village.  Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 5/19/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Annette Gordon-Reed | Jefferson on Race: A Reader In Conversation with Patrick Spero, Ph.D Among America's Founding Fathers, none was more deeply, personally, or controversially entangled with race and slavery than Thomas Jefferson. The man whose Declaration of Independence proclaimed that ''all men are created equal'' enslaved more than 600 people of African descent even as he acknowledged the injustice of slavery, saw himself as its opponent, and condemned it in his writings. How is this possible? In Jefferson on Race, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed gathers Jefferson's most revealing writings about African Americans, slavery, and Native Americans, enabling readers as never before to directly explore his complex and contradictory thoughts, feelings, and decisions on these subjects-the most hotly debated aspect of his legacy. These selections come from Jefferson's public and private writings, letters, and plantation records, as well as accounts by contemporaries, including his son Madison Hemings and three other people formerly enslaved at Monticello. The book documents Jefferson's ideas about-and self-image in relation to-African Americans, slavery, and Native Americans, as well as his conduct, including interactions with individual Black and Native people. The writings show how Jefferson responded to living in a multiracial slave society while professing progressive ideals, and how his views on race and slavery were shaped by his experiences with enslaved Black people. Jefferson on Race is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Jefferson's conflicted attitudes-and the impact of race and slavery on American history. Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. Gordon-Reed won 16 book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize  and the National Book Award, for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family  (2008). She is the author of six books, and editor of two. She was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford (Queen's College) 2014-2015, and was appointed an Honorary Fellow at Queen's in 2021. Gordon-Reed served as the 2018-2019 President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and is currently president of the Organization of American Historians.  Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, and the National Humanities Medal. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the British Academy.  Patrick Spero, Ph.D., is the Chief Executive Officer of the American Philosophical Society and a scholar of early American history. Dr. Spero is the author of four books on the era of the American Revolution. They are Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania (2016), which was named a staff pick by the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2017, Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765-1776 (2018), winner of the Philadelphia Athenaeum's Literary Award and a finalist for the Journal of the American Revolution's best book of the year, The Scientist Turned Spy: Andre Michaux, Thomas Jefferson, and the Kentucky Conspiracy of 1793 (2024), and The Other Presidency: Thomas Jefferson and the American Philosophical Society (2024).  Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 5/7/2026)

The Author Events Series presents M Lin | The Memory Museum: Stories In Conversation with 'Pemi Aguda Stretching from the present day to the near future, from China to America and beyond, M Lin's piercing and melodious debut captures the spirit of China's One-Child Generation as its characters navigate homes and cultures, hopes and contradictions, survival and resistance. These frank, tender, and playful stories offer profound insight into the ambivalence of migration, the perverse ways race and class can operate, and what it means to be Chinese today. The collection begins with ''Scenes from Childhood,'' in which a lonely, elderly woman in a dystopian reality remembers her grandfather's village. In ''Magic, or Something Less Assuring,'' a politically divided couple goes on a divorce honeymoon in Morocco. ''You Won't Read This in the News'' features four migrant workers during one night of petty theft and connection. In ''Tough Egg,'' a filmmaker thwarted by censorship untangles her fraught relationship to motherhood. Other stories portray a photographer reuniting with her first love in Beijing; the historic White Paper protests that ended the zero-COVID policy; and generations into the future, a newly instated Memory Museum where two sensory architects share their vision for a utopian world. With daring political and creative commitment, The Memory Museum brims with joy even as Lin exposes the knife's edge between powerlessness and agency, pain and intimacy, our memories and our futures. M Lin is a Chinese writer living in the US. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Swamp Pink, Joyland, Epiphany, Fence, and Best Debut Short Stories 2023, and her nonfiction can be read in The New York Times, Guernica, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. 'Pemi Aguda is the author of One Leg on Earth, and Ghostroots, a finalist for the National Book Award, the LA Times First Fiction Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. She is from Lagos, Nigeria. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 4/29/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Bob Spitz | The Rolling Stones: The Biography In Conversation with Dan DeLuca  All great music is a threat. What left is there to say about The Rolling Stones? A hell of a lot, it turns out. Bob Spitz has brought his indefatigable energy and five decades of experiences in the fields and hollows of rock 'n' roll to bear on his five-year journey to reexamine one of popular music's greatest stories. There are myriad revisions to the conventional narrative which underscore just how in control of that narrative the band has been up to now-small example: no, Muddy Waters was not mopping the floors at Chess Records when the Stones showed up. But in a larger sense, as with the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, Spitz's greatest gift is for the big picture. He knows where the magic is, and why it is. He is as clear-eyed a connoisseur of the show business, the spectacle and the collateral damage of this whirlwind as anyone alive, and that lucid gaze pierces a lot of incrusted bullshit, but the ultimate goal is to connect with a creative force whose power shows no signs of fading, over sixty years on. At its heart the story is about two boys, Mick and Keith, and their unique, fraught, alchemical bond, often tested, never sundered. The Glimmer Twins. The bandmates, like Charlie Watts, who found their groove in relation to this double star made the trip intact, while those who struggled, like Brian Jones and Mick Taylor, were chewed up and spit out. This is a story with many dark corners, including a surprising number of deaths. But whether Jagger and Richards sold their souls to the devil is at the crossroads for blues greatness or just squeezed their heroes for every drop of inspiration, in the end their connection to their music and to each other put them in a category of one, where they very much remain. Bob Spitz is the award-winning author of the biographies The Beatles and Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child, both New York Times bestsellers, as well as six other nonfiction books and a screenplay. He helped manage Bruce Springsteen and Elton John at crucial points in their careers. He's written hundreds of major profiles of figures, ranging from Keith Richards to Jane Fonda, from Paul McCartney to Paul Bowles. Dan DeLuca is the pop music critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He's been writing about music and pop culture for the Inquirer and other outlets for more than three decades. He grew up at the Jersey Shore and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. He has interviewed Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Darryl Jones and saw the Charlie Watts Orchestra play at Pulsations nightclub in Glenn Mills, Pa. in 1986. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 4/28/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Sheinelle Jones | Through Mom's Eyes In Conversation with Mike Jerrick Montgomery Auditorium is now sold out. We have opened a rush line for anyone interested in purchasing Auditorium tickets at the door for $5. Please register for the rush line. The rush line will be available on a first come, first served basis. Guests will be asked to line up in the Lobby prior to the event. Auditorium seats are not guaranteed, but we are often able to accommodate a significant number of guests. A staff member will assess how many seats are empty approximately five minutes before the event commences and will allow the corresponding number of patrons into the Auditorium.  Please bring $5 cash in order to purchase a rush ticket. Credit cards or other forms of payment will not be accepted. From the beloved Today show host Sheinelle Jones comes an inspiring collection of heartfelt life-lessons from hard working moms who raised some of our favorite celebrities. When Sheinelle Jones launched ''Through Mom's Eyes,'' a recurring Today show segment interviewing celebrities' mothers about raising successful kids, she had an ulterior motive-she wanted to bring all their wisdom to bear on raising her own three children. So she asked Lin-Manuel Miranda's mom about staying present with kids while balancing a demanding career, talked with Lady Gaga's mom about how to recognize bullying, and got tips from Steph Curry's mom on making sure even future NBA royalty does his chores. She has since interviewed dozens of remarkable women and gathered a candid, warm, and insightful collection of valuable lessons about life, love, and parenthood. Now in her first book, Through Mom's Eyes, Sheinelle is ready to share even more of those life-changing secrets with the world. Combining insights from celebrity mothers with her own journey through modern parenting, Sheinelle reveals how to make it through the hard parts of motherhood and still tap into the joys of it with empathy, generosity, and solidarity. Through Mom's Eyes is a beautiful celebration of those who are the guiding light for their loved ones-mothers. Sheinelle Jones is the cohost of Today with Jenna and Sheinelle on NBC. She's also the host of Through Mom's Eyes, a digital and broadcast series for Today where she interviews mothers of celebrities to discuss their journeys raising successful children. She lives in New York City with her three kids. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 4/16/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Chanda Prescod-Weinstein | The Edge of Space-Time In Conversation with Airea D. Matthews In her highly acclaimed debut, distinguished cosmologist and particle physicist Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein shared with her audience an abiding sense of wonder at the cosmos, while imagining a world without the entrenched injustice that plagues her field. Now, in The Edge of Space-Time, she embraces that cosmic wonder, taking readers on a mind-altering journey to the boundaries of the universe, inviting us to spend time at the edge of what we know about space-time and about ourselves. Guided by her conviction that for humanity to go forward we must know our cosmic past and drawing on poetry and popular culture-from Langston Hughes, Queen Latifah, and Lewis Carroll, to Big K.R.I.T., Sun Ra, and Star Trek-Prescod-Weinstein renders accessible some of the most abstract concepts of theoretical physics to tell fascinating stories about the history and fundamental nature of our universe. Here we meet the quantum cat that is both dead and alive, learn the difference between dark matter and dark energy, explore the inner workings of black holes, and investigate the possibility of a unified theory of quantum gravity, following our guide out to the far reaches of the cosmic event horizon and down to the tiniest (and queerest) neutrino. Along the way, she calls on us to resist colonial approaches to space exploration and instead imagine a better path forward in our pursuit of humanity's undeniable connection with the stars. Through Prescod-Weinstein's clear-eyed and unique perspective, and informed by her deep knowledge of post-colonial history and Black feminist thought, The Edge of Space-Time argues that physics is an essential way for everyone to look at the universe and presents a compelling case that ''the edge'' is a powerful vantage point from which to see the big picture. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an associate professor of physics and astronomy and core faculty in women's and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. She conducts award-winning theoretical physics research on dark matter, the early universe, and neutron stars, while also researching Black feminist science studies. Her first book, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, won the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science and Technology, the 2022 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, and a 2022 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award. A columnist for New Scientist and Physics World, she is originally from East L.A., California, and now divides her time between the New Hampshire Seacoast and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 4/8/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Senator Cory Booker | STAND In Conversation with Cherri Gregg SOLD OUT Join U.S. Senator Cory Booker for a timely and hopeful conversation about our shared American ideals. Centered around his new book, STAND, Senator Booker will share stirring personal reflections and powerful stories of leadership that will challenge us to reclaim our national story and work together to redeem the American dream.  STAND shows that our principles are not luxuries; they are vital, strategic keys to our survival and success. By wielding these tools, we can reclaim our sense of common cause and change the course of our country's history. In STAND, Senator Booker offers inspiring and actionable insights for Americans from all walks of life. Senator Cory Booker is the senior United States Senator from New Jersey. He served as mayor of Newark before becoming New Jersey's first Black senator and only the fourth popularly elected Black senator in US history.  Cherri Gregg is co-host of WHYY's flagship daily radio news show Studio 2. She is also the executive producer and creator of the Emmy Award winning Good Souls Project, WHYY's effort to highlight individuals serving as role models for compassion, generosity and service. Prior to her current position, Cherri covered civil rights, social justice, race and public affairs issues impacting marginalized communities, spending nearly a decade as the Community Affairs reporter for KYW Newsradio, also reporting for CBS 3 Eyewitness News. She was the creator, host and executive producer of the weekly, syndicated radio show and podcast, Flashpoint with Cherri Gregg. Cherri, who is a former attorney, is a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Law & Justice Journalism Project, a non-profit focused on shifting the journalism narrative around public safety, crime and justice. Bundle tickets come with a pre-signed copy of STAND, published by St. Martins Press Pre-signed copies of STAND will be available for purchase at the event.  Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 3/26/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Lynn Matluck Brooks | Theatres of the Body  Theatres of the Body is Lynn Matluck Brooks' critical examination of danced stage productions in antebellum Philadelphia. Starting in the 1820s, Brooks explores visual art and social and theatrical dancing across different classes, focusing on the work of E. W. Clay. Continuing through the 1830s, she looks at pantomime ballets and blackface minstrelsy through a political lens, asking questions regarding citizenship, slavery, and freedom. At the time, the city boasted the largest number of native-born ballet dancers in the young nation. Philadelphia also became a creative home to blackface star T. D. Rice, who helped popularize that performance genre. Reviewing print culture in the 1840s, Brooks shows how newspapers, magazines, and popular fiction provided documentation of dancing in Philadelphia as well as the responses of dance commentators, practitioners, and moralists. Theatres of the Body also considers the interplay of science with dance in the 1850s, which impacted both dance practices and reception. Providing an expansive historiography of these significant contributions to dance in the United States, Brooks deepens our understanding of antebellum culture and history. Lynn Matluck Brooks is Arthur and Katherine Shadek Professor of Humanities, Emerita, at Franklin & Marshall College. She is the author of John Durang: Man of the American Stage, The Art of Dancing in Seventeenth-Century Spain: Juan de Esquivel Navarro and His World, and The Dances of the Processions of Seville in Spain's Golden Age and the editor of Women's Work: Making Dance in Europe before 1800. She was also editor of Dance Research Journal, Dance Chronicle, and thINKingDANCE.org. Lauren Putty White is a Baltimore-born dancer, choreographer, educator, and writer whose work blends the freedom of jazz with the depth of modern dance. She holds an M.F.A. in Dance from Montclair State University and a B.F.A. in Modern Dance Performance from the University of the Arts. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 3/17/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Karla Trotman & Cheryl McKissack Daniel | Dark, Dirty, Dangerous & The Black Family Who Built America  In Conversation with Joann Bell Karla Trotman is President and CEO of Electro Soft, Inc., a second-generation family business specializing in electronics contract manufacturing for defense, aviation, and transit markets. A passionate advocate for entrepreneurship as a path to building generational wealth and closing the Black wealth gap, Karla is the author of the #1 Amazon bestseller Dark, Dirty, Dangerous: Building the Vibrant Future of Manufacturing. She was named 2024 EY Entrepreneur of Year for Greater Philadelphia and serves on the boards of the Museum of the American Revolution, the Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation, and the African Women's Entrepreneurship Cooperative. A member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Karla holds a B.S. in Business Logistics from Penn State and an MBA from Drexel University. Through her work and advocacy, she inspires the next generation to see manufacturing and entrepreneurship as vehicles for transforming communities and creating lasting economic impact. Cheryl McKissack Daniel is Chair of the Board of McKissack & McKissack, the nation's oldest minority- and woman-owned design and construction firm, and former President and CEO from 2000 to 2025. A fifth-generation builder, civil engineer, and author of The Black Family Who Built America (Simon & Schuster, August 2025), she leads the firm's work across major infrastructure, healthcare, education, and transportation projects nationwide. A Howard University alumna, Cheryl is widely recognized for her leadership, board service, and commitment to equity, generational wealth, and inclusive growth. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 3/3/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Namwali Serpell | On Morrison In Conversation with Angela Flournoy  Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate and one of our most beloved writers, has inspired generations of readers. But her artistic genius is often overshadowed by her monumental public persona, perhaps because, as Namwali Serpell puts it, ''she is our only truly canonical black, female writer-and her work is highly complex.'' In On Morrison, Serpell brings her unique experience as both an award-winning writer and professor who teaches a course on Morrison to illuminate her masterful experiments with literary form. This is Morrison as you've never encountered her before, a journey through her oeuvre-her fiction and criticism, as well as her lesser-known dramatic works and poetry-with contextual guidance and original close readings. At once accessible and uncompromisingly rigorous, On Morrison is a primer not only on how to read one of the most significant American authors of all time, but also on how to read great works of literature in general. This dialogue on the page between two black women artist-readers is stylish, edifying, and thrilling in its scope and intelligence. Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka and lives in New York. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her second novel, The Furrows, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and was selected as one of The New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year. Her book of essays, Stranger Faces, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, the Caine Prize for African Writing, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award. She is a professor of English at Harvard University. Angela Flournoy is the author of The Turner House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, an Indie Next pick, and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, and she has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Flournoy has taught at the University of Iowa, Princeton University, and UCLA. She lives in New York. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 2/25/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Heather Ann Thompson | Fear and Fury In Conversation with Cherri Gregg On December 22, 1984, in a graffiti-covered New York City subway car, passengers looked on in horror as a white loner named Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teens,  Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur, at point-blank range. He then disappeared into a dark tunnel. After an intense manhunt, and his eventual surrender in New Hampshire, the man the tabloid media had dubbed the ''Death Wish Vigilante'' would become a celebrity and a hero to countless ordinary Americans who had been frustrated with the economic fallout of the Reagan 80s. Overnight, Goetz's young victims would become villains. Out of this dramatic moment would emerge an angry nation, in which Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and later Fox News Network stoked the fear and the fury of a stunning number of Americans.  Drawing from never-before-seen archival materials, legal files, and more, Heather Ann Thompson narrates the Bernie Goetz Subway shootings and their decades-long reverberations, while deftly recovering the lives of the boys whom too many decided didn't matter. Fear and Fury is the remarkable account and a searing indictment of a crucial turning point in American history. Heather Ann Thompson is a historian and the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. Thompson is also the author of Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. She writes regularly on the criminal justice system for myriad publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. Thompson's policy work includes serving on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the US. She also co-runs the Carceral State Research Project at the University of Michigan. Cherri Gregg, Esq. is a known quantity in the Greater Philadelphia region, serving as the co-host of WHYY's daily news show, Studio 2, as well as an afternoon drive news anchor for the station. An award-winning journalist, Cherri has a distinguished career covering civil rights, social justice, race, poverty and public affairs issues impacting marginalized communities. She spent nearly a decade on air at KYW Newsradio and several years doing reports for CBS 3 Eyewitness News. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 2/19/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Victoria Christopher Murray, author of the award winning book, The Personal Librarian. In Conversation with Elizabeth Wellington This partnership was inspired by Victoria Christopher Murray's role as an Honorary Member of The Society, Inc., and developed in collaboration with the Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation and The Greater Delaware Valley Chapter of The Society, Inc. The Society, Incorporated, is a non-profit national organization of women dedicated to enhancing, exposing, and promoting youth in the arts for the betterment of our communities, with a focus on under-served children. The group provides support for young literary, visual, vocal, and performing artists. Victoria Christopher Murray is a New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty novels, including her most recent release Harlem Rhapsody. With Marie Benedict, she coauthored The Personal Librarian, a Good Morning America book club pick, and The First Ladies, Target's 2023 Book of the Year. She is an NAACP Image Award Winner for Outstanding Literary Work for her novel Stand Your Ground, which was also a Library Journal Best Book of the Year. She holds an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 2/17/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Dorothy Roberts | The Mixed Marriage Project In Conversation with Marcia Chatelain  Dorothy Roberts grew up in a deeply segregated Chicago of the 1960s where relationships barely crossed the ''colorline.'' Yet inside her own home, where her father was white and her mother a Black Jamaican immigrant, interracial marriage wasn't just a part of her upbringing, it was a shared mission. Her father, an anthropologist, spent her entire childhood working on a book about Black-white marriages-a project he never finished but shaped every aspect of their family life. As a 21-year-old graduate student, Dorothy's father dedicated himself to the study of interracial marriage and her mother soon became his full-time partner in that work. Together over the years they interviewed over 500 couples and assembled stunning stories about interracial marriages that took place as early as the 1880s-studying, but also living, championing, and believing in their power to advance social equality. Decades later, while sorting through her father's papers, Roberts uncovers a truth that upends everything she thought she knew about her family: her father's research didn't begin with her parents' love story-it came long before it. This discovery forces her to wrestle with her father's intentions, her own views about interracial relationships, and where she fits in that story. Rather than finish the book her father never published, Roberts immerses herself in their archive of interviews to trace the story of her parents and to better understand her own. Though grounded in her parents' research, it's Roberts' captivating storytelling that drives this memoir. In following the arc of her parents' interviews and marriage, The Mixed Marriage Project invites us into the everyday lives of interracial couples in Chicago over four decades. Along the way, Roberts reflects on her own childhood as a Black girl with a white father, and how those experiences shaped her into one of today's most prominent public thinkers and scholars on race. Blurring the boundaries between the political and the personal, between memoir and history, The Mixed Marriage Project is a deeply moving meditation on family, race, identity, and love. Dorothy Roberts is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. The author of five books, including Killing the Black Body, a MacArthur Fellow, and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Marcia Chatelain is the Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of two books, South Side Girls: Growing up in the Great Migration and the Pulitzer Prize winning Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. Her forthcoming book, How Bright the Path Grows: The Women who Made the March on Washington will be released in fall 2026 with Pantheon Books. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 2/11/2026)

The Author Events Series presents James Martin, SJ | Work in Progress  In Conversation with Tamala Edwards Work in Progress, set in the Philly suburbs, is a snapshot of several years-first as a boy, then as a teenager, and finally as a young adult--of being thrown into a series of jobs for which Martin had zero training. He had never set foot in a restaurant kitchen before working as a busboy and dishwasher; never stepped onto a golf course before working as a caddy; and had never seen a factory floor before working as an assembly-line worker. He almost always felt uncomfortable, unsettled, and uneasy. But, like many of us, he needed the money. This coming-of-age story is set in the 1960s and 1970s, a lighthearted tale for readers who enjoy personal narratives, and it's unlike anything Father Martin has written before. As he puts it, "This is a spiritual memoir from a different angle ... told 'slant' as Emily Dickinson might say." Each chapter features photos of memories and milestones throughout Father Martin's young life. If you're an aficionado of snafus, you won't be disappointed. He's not the hero of these stories, more a hapless teenager who learns in each job, even the ones he loathes, something about the value of work, about what it means to be an adult, about people, and about life overall. Rev. James Martin, SJ, born in Philadelphia and raised in the suburbs, is a Jesuit priest, editor at large of America magazine, consultor to the Vatican's Dicastery for Communication, and author of the New York Times bestsellers Learning to Pray, Jesus: A Pilgrimage, and The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything. Father Martin is a frequent commentator in the national and international media, having appeared on all the major networks and outlets, like The Colbert Report, NPR's Fresh Air, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Tamala Edwards joined 6abc in January of 2005. She is the weekday co-anchor of Action News Mornings from 4 a.m to 7 a.m. and is a regular co-host of Inside Story, conducting probing interviews with newsmakers like Governor Tom Corbett, Senator Bob Casey, Mayor Michael Nutter and others, as well as moderating many election debates. Prior to joining 6abc, Tamala Edwards was the anchor of ABC's World News Now, and World News This Morning. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable.   (recorded 2/5/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Matthew F. Delmont | Until the Last Gun Is Silent  In Conversation with Richard Brookshire As the civil rights movement blazed through America, more than 300,000 Black troops were drafted and sent to fight in the Vietnam War. These soldiers, often from disadvantaged backgrounds and subjected to the brutalities of racism back home, found themselves thrust onto the frontlines of a war many saw as unjust. On the homefront, Black antiwar activists faced another battle: Opposition to the Vietnam War, vilified by key allies in the media and government as anti-American, jeopardized the fight for civil rights. For Black Americans, the Vietnam War forced a generation to question what it truly meant to fight for justice. Award-winning civil rights historian Matthew F. Delmont weaves together the stories of two Black heroes of the Vietnam War era: Coretta Scott King, who bravely championed the antiwar cause-and eventually persuaded her husband to do the same-and Dwight ''Skip'' Johnson, a Medal of Honor recipient whose life ended tragically after returning from battle to his native Detroit. Together, these extraordinary accounts expose the contradictions of Black activism and military service during the Vietnam War. Through rich storytelling, Delmont offers a portrait of this period unlike any other, shedding light on a fractured civil rights movement, a generation of veterans failed by the country they served, and the valor of Black servicemen and peace advocates in the midst of it all. Vivid, revelatory, and meticulously researched, Until the Last Gun Is Silent: How a Civil Rights Icon and Vietnam War Hero Changed America is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the enduring legacy of Black military service, protest, and patriotism in the United States. Matthew F. Delmont is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth College. A Guggenheim Fellow and expert on African American history and the history of civil rights, he is the author of five books, most recently Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and several academic journals, and on NPR. Originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Delmont earned his BA from Harvard University and his MA and PhD from Brown University. Richard Brookshire is a multi-hyphenate storyteller and nationally recognized political communications strategist. As the co-CEO and co-founder of the Black Veterans Project, his work is advancing institutional reforms around racial equity and the case for reparations for Black veterans and military families. A former infantry combat medic and U.S. Army veteran of the War in Afghanistan, he is a graduate of Columbia University's School of International & Public Affairs, Fordham University and the New York Film Academy's Documentary Conservatory. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 2/4/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Marc Shaiman | Never Mind the Happy In Conversation with Alan Zweibel Featuring a special performance from Rob Reiner's THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT with MATTHEW GALLAGHER, Principal trumpeter of The Philly Pops Orchestra.  In Never Mind the Happy, musical dynamo Marc Shaiman looks back on five decades of Broadway triumphs, Hollywood hijinks, and unforgettable collaborations. Along the way, he charts the personal highs and heartbreaks that have shaped him-spending his teenage years in community theater, starting a decades-long collaboration with Bette Midler in the '70s, surviving the AIDS crisis of the '80s, his award-winning film music career in the Hollywood of the '90s, right up to the peaks (and valleys) of creating Broadway musicals from 2000 on. Candid, hilarious, and deeply human, Shaiman's story is a tribute to the power of music, the pull of the spotlight, and the beat that never stops. Part showbiz tell-all, part love letter to the melancholy that fuels creativity, told with perfect comic timing-along with a few wrong notes, and plenty of standing ovations. Marc Shaiman is a renowned American composer, lyricist, arranger, and music producer known for his work across film, television, and theater. Shaiman began his career as a musical director and arranger for Bette Midler before expanding into film scoring. He gained prominence with his work on films such as When Harry Met Sally, The Addams Family, Sister Act, City Slickers, A Few Good Men, Sleepless in Seattle, The American President, and South Park, on television with SNL, and on his recordings with Harry Connick Jr. and Mariah Carey. Shaiman earned widespread acclaim for co-writing the Broadway musical Hairspray alongside his longtime co-lyricist Scott Wittman. The duo has also co-created the musicals Catch Me If You Can, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Some Like It Hot, and Smash. He has been nominated for multiple Academy Awards and has won a Tony, two Emmys, and two Grammys. Marc Shaiman is celebrated for his versatile, emotionally resonant music and his ability to blend classic musical theater sensibilities with modern storytelling. Born and raised in New Jersey, he currently lives in New York with his husband, Lieutenant Commander (ret) Lou Mirabal. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! If you'd like to purchase two tickets but only one copy of the book, please email authorevents@freelibrary.org All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 1/29/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Lee Bollinger | University: A Reckoning In Conversation with Ali Velshi The American university-one of the most successful institutions in human history-is facing an unprecedented assault from the President of the United States. Experts on authoritarianism have drawn comparisons to Turkey and Hungary, where strongmen subdued universities as part of their power grabs. Yet as former Columbia president Lee C. Bollinger points out in his powerful account of the university's significance, in such dire times one has no choice but to state clearly and forcefully what one stands for. Defenses of the university usually emphasize the practical benefits it offers to society: highly skilled graduates who can thrive in an information-saturated world; scientific research that leads to important advances in health; technological breakthroughs that contribute to the American economy being the envy of the world. Bollinger offers a more original, and more sweeping, account. He reveals how the seemingly unwieldy structure of the university actually contributes to the success of the American system- providing those who study and work within it a degree of creative freedom hard to find elsewhere-and why that structure is both impossible to re-create and vulnerable to outside attack. The fundamental mission of the university is to enhance knowledge, but this is not merely a high-minded idea. It is, as Bollinger demonstrates, a notion rooted deeply in the Enlightenment ideas of the nation's founding documents, specifically the First Amendment to the Constitution, the basis of our political and civic life. The university helps realize the First Amendment; the First Amendment helps make the university. Bollinger argues that, in a challenging era for journalism, it is more essential than ever that the university stands strong as an essential source of truth-seeking for those who still believe in democracy. The stakes are self-evident: The university, like the press, must be defended if the American experiment is to continue. Lee C. Bollinger is an American legal scholar and educator who served as the nineteenth president of Columbia University, from 2002 to 2023. He is currently president emeritus and the Seth Low Professor of the University. He also served as the president of the University of Michigan from 1997 to 2002. A renowned expert on the First Amendment and freedom of speech and press, he lives in New York City. Ali Velshi is an award winning journalist, host of "Velshi" and Chief Correspondent for MS NOW, and a weekly economics contributor to NPR's "Here And Now." He hosts the "Velshi Banned Book Club'' on MS NOW, and the "Velshi Banned Book Club" podcast. He has been nominated for multiple Emmy Awards, and is the recipient of two National Headliner Awards and a Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 1/28/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Governor Josh Shapiro | Where We Keep the Light  SOLD OUT In Where We Keep the Light, Josh Shapiro, a leading voice in the Democratic party, shares powerful stories about his family, his faith, and his career in public service. From an early age, Shapiro learned and practiced the power of helping others, values which he carried through successful campaigns for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Montgomery County Commissioner, Pennsylvania Attorney General, and ultimately the Governorship, which he won in a decisive victory in 2022.  Here, Shapiro opens up about the toughest and most pivotal times of his life in public service – including: when an arsonist set fire to the Governor's residence while he and his family slept inside, when he was under consideration to be Kamala Harris' running mate in the 2024 election, and how experiences in his childhood shaped him to be the empathetic leader and pragmatic problem-solver that he is today.  Reflecting on what he has learned along his journey – knocking on doors, serving his community, and bringing people together to tackle the tough problems we face--Shapiro reminds us of the faith that guides so many and that there is more that unites us as Americans than divides us. Through it all, Shapiro shares the stories of the people who have impacted him along the way and how they've taught him where we keep the light. Josh Shapiro is the 48th Governor of Pennsylvania. He previously served as Pennsylvania's Attorney General, Chair of the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners, and State Representative. From seeing his parents serve others-his father in the Navy and as the local pediatrician and his mother as an educator-to marrying his high school sweetheart, Lori, and raising four children in the community and traditions they grew up in, to a career fighting for the people of Pennsylvania, Governor Shapiro's life has been grounded in faith, family, and public service. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 1/24/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Quiara Alegría Hudes & Ray Beauchamp | The White Hot & Misunderstood The White Hot takes the form of a letter from mother to daughter about a moment of abandonment that would stretch from ten days to ten years-an explanation, but not an apology. Hudes narrates April's story-spiritual and sexy, fierce and funny-with delicate lyricism and tough love. Just as April finds in her painful and absurd sojourn the key to freeing herself and her family from a cage of generational trauma, so Hudes turns April's stumbling pursuit of herself into an unforgettable short epic of self-discovery. In Misunderstood, Allen Iverson shares in searing clarity and touching candor his meteoric rise from impoverished child in the Virginia projects to high school champion to Georgetown University protégé of legendary coach John Thompson, and finally to NBA All-Star and Reebok's Vice President of Basketball. Quiara Alegría Hudes is an American writer. Her work includes the Pulitzer Prize winning play Water by the Spoonful, the Tony Award winning Broadway musical and major motion picture In the Heights, the animated film Vivo, and the essay High Tide of Heartbreak. As a prison reform activist, Hudes and her cousin founded Emancipated Stories, a platform where people behind bars can share one page of their life story with the world. Ray Beauchamp has been a criminal defense attorney in New York for the last fifteen years, having advocated for the rights of indigent people at the Legal Aid Society in Manhattan and the Bronx. Prior to Legal Aid, he clerked in the Second Circuit and served as managing editor of the Fordham Law Review. And prior to all that, he was a kid in West Philly, developing and nurturing a deep love of the 76ers. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 1/14/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Ezekiel J. Emanuel | Eat Your Ice Cream  In Conversation with Maiken Scott  Everyone wants to live a full and healthy life-and every day brings a tidal wave of attention-grabbing misinformation, faddish ideas from ''wellness'' influencers, and bizarre advice from news outlets over-extrapolating the results of tiny, outlier studies. The ''Wellness Industrial Complex'' prescribes conflicting and complicated regimens while promising us more time to enjoy in the future-though it sure is demanding a lot of time right now. But what actually matters most to our health and longevity? What has the most robust, actionable evidence? What's the junk you can skip In Eat Your Ice Cream, renowned physician Ezekiel J. Emanuel argues that life is not a competition to live the longest and that ''wellness'' shouldn't be difficult; it should be an invisible part of one's lifestyle that yields maximum health benefits with the least work. Dr. Emanuel cuts through the noise with wit and good humor, giving readers just what they need: simple, high-impact, evidence-based guidelines on such issues as alcohol consumption, food and nutrition, exercise, sleep, mental acuity, and social engagement. Resisting the tide of the latest trends to extend life at all costs, Eat Your Ice Cream reveals that many of the tools for a long, healthy and meaningful life are already within reach. Pairing common sense with uncommon wisdom based on his decades of expertise and experience, Dr. Emanuel helps us consider which lifestyle changes are worth making and how to most easily implement them for longer, healthier, and happier lives. Readers will come away with greater clarity and a deeper understanding of what really matters for well-being-connection, purpose, and sustainable choices backed by rigorous science. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD is a vice provost and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. A bioethicist, health policy expert, and oncologist, he was one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act. He is a regular guest on CNN and MSNBC and often contributes to the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Atlantic. He lives in Washington, DC. Maiken Scott is the host and executive producer of WHYY's The Pulse - a weekly, national health and science radio show and podcast that explores the people and places at the heart of health and science. The show airs on more than 120 public radio stations across the country and its podcast is presented by NPR. Before hosting The Pulse, Maiken covered behavioral health for WHYY. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 1/13/2026)

The Author Events Series presents Tre Johnson in conversation with Reckon True Stories: Podcast hosts Kiese Laymon and Deesha Philyaw This event will be a live taping of the Reckon True Stories podcast. Black genius sits at the heart of the American story. In his probing essay collection, Black Genius, cultural critic Tre Johnson examines how Black American culture has, against all odds, been the lifeblood of American ingenuity. At times using his own personal and professional stories,  Johnson surveys Black cities, communities, and schools with an ever-watchful eye of what transpires around Black mobility. With a passion for complex storytelling and pulling from both pop culture and American history, Johnson weaves past and present making his case for the genius of innovation. As he examined his findings, Johnson couldn't help but wonder about the brilliance of the every day. Specifically, the creativity of the 90's graffiti-style airbrush tee, his aunties packed weekend bus trips to Atlantic city, and the razor-tongued, socially-sharp, profanity-laced monologues of comedian Dick Gregory. Again and again, he asks us to ponder-are these not obvious examples of genius? Chatty yet profound, Black Genius subverts expectations from the very first page with a blend of reportage, historical data, and pop culture as Johnson dives into his own family history seeking big answers to complex questions. Johnson's signature wit and curiosity turns history into an amusing sequence of events.  Tre Johnson was born in Trenton, NJ and now finds himself in Philadelphia, where he writes with a focus on race, culture and politics. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Vox, The New York Times, Slate, Vanity Fair, The Grio, and other outlets. He has appeared to provide media commentary on CNN Tonight with Don Lemon; CBS Morning Show; PBS NewsHour, NPR's Morning Edition, and other programs. In addition to writing, Tre is a career educator, beginning working both inside and outside in the classroom as a teacher and eventually as a leader in the sector.  Reckon True Stories is a celebration of new and classic nonfiction – the essays, journalism, and memoirs that inspire us, that change the world, and help us connect with each other. Join hosts and acclaimed authors Deesha Philyaw (The Secret Lives of Church Ladies) and Kiese Laymon (Heavy, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, Long Division) for in-depth discussions about the stories we tell and how they impact our culture. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 12/4/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Larry Magid | The Philadelphia Music Book In Conversation with Sam Katz Montgomery Auditorium is now sold out, but tickets are still available for a live simulcast screening in a separate room at the Parkway Central Library. The Philadelphia Music Book: Sounds of a City is a 340 page coffee table book that contains 284 bios of musicians and music industry people from Philadelphia who have made a national or international impact in their work. Additionally, there are stories about the forerunners to modern music in the city, information about historic venues, and accounts of some major music events and festivals that took place in our area. It is a reflection of Philadelphia's great talents in many genres  including Rock & Roll, Folk, Americana, Jazz, the Blues, Classical, Musical Theatre, Hip Hop, EDM and music on the radio, television and movies among other topics. It's a must read for anyone interested in music or the history of Philadelphia. Larry Magid, along with his partners Allen, Jerry, and Herb Spivak, created the Electric Factory - first, the club, and then the concerts. Magid was just a kid himself then, but he quickly became the godfather of Philly's counterculture, a pied piper for a generation. Larry Magid may have helped turn pop music into a 20th-century art form, but, far from forgetting his West Philly roots, he revels in them. During his teen years, he learned how much music can stir a soul at the Uptown Theater's R & B shows, and - despite being seen as a tough businessman in the Wild West of the rock industry - he remains in it for the right reasons. Rocking the world, Magid knows, changes it.  Sam Katz is a lifelong Philadelphian who has experienced a diverse and unique career in public and project finance, venture capital, civic affairs, development, politics and documentary filmmaking. Sam had a nearly three-decade career in public and project finance including the financings for the Wells Fargo Center and Baltimore's Camden Yards.  He served as CEO for a major civic organization, launched and managed a regional venture capital fund and was a candidate for mayor of Philadelphia. Sam also serves as a consultant to Comcast-Spectacor and the Philadelphia Phillies and is the founder of the Histories Collaborative of Philadelphia. Sam is a graduate of Central High School, Johns Hopkins University and the New School for Social Research. Sam and Connie Katz have lived in West Mt. Airy for 40 years where they try hard to spoil their seven grandchildren. The Philadelphia Music Alliance was founded in June 1986 as a community-based, not-for-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of Philadelphia as one of the nation's oldest and most prolific music capitals.  Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees. (recorded 11/20/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis | Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America's Justice Department In Conversation with Ankush Khardori Throughout his first administration, Trump did more than any other president to politicize the nation's top law enforcement agency, pressuring appointees to shield him, to target his enemies, and even to help him cling to power after his 2020 election defeat. The department, pressed into a defensive crouch, has never fully recovered. Injustice exposes not only the Trump administration's efforts to undermine the department at every turn but also how delays in investigating Trump's effort to overturn the will of voters under Attorney General Merrick Garland helped prevent the country from holding Trump accountable and enabled his return to power. With never-before-told accounts, Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis take readers inside as prosecutors convulsed over Trump's disdain for the rule of law, and FBI agents, the department's storied investigators, at times retreated in fear. They take you to the rooms where Special Counsel Jack Smith's team set off on an all-but-impossible race to investigate Trump for absconding with classified documents and waging an assault on democracy-and inside his prosecution's heroic and fateful choices that ultimately backfired. With a plethora of sources deeply embedded in the ranks of three presidencies, Leonnig and Davis reveal the daily war secretly waged for the soul of the department, how it has been shredded by propaganda and partisanship, and how-if the United States hopes to live on with its same form of government-Trump's war with the Justice Department will mark a turning point from which it will be hard to recover. Injustice is the jaw-dropping account of partisans and enablers undoing democracy, heroes still battling to preserve a nation governed by laws, and a call to action for those who believe in liberty and justice for all. Carol Leonnig, a five-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is the author of three bestselling books and an investigative reporter who has worked at The Washington Post for the last twenty-five years. She won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on security failures by the Secret Service. She also was part of Post teams awarded Pulitzers in 2024, 2022, 2018, and 2014. Leonnig, a contributor to MSNBC, is the author of Zero Fail and coauthor of A Very Stable Genius and I Alone Can Fix It. Aaron C. Davis is an investigative reporter for The Washington Post who has won the Pulitzer Prize twice and has been a finalist three times. He was a lead writer and reporter on the Post's investigative series into the January 6 attack, which won the George Polk Award, the Toner Prize, and, with other Post coverage, the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. In 2018, he was part of a Post team that won the Pulitzer for Investigative Reporting. Davis has reported from fourteen countries. He began at The Washington Post in 2008, after reporting for the Associated Press, The Mercury News, and Florida Today. Ankush Khardori is based in Washington, D.C. and a senior writer for Politico Magazine, where he writes a column and features about national legal issues. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 11/13/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Jonathan Karl | Retribution  In Conversation with Tamala Edwards In Retribution, Jonathan Karl's unparalleled access brings us behind closed doors deep inside the White House and presidential campaigns, revealing the extraordinary moments that ended one man's presidency and brought another back to power. This is a story of unprecedented political plot twists, showing what happened behind the scenes as political fortunes fell and rose again, and as a new team coalesced around President Trump with the goal of creating an entirely new world order. From President Biden's shocking withdrawal and Vice President Harris's historic run, to the multiple assassination attempts on President Trump, his election, and the changes he has brought to every corner of the country, this book reveals in surprising new detail how we got here, and what we can expect from American politics in the years to come. Jonathan Karl is the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News and co-anchor of This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Karl has covered every major beat in Washington, D.C., including the White House, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the State Department. He has reported from the White House under four presidents and fourteen press secretaries. He is a former president of the White House Correspondents' Association. Front Row at the Trump Show, Betrayal, and Tired of Winning were instant New York Times bestsellers. Tamala Edwards joined 6abc in January of 2005. She is the weekday co-anchor of Action News Mornings from 4 a.m to 7 a.m. and is a regular co-host of Inside Story, conducting probing interviews with newsmakers like Governor Tom Corbett, Senator Bob Casey, Mayor Michael Nutter and others, as well as moderating many election debates. Prior to joining 6abc, Tamala Edwards was the anchor of ABC's World News Now, and World News This Morning. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable (recorded 12/2/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Ray Didinger | The Eagles Encyclopedia : Champions II In Conversation with Merrill Reese Community Spotlight Partner: FanDuel Group Montgomery Auditorium is now sold out, but tickets are still available for a live simulcast screening in a separate room at the Parkway Central Library. Standby seating will be available in the overflow room for guests who wish to wait for an opportunity to be seated in the main auditorium, if space permits. These standby seats will be available on a first come, first served basis. Auditorium seats are not guaranteed. Fly Eagles Fly! They did it again. The Eagles routed the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LIX to claim their second NFL championship in the Jeffrey Lurie era. Hall of Fame sportswriter Ray Didinger has done it again, too, revising and updating his best-selling The Eagles Encyclopedia: Champions Edition to celebrate the latest victory. Quarterback Jalen Hurts described the city's love for the Eagles as "a Philly thing," and no one understands that better than Didinger, who has followed the team since the 1950s. In Champions II, he brings that history up to date by writing about the Tush Push, Saquon Barkley's reverse hurdle, and other milestones of the season leading up to the team's second Super Bowl triumph. This new edition includes: * More than 50 new photographs plus a 16-page color insert. * Tributes to the team's newest Hall of Fame inductees: Eric Allen, Dick Vermeil and Harold Carmichael. * Dozens of new player, coach and front-office profiles. * An expanded chapter on the Eagles-Cowboys rivalry. * An updated statistics and records section. The Eagles Encyclopedia: Champions II is a must have for any E-A-G-L-E-S fan who wants to relive the Big Game and all the drama that led up to it. Ray Didinger was a sports columnist for the Philadelphia Bulletin and Philadelphia Daily News. He was named Pennsylvania Sportswriter of the Year five times. He won six Emmy Awards as a writer and producer for NFL Films. He has authored or coauthored a dozen books and was the first print journalist inducted into the Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame. He was a talk show host on 94WIP Sports Radio and football analyst for NBC Sports Philadelphia. In 1995, he won the Bill Nunn Award for his long and distinguished reporting on professional football and his name was added to the Writers Honor Roll at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. Merrill Reese has been the Eagles' radio play-by-play announcer for 48 consecutive seasons. A Philadelphia native, Reese was a named sports director at Temple University's station, WRTI, and after graduation he began his professional radio career at WPAZ in Pottstown, PA, calling high school football games. In 1990, Reese voiced ESPN's award-winning series ''NFL Dream Season.'' Reese has received numerous awards and recognition, including Pennsylvania Sportscaster of the Year, and being inducted into the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame. In 2024 he received the Pro Football Hall of Fame's coveted Pete Rozelle Radio and Television Award for broadcasting the team's triumph in Super Bowl LIX. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 11/4/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Jaquira Diaz | This Is the Only Kingdom In Conversation with Airea D. Matthews When Maricarmen meets Rey el Cantante, beloved small-time Robin Hood and local musician on the rise, she begins to envision a life beyond the tight-knit community of el Caserío, Puerto Rico - beyond cleaning houses, beyond waiting tables, beyond the constant tug of war between the street hustlers and los camarones. But breaking free proves more difficult than she imagined, and she soon finds herself struggling to make a home for herself, for Rey, his young brother Tito, and eventually, their daughter Nena. Until one fateful day changes everything. Fifteen years later, Maricarmen and Nena find themselves in the middle of a murder investigation as the community that once rallied to support Rey turns against them. Now Nena, a teenager haunted by loss and betrayal and exploring her sexual identity, must learn to fight for herself and her family in a world not always welcoming. For lovers of the Neapolitan novels, This is the Only Kingdom is an immersive and moving portrait of a family - and a community - torn apart by generational grief, and a powerful love letter to mothers, daughters, and the barrios that make them. Born in Puerto Rico, Jaquira Díaz was raised between Humacao, Fajardo, and Miami Beach. She is the author of Ordinary Girls: A Memoir, winner of a Whiting Award, a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, a Lambda Literary Awards finalist, an American Booksellers Association Indies Introduce Selection, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, an Indie Next Pick, a Library Reads pick, and finalist for the B&N Discover Prize. The recipient of the Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, the Alonzo Davis Fellowship from VCCA, two Pushcart Prizes, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, and fellowships from MacDowell, the Kenyon Review, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV, Díaz has written for The Atlantic, The Guardian, Time Magazine, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Condé Nast Traveler, and The Fader, and her stories, poems, and essays have been anthologized in The Best American Essays, The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Best American Experimental Writing, and The Pushcart Prize anthology. In 2022, she held the Mina Hohenberg Darden Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University's MFA program and a Pabst Endowed Chair for Master Writers at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University. Airea D. Matthews received a BA in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers' Program and an MPA from the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Bread and Circus (Scribner Books, 2023), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award, and was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. Her poetry collection, Simulacra (Yale University Press, 2017), was selected by Carl Phillips as the winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 10/30/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Keisha N. Blain | Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights In Conversation with Timothy Welbeck Even before they were recognized as citizens of the United States, Black women understood that the fights for civil and human rights were inseparable. Over the course of two hundred years, they were at the forefront of national and international movements for social change, weaving connections between their own and others' freedom struggles around the world. Without Fear tells how, during American history, Black women made humans rights theirs: from worldwide travel and public advocacy in the global Black press to their work for the United Nations, they courageously and effectively moved human rights beyond an esoteric concept to an active, organizing principle. Acclaimed historian Keisha N. Blain tells the story of these women-from the well-known, like Ida B. Wells, Madam C. J. Walker, and Lena Horne, to those who are still less known, including Pearl Sherrod, Aretha McKinley, and Marguerite Cartwright. Blain captures human rights thinking and activism from the ground up with Black women at the center, working outside the traditional halls of power. By shouldering intersecting forms of oppression-including racism, sexism, and classism-Black women have long been in a unique position to fight for freedom and dignity. Without Fear is an account of their aspirations, strategies, and struggles to pioneer a human rights approach to combating systems of injustice. Keisha N. Blain is professor of Africana studies and history at Brown University. She is a Guggenheim, Carnegie, and New America Fellow, and author-most recently of the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Until I Am Free. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island. Timothy Welbeck is the Director for the Center of Anti-Racism at Temple University. A Civil Rights Attorney by training, Timothy is a scholar of law, race, and cultural studies whose work has allowed him to contribute to various media outlets, such as the CNN, CBS, BBC Radio 4, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, NPR, The New York Times, and REVOLT TV. Timothy lives in the Philadelphia area with his wife and three children. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 10/27/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Karine Jean-Pierre | Independent : A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines In Conversation with Tamala Edwards Montgomery Auditorium is now sold out, but tickets are still available for a live simulcast screening in a separate room at the Parkway Central Library. Standby seating will be available in the overflow room for guests who wish to wait for an opportunity to be seated in the main auditorium, if space permits. These standby seats will be available on a first come, first served basis. Auditorium seats are not guaranteed. In a country obsessed with blind loyalty to a two-party democratic system, Karine Jean-Pierre, former White House press secretary to the Biden-Harris administration, shares why Americans must step beyond party lines to embrace life as Independents. Jean-Pierre didn't come to her decision to be an Independent lightly. She has served two American presidents, Obama and Biden. In 2020, she joined Biden's campaign as a senior adviser, becoming Harris's chief of staff and then, two years later, White House press secretary. She takes us through the three weeks that led to Biden's abandoning his bid for a second term and the betrayal by the Democratic Party that led to his decision. In an urgent, timely analysis, Independent urges all Americans to vote their values and maintain individuality within party lines. She presents clear arguments and provocative evidence as an insider about the importance of dismantling the torrent of disinformation and misinformation that has been rampant in recent elections and provides passionate insight for moving forward. In a hard-hitting yet hopeful critique, Jean-Pierre defines what it means to be part of the growing percentage of our fractured electorate that is Independent, why it can be worthwhile to carve a political space more loyal to personal beliefs than a party affiliation, and what questions you need to ask yourself to determine where you fit politically. As a history maker, veteran public servant, political analyst and independent thinker, she urges Americans to think outside of the blue-and-red box as we consider what's next to save our democracy. Karine Jean-Pierre was the White House Press Secretary and Special Advisor to former President Joe Biden. She has worked in senior communications and political offices in both the Biden and Obama Administrations. Prior to her time in the White House, Jean-Pierre was the Chief Public Affairs Officer for MoveOn.org. She is a graduate of Columbia University. Tamala Edwards joined 6abc in January of 2005. She is the weekday co-anchor of Action News Mornings from 4 a.m to 7 a.m. and is a regular co-host of Inside Story, conducting probing interviews with newsmakers like Governor Tom Corbett, Senator Bob Casey, Mayor Michael Nutter and others, as well as moderating many election debates. Prior to joining 6abc, Tamala Edwards was the anchor of ABC's World News Now, and World News This Morning. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 10/22/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Harmonia Rosales | Chronicles of Ori: An African Epic  In Conversation with Imani Roach In Chronicles of Ori, her debut book, Harmonia Rosales retells the African myths she has long treasured, crafting an enthralling epic that spans the birth of the universe to the modern world of colonialism and resistance. She writes of the powerful, temperamental deities called the Orishas; of the founding of Yorubaland by the shrewd leader Oduduwa; of the young heroine Eve, born in a time of violence and despair, who would help her people regain their past splendor; and of shimmering serpents and monstrous shadows who stalk the lands of mortals. At the center of these linked tales is the bond, sometimes fraying, between the Orishas and the humans who worship them. It was the Orishas who made humans, and who gave them their most precious resource: their Oris, or destinies. Vividly brought to life by Rosales's artwork, Chronicles of Ori will enlighten and delight readers for years to come. Harmonia Rosales is an American artist from Chicago whose work depicts and honors African myths and the diaspora. She lives in Los Angeles, California. Imani Roach is the inaugural director of the Brind Center for African and African Diasporic Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. There she is planning the first permanent gallery devoted to the arts of Africa and its diaspora in the PMA's 150-year history, set to open Fall, 2026. In this role she also works with colleagues across the institution on educational, curatorial and conservation initiatives that center Black art. She was previously Assistant Curator for the Arts of Africa at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York during the renovation and reinstallation of the Michael C. Rockefeller wing's African collection. A scholar of African Modernism and a proud Philadelphia resident since 2012, she has designed and led courses on the arts of Africa at Haverford College, the University of Pennsylvania, University of the Arts, Moore College of Art and Design and elsewhere. She has also worked in the arts journalism space, both as a senior editor at Guernica Magazine and as the first Managing editor of Artblog. Beyond her career as an art historian, she is also a regularly gigging vocalist and a new mom.  Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 10/21/2025)

The Author Events Series presents The Aeneid: Translating the Classics with Emily Wilson, Scott McGill, and Susannah Wright Crafted during the reign of Augustus Caesar at the outset of the Roman Empire, Virgil's Aeneid is a tale of thrilling adventure, extreme adversity, doomed romance, fateful battles, and profound loss. Through its stirring account of human struggle, meddling gods, and conflicting destinies, the poem brings to life the triumphs and trials that led to one of the most powerful societies the world has ever known. Unlike its Homeric predecessors, which arose from a long oral tradition, the Aeneid was composed by a singular poetic genius, and it has ever since been celebrated as one of the greatest literary achievements of antiquity. This exciting new edition of the Aeneid, the first collaborative translation of the poem in English, is rendered in unrhymed iambic pentameter, the English meter that corresponds best, in its history and cultural standing, to Virgil's dactylic hexameter. Scott McGill and Susannah Wright achieve an ideal middle ground between readability and elevation, engaging modern readers with fresh, contemporary language in a heart-pounding, propulsive rhythm, while also preserving the epic dignity of the original. The result is a brisk, eminently approachable translation that captures Virgil's sensitive balance between celebrating the Roman Empire and dramatizing its human costs, for victors and vanquished alike. This Aeneid is a poem in English every bit as complex, inviting, and affecting as the Latin original. With a rich and informative introduction from Emily Wilson, maps drawn especially for this volume, a pronunciation glossary, genealogies, extensive notes, and helpful summaries of each book, this gorgeous edition of Rome's founding poem will capture the imaginations and stir the souls of a new generation of readers. Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance and early modern studies, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. In addition to Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, she has also published translations of Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca. She lives in Philadelphia. Scott McGill is Deedee McMurtry Professor in Humanities at Rice University. He lives in Houston, Texas. Susannah Wright is an assistant professor of classical studies and Roman history at Rice University. She lives in Houston, Texas. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 10/14/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Muhammad Abdul-Hadi | We the Pizza: Slangin' Pies and Savin' Lives In Conversation with Janice Johnson Dias, PhD Before the conversation begins, Author Event ticket holders are invited to a special tasting of Down North's signature pies at a reception sponsored by the Urban League. This pre-event sampling offers guests a chance to savor the flavors and spirit behind We the Pizza. Pizza samples available while supplies last. First come first serve.  We the Pizza tells the Down North story about how the restaurant fulfills its mission to educate and support the formerly incarcerated while serving dope food. A testament to survival and second chances, this cookbook offers recipes for the tender, crispy-edged, square-cut, sauce-on-top pies that are Down North's signature dish; a whole chapter is devoted to vegetarian and vegan pizzas like No Better Love made with four cheeses and the arrabbiata-inspired Norf Sauce, while the meat and seafood pizza chapter features their most popular Roc the Mic pepperoni pie as well as the smoky berbere-brisket Tales of a Hustler and Say Yes, topped with jerk turkey sausage, roasted butternut squash, kale, ricotta, and lemon-honey drizzle.  The 65 recipes for pizzas along with classic and creative wings, fries, lemonades, and shakes are paired with cinematic photography of the pizzas in their natural setting and out in the wilds of Philadelphia, with lots of journalistic-style photography of the Down North crew making dough and slinging pies. At the same time, We the Pizza provides detailed historical information about incarceration in the United States along with empowering stories from Down North's formerly incarcerated staff. And with exclusive pizza recipes from renowned chef-supporters like Marc Vetri and Marcus Samuelsson, We the Pizza celebrates ingeniously delicious pizza, as well as the power people have to rise above their circumstances-if simply given the chance. Muhammad Abdul-Hadi is the founder and owner of Down North Pizza, the mission-driven restaurant in North Philadelphia that exclusively hires formerly incarcerated individuals. Down North Pizza is the culmination of Abdul-Hadi's thirteen-year vision and is a concept that has long been ingrained in him; through Down North and the Down North Foundation, he is able to impact to the economic realities of underserved communities through excellent food and uplifiting endeavors. Abdul-Hadi has won the James Beard Foundation's leadership award, and he and the Down North team have been featured in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Bon Appetit Magazine, the Today Show, Eater, First We Feast, and more. Dr. Janice Johnson Dias is an educator, strategist, and changemaker with a Ph.D. in Sociology from Temple University, specializing in urban and political sociology. She is a tenured associate professor of sociology and a graduate faculty member of criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. As president of the GrassROOTS Community Foundation, an international public health and social action training organization she co-founded in 2011, Dr. Johnson Dias leads efforts to empower communities and promote equity. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 10/8/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Jill Lepore  | We the People : A History of the U.S. Constitution Meelya Gordon Memorial Lecture Standby seating will be available in the overflow room for guests who wish to wait for an opportunity to be seated in the main auditorium, if space permits. These standby seats will be available on a first come, first served basis. Auditorium seats are not guaranteed. In Conversation with Kate Shaw Published on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the nation's founding-the anniversary, too, of the first state constitutions-We the People offers a wholly new history of the Constitution. ''One of the Constitution's founding purposes was to prevent change,'' Lepore writes. ''Another was to allow for change without violence.'' Relying on the extraordinary database she has assembled at the Amendments Project, Lepore recounts centuries of attempts, mostly by ordinary Americans, to realize the promise of the Constitution. Yet nearly all those efforts have failed. Although nearly twelve thousand amendments have been introduced in Congress since 1789, and thousands more have been proposed outside its doors, only twenty-seven have ever been ratified. More troubling, the Constitution has not been meaningfully amended since 1971. Without recourse to amendment, she argues, the risk of political violence rises. So does the risk of constitutional change by presidential or judicial fiat. Challenging both the Supreme Court's monopoly on constitutional interpretation and the flawed theory of ''originalism,'' Lepore contends in this ''gripping and unfamiliar story of our own past'' that the philosophy of amendment is foundational to American constitutionalism. The framers never intended for the Constitution to be preserved, like a butterfly, under glass, Lepore argues, but expected that future generations would be forever tinkering with it, hoping to mend America by amending its Constitution through an orderly deliberative and democratic process. Lepore's remarkable history seeks, too, to rekindle a sense of constitutional possibility. Congressman Jamie Raskin writes that Lepore ''has thrown us a lifeline, a way of seeing the Constitution neither as an authoritarian straitjacket nor a foolproof magic amulet but as the arena of fierce, logical, passionate, and often deadly struggle for a more perfect union.'' At a time when the Constitution's vulnerability is all too evident, and the risk of political violence all too real, We the People, with its shimmering prose and pioneering research, hints at the prospects for a better constitutional future, an amended America. Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and professor of law at Harvard Law School. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her many books include the international bestseller These Truths: A History of the United States. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 9/24/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Nicholas Boggs | Baldwin: A Love Story In Conversation with Rachel L. Swarns Baldwin: A Love Story, the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, reveals how profoundly the writer's personal relationships shaped his life and work. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material and original research and interviews, this spellbinding book tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin's most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac, whose long-overlooked significance as Baldwin's last great love is explored in these pages for the first time. Nicholas Boggs shows how Baldwin drew on all the complex forces within these relationships-geographical, cultural, political, artistic, and erotic- and alchemized them into novels, essays, and plays that speak truth to power and had an indelible impact on the civil rights movement and on Black and queer literary history. Richly immersive, Baldwin: A Love Story follows the writer's creative journey between Harlem, Paris, Switzerland, the southern United States, Istanbul, Africa, the South of France, and beyond. In so doing, it magnifies our understanding of the public and private lives of one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, whose contributions only continue to grow in influence. Nicholas Boggs was an undergraduate when he discovered James Baldwin's out-of-print children's book, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood, in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. After he tracked down its illustrator, the French artist Yoran Cazac, he went on to coedit an acclaimed new edition of the book in 2018. His writing has also been anthologized in The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin, James Baldwin Now, and Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin. He is the recipient of a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Beinecke Library and Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, the Schomburg Center Scholars-in-Residence Program, and the National Humanities Center, as well as residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell. He received his BA in English from Yale, his MFA in creative writing from American University, and his PhD in English from Columbia. Born and raised in Washington, DC, he lives in Brooklyn, New York. Rachel L. Swarns is a journalist, author and associate professor of journalism at New York University, who writes about race and history as a contributing writer for The New York Times. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of American Historians and her work has been recognized and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Biographers International Organization and others. Her latest book, The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church, was published by Random House. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 9/30/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Steven Pinker  | When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . . In Conversation with Annie Duke Common knowledge is necessary for coordination, for making arbitrary but complementary choices like driving on the right, using paper currency, and coalescing behind a political leader or movement. It's also necessary for social coordination: everything from rendezvousing at a time and place to speaking the same language to forming enduring relationships of friendship, romance, or authority. Humans have a sixth sense for common knowledge, and we create it with signals like laughter, tears, blushing, eye contact, and blunt speech. But people also go to great lengths to avoid common knowledge-to ensure that even if everyone knows something, they can't know that everyone else knows they know it. And so we get rituals like benign hypocrisy, veiled bribes and threats, sexual innuendo, and pretending not to see the elephant in the room. Pinker shows how the hidden logic of common knowledge can make sense of many of life's enigmas: financial bubbles and crashes, revolutions that come out of nowhere, the posturing and pretense of diplomacy, the eruption of social media shaming mobs and academic cancel culture, the awkwardness of a first date. Artists and humorists have long mined the intrigues of common knowledge, and Pinker liberally uses their novels, jokes, cartoons, films, and sitcom dialogues to illuminate social life's tragedies and comedies.  Consistently riveting in explaining the paradoxes of human behavior, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows... invites us to understand the ways we try to get into each other's heads and the harmonies, hypocrisies, and outrages that result. Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He has won many prizes for his teaching, his research on language, cognition, and social relations, and his twelve books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Enlightenment Now, and Rationality. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and one of Time's ''100 Most Influential People in the World Today.'' Annie Duke is an author, speaker, and consultant in the decision-making space, as well as Special Partner focused on Decision Science at First Round Capital Partners, a seed stage venture fund. Annie's latest book, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, was released in 2022 from Portfolio, a Penguin Random House imprint. Her previous book, Thinking in Bets, is a national bestseller. As a former professional poker player, she has won more than $4 million in tournament poker. During her career, Annie won a World Series of Poker bracelet and is the only woman to have won the World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions and the NBC National Poker Heads-Up Championship. She retired from the game in 2012. Prior to becoming a professional poker player, Annie was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship to study Cognitive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her master's degree. In 2021 she returned to her alma mater as a Visiting Scholar, where she also teaches executive education. In 2023 Annie completed her PhD in Cognitive Psychology. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 9/25/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Trymaine Lee | A Thousand Ways to Die : The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America In Conversation with James Peterson and local gun violence prevention organizers: Chantay Love, EMIR: Every Murder Is Real, Pastor Carl Day, Culture Changing Christians Worship Center Tasnim Sulaiman, Black Men Heal A few years ago, Trymaine Lee, though fit and only 38, nearly died of a heart attack. When his then five-year-old daughter, Nola, asked her daddy why, he realized that to answer her honestly, he had to confront what almost killed him-the weight of being a Black man in America; of bearing witness, as a journalist, to relentless Black death; and of a family history scarred by enslavement, lynching, the Great Migration, the also-insidious racism of the North, and gun violence that stole the lives of two great-uncles, a grandfather, a stepbrother, and two cousins. In this powerful narrative, Lee weaves together three strands: the long and bloody history of African Americans and guns; his work as a chronicler of gun violence, tallying the costs and riches generated by both the legal and illegal gun industries; and his own life story. With unflinching honesty he takes readers on a journey, from almost being caught up in gun violence as a young man, to tracing the legacy of the Middle Passage in Ghana through his ancestors' footsteps, to confronting the challenges of representing his people in an overwhelmingly white and often hostile media world, and most importantly, to celebrating the enduring strength of his family and community. In A Thousand Ways to Die, Lee answers Nola and all who seek a more just America. He shares the hard truths and complexities of the Black experience, but he also celebrates the beauty and resilience that is Nola's legacy. Trymaine Lee is a Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award-winning journalist and MSNBC contributor. He's the host of the ''Into America'' podcast where he covers the intersection of Blackness, power, and politics. A contributing author to the ''1619 Project'', he has reported for The New York Times, the Huffington Post, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune. A Thousand Ways to Die is his first book. James Peterson, Ph.D. is a writer, educator, and consultant. Dr. Peterson is the Host of ''Evening WURDS'' on WURD (900AM and 96.1FM) in Philadelphia, PA. He is the author of several books, including The Hip Hop Underground and African American Culture, Prison Industrial Complex for Beginners, and Hip-Hop Headphones: A Scholar's Critical Playlist. He is a columnist for The Philadelphia Citizen and has written for Fortune.com, Newsweek.com, The Guardian, The LA Times, Reuters, The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, and The Grio.  Dr. Peterson is also a professional wordsmith who has ghostwritten and edited projects for a variety of individuals and corporate entities across a wide spectrum of professions. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 9/11/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Miriam Toews | A Truce That Is Not Peace In Conversation with Katy Waldman ''Why do you write?'' the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews-all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer-surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister's suicide. She has been keeping up, she realizes, a decades-old internal correspondence, filling a silence she barely understands. And we, her readers, come to see that the question is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy. Marking the first time Toews has written her own life in nonfiction, A Truce That Is Not Peace explores the uneasy pact a writer makes with memory. Wildly inventive yet masterfully controlled; slyly casual yet momentous; wrenching and joyful; hilarious and humane-this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her world and inventing an astonishing new literary form to contain it. Miriam Toews is the author of the bestselling novels Women Talking, Fight Night, All My Puny Sorrows, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, and Irma Voth, and two works of nonfiction, A Truce That is Not Peace and Swing Low: A Life. She is winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award. She lives in Toronto. Katy Waldman is a staff writer at The New Yorker, for which she writes about books, culture, and more. Previously, she was a staff writer at Slate and the host of the ''Slate's Audio Book Club'' podcast. She won the National Book Critics Circle's Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing in 2019 and the American Society of Magazine Editors's award for journalists under thirty in 2018; her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York magazine, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband and dog in Washington, D.C. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 9/3/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Russell Shorto and Molly Beer  | Angelica & Taking Manhattan In Conversation with Michelle Craig McDonald In this enthralling and revealing woman's-eye view of a revolutionary era, Molly Beer breathes vibrant new life into a period usually dominated by masculine themes and often dulled by familiarity. In telling Angelica's story, she illuminates how American women have always plied influence and networks for political ends, including the making of a new nation. Taking Manhattan tells the riveting story of the birth of New York City as a center of capitalism and pluralism, a foundation from which America would rise. It also shows how the paradox of New York's origins--boundless opportunity coupled with subjugation and displacement--reflects America's promise and failure to this day. Russell Shorto, whose work has been described as "astonishing" (New York Times) and "literary alchemy" (Chicago Tribune), has once again mined archival sources to offer a vibrant tale and a fresh and trenchant argument about American beginnings. Raised in Angelica Schuyler Church's namesake town of Angelica, New York, Molly Beer is an award-winning author of essays, longform journalism, and oral history. She teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Russell Shorto, author of the bestsellers Smalltime, Revolution Song, Amsterdam, and The Island at the Center of the World, is the director of the New Amsterdam Project at the New York Historical. He lives in Maryland. Michelle Craig McDonald is the Director of the Library & Museum at the American Philosophical Society, and has worked for nearly three decades as an educator and administrator. She earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan where she focused on business relationships and consumer behavior between North America and the Caribbean during the 18th and 19th centuries. She also holds an M.A. in Liberal Arts from St. John's College, Annapolis, an M.A. in Museum Studies from George Washington University, and a B.A. in History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and was the Harvard-Newcomen Postdoctoral Fellow in Business History at the Harvard Business School. McDonald is the author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States (UPenn Press, 2025), and co-author of Public Drinking in the Early Modern World: Voices from the Tavern (Pickering & Chatto/Routledge Press, 2011), and her research has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Winterthur Library and Museum. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! After the program, attendees will be invited to continue the countdown to the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence in 2026 and meet Philadelphia's Revolutionary City Project partners, including colleagues from the American Philosophical Society and the Museum of the American Revolution. All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 9/4/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Caro De Robertis | So Many Stars REGISTER In Conversation with Dr. Michelle Taylor So Many Stars knits together the voices of trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, and two-spirit elders of color as they share authentic, intimate accounts of how they created space for themselves and their communities in the world. This singular project collects the testimonies of twenty elders, each a glimmering thread in a luminous tapestry, preserving their words for future generations--who can more fully exist in the world today because of these very trailblazers. De Robertis creates a collective coming-of-age story based on hundreds of hours of interviews, offering rare snapshots of ordinary life: kids growing up, navigating family issues and finding community, coming out and changing how they identify over the years, building movements and weathering the AIDS crisis, and sharing wisdom for future generations. Often narrating experiences that took place before they had the array of language that exists today to self-identify beyond the gender binary, this generation lived through remarkable changes in American culture, shaped American culture, and yet rarely takes center stage in the history books. Their stories feel particularly urgent in the current political moment, but also remind readers that their experiences are not new, and that young trans and nonbinary people today belong to a long lineage. The anecdotes in these pages are riveting, joyful, heartbreaking, full of personality and wisdom, and artfully woven together into one immersive narrative. In De Robertis's words, So Many Stars shares "behind-the-scenes tales of what it meant--and still means--to create an authentic life, against the odds." A writer of Uruguayan origins, Caro De Robertis is the author of six novels, including The Palace of Eros, Cantoras, and more. Their books have been translated into seventeen languages and have received numerous honors, including two Stonewall Book Awards, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, which they were the first openly nonbinary writer to receive. De Robertis is also an award-winning literary translator and a professor at San Francisco State University. They live in Oakland, California with their two children. Dr. Michelle Taylor holds a Ph.D. in Africology & African American Studies from Temple University and is an educator, writer, and activist. She also earned an M.S.W. from CUNY-Hunter College and served her community as a social worker for eighteen years prior to entering academia. Dr. Taylor is the author of Reclaiming Our Space: How Black Feminists Are Changing the World from the Tweets to the Streets and her work focuses on African American women, mass media, and social justice. Dr. Taylor founded Sankofa Summer School, a  ritual Afrocentric academy that educates students about topics relevant to people of the African Diaspora.  The 2024/25 Author Events Series is presented by Comcast. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 6/2/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson  | Original Sin Tickets to the Montgomery Auditorium are now sold out, but you can still get tickets for the simulcast live screening in Room 108.  REGISTER In Conversation with Tamala Edwards In Greek tragedy, the protagonist's effort to avoid his fate is what seals his fate. In 2024, American politics became a Greek tragedy. Joe Biden launched his successful 2020 bid for the White House with the stated goal of saving the nation from a second Trump presidential term. He, his family, and his senior aides were so convinced that only he could beat Trump again, they lied to themselves, allies, and the public about his condition and limitations. At his debate with Trump on June 27, 2024, the consequences of that deception were exposed to the world. It was shocking and upsetting. Now the full, unsettling truth is being told for the first time. Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson take us behind closed doors and into private conversations between the heaviest of hitters, revealing how big the problem was and how many people knew about it. From White House staffers at the highest to lowest levels, to leaders of Congress and the Cabinet, from governors to donors and Hollywood players, the truth is finally being told. What you will learn makes President Biden's decision to run for reelection seem shockingly narcissistic, self-delusional, and reckless-a desperate bet that went bust-and part of a larger act of extended public deception that has few precedents. The story the authors tell raises fundamental issues of accountability and responsibility that will continue for decades. The irony is biting: In the name of defeating what they called an existential threat to democracy, Biden and his inner circle ensured it, tossing aside his implicit promise to serve for only one term, denying the existence of health issues the nation had been watching for years, dooming the Democrats to defeat. The decision to run again, the Original Sin of this president, led to a campaign of denial and gaslighting, leading directly to Donald Trump's return to power and all that has happened as a consequence. Rarely does hubris meet nemesis more explosively. Wherever you stand on the political spectrum, Original Sin is essential reading. Tamala Edwards joined 6abc in January of 2005. She is the weekday co-anchor of Action News Mornings from 4 a.m to 7 a.m. and is a regular co-host of Inside Story, conducting probing interviews with newsmakers like Governor Tom Corbett, Senator Bob Casey, Mayor Michael Nutter and others, as well as moderating many election debates. Prior to joining 6abc, Tamala Edwards was the anchor of ABC's World News Now, and World News This Morning. The 2024/25 Author Events Series is presented by Comcast. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 5/29/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Senator Ron Wyden  | It Takes Chutzpah: How to Fight Fearlessly for Progressive Change REGISTER In Conversation with Michael Solomonov  Endowed Lecture: Pine Tree Foundation It Takes Chutzpah is an inspirational call to action by a senior U.S. politician, describing how Americans of all age groups, persuasions, and occupations can defy convention, chart new pathways for their communities, schools, at work and in life. US Senator Ron Wyden is widely praised for coming up with sensible-sounding ideas no one else had thought of and making the counter-intuitive political alliances that prove helpful in passing bills. In It Takes Chutzpah, he offers a progressive leader's manifesto for being a courageous warrior during turbulent times. "Chutzpah" is a Yiddish word that describes a trait that many Jews consider in-born. Ron explores chutzpah's long history and many interpretations and reclaims the word chutzpah for a new American generation, showing how it can be used for good to reclaim idealism and enact positive change. He shares "Ron's 12 Rules of Chutzpah" that enable any individual or group to achieve their objectives, including: 1. If you want to make change, you've got to make noise. 2.In a world where everyone thinks and acts for the short-term, always play the long game. 3. Leading is coaching: Whether in legislation or in life, you've got to bring people and ideas together around a shared goal. Ron identifies several key values--free speech, health care, reproductive rights, a clean environment, and reigning in Big Tech--and draws on his decades of public service to stress that preserving those values means that loud brashness and boldness will be needed now more than ever. The 2024/25 Author Events Series is presented by Comcast. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 5/15/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Jonathan Capehart  | Yet Here I Am: Lessons from a Black Man's Search for Home Tickets to the Montgomery Auditorium are now sold out, but you can still get tickets for the simulcast live screening in Room 108.  REGISTER In Conversation with David Brooks Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, editor, and TV host Jonathan Capehart on growing up, coming out, finding his voice, battles lost and won, and the path to a meaningful life Before meeting with success as a journalist, Jonathan Capehart struggled with his identity. Capehart grew up without his father and, as a child, lived with his mother in New Jersey and spent his summers living with relatives in North Carolina. Whether in the North or the South, Capehart had to contend with being told he was too smart or not smart enough, too black or not black enough. His was a struggle to identify and become. Yet Here I Am takes us along Capehart's journey, from his years at Carleton College, where he learns to embrace his identity as a gay, black man surrounded by a likeminded community; to his decision to come out to his family, risking rejection; and finally, his move to New York City and where he landed his first break in television news. Capehart, gaining confidence, eventually found his singular voice – as a writer, editor, and broadcaster – and used it to propel himself and the causes of others. Indeed, it was his voice that helped him find his place in the world, contemplating the complexities of race, place, reporting, and home. Honest and endearing, Yet Here I Am is an inspirational memoir of identity, opportunity, and purpose.  Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jonathan Capehart is anchor of The Saturday Show and The Sunday Show on MSNBC. In the spring, he will become a co-host of the morning edition of The Weekend on MSNBC. Capehart is Associate Editor at the Washington Post, where he is also an opinion writer. He is also an analyst on The PBS News Hour. Capehart was deputy editorial page editor of the New York Daily News (2002-2004) and served on its editorial board (1993-2000). His editorial campaign in 1999 to save the Apollo Theater earned the board the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing. David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times and a contributor to The Atlantic. He is a commentator on ''The PBS Newshour." His latest book is ''How To Know A Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.'' His previous three books were ''The Second Mountain,'' ''The Road to Character,'' and ''The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement,'' all #1 New York Times bestsellers.  The 2024/25 Author Events Series is presented by Comcast. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 5/22/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Paul Muldoon  | Joy in Service on Rue Tagore: Poems  REGISTER In Conversation with Daisy Fried  Since his 1973 debut, New Weather, Paul Muldoon has created some of the most original and memorable poetry of the past half century. Joy in Service on Rue Tagore sees him writing with the same verve and distinction that have consistently won him the highest accolades. Here, from artichokes to zinc, Muldoon navigates an alphabet of image and history, through barleymen and Irish slavers to the last running wolf in Ulster. The search involves the accumulated bric-a-brac of a life, and a reckoning along the way of gains against loss. In the poet's skillful hands, ancient maps are unfurled and brought into focus--the aggregation of Imperial Rome and the dismantling of Standard Oil, the pogroms of a Ukrainian ravine and of a Belfast shipyard. Through modern medicine and warfare, disaster and repair, these poems are electric in their energy, while profoundly humane in their line of inquiry. Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951. He now lives in New York. A former radio and television producer for the BBC in Belfast, he has taught at Princeton University for thirty-five years. He is the author of fourteen previous collections of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. Daisy Fried is the author of five books of poetry: My Destination (forthcoming next year from Flood Editions and Carcanet Press), The Year the City Emptied, Women's Poetry: Poems and Advice, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle, and She Didn't Mean to Do It. She has been awarded Guggenheim, Hodder and Pew Fellowships. A core faculty member in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and an occasional poetry critic for the New York Times, Poetry Foundation and elsewhere, she has lived in Philadelphia for decades, but will be moving to San Francisco at the end of the summer.  The 2024/25 Author Events Series is presented by Comcast. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 5/14/2025)

The Author Events Series presents Dr. Judith Joseph | High Functioning  REGISTER In Conversation with Hannah Williams Emcee - Dr. Dalesa Rueda The first book to unmask the hidden face of depression. If you look fine on the outside but don't feel fine on the inside, learn five tools to break the cycle of High Functioning Depression and experience more joy in your life. In High Functioning, Dr. Judith Joseph reveals that what we're feeling is not simply ''negativity'' or stress. Drawing on original research, client cases, and her personal experience with HFD, Dr. Judith radically shifts the way those of us with HFD see ourselves, and empowers us with five simple tools to reclaim our lives from this widespread yet poorly understood condition.  By following her 5 V's - validation, venting, values, vision, and vitals - we can wake up happier, find more satisfaction in our relationships, and feel better in the present while also looking forward to the future. Hannah Williams is a social activist and former data analyst tackling a major issue: salary transparency. After finding out she was underpaid, Hannah created Salary Transparent Street, a viral series interviewing strangers about their pay to help workers learn and earn more. She's testified in support of pay transparency bills in Virginia, Maryland, and DC, and her work has been featured by major media organizations like The Washington Post, TIME and BBC News. In 2023, she was named a Money.com Changemaker, and in 2024, she made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Dr. Dalesa Rueda is a licensed marriage and family therapist and the founder of Inspired & Free, a multi-state virtual therapy practice rooted in culturally responsive care. With over 20 years of experience, she specializes in helping individuals and couples heal from anxiety, trauma, and relationship challenges. Known for her warm, relatable approach and deep community ties in Philadelphia, Dr. Dalesa is passionate about making emotional wellness accessible and empowering for all. The 2024/25 Author Events Series is presented by Comcast. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. All tickets are non-refundable. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees. (recorded 5/8/2025)

The Author Events Series presents  Elie Mystal  | Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America  REGISTER In Conversation with Cherri Gregg In Bad Law, the New York Times bestselling author of Allow Me To Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution brings his trademark legal acumen and passionate snark to a brilliant takedown of ten of what he considers the most egregiously awful laws on the books today. These are pieces of legislation that are making life worse rather than better for Americans, and that, he argues with trenchant wit and biting humor, should be repealed completely. On topics ranging from abortion and immigration to voting rights and religious freedom, we have chosen rules to live by that do not reflect the will of most of the people. With respect to our decision to make a law that effectively grants immunity to gun manufacturers, for example, Mystal writes, ''We live in the most violent, wealthy country on earth not in spite of the law; we live in a first-person-shooter video game because of the law.'' But, as the man Samantha Bee calls ''irrepressible and righteously indignant'' and Matt Levine of Bloomberg Opinion calls ''the funniest lawyer in America,'' points out, these laws do not come to us from on high; we write them, and we can and should unwrite them. In a marvelous and original takedown spanning all the hot-button topics in the country today, one of our most brilliant legal thinkers points the way to a saner tomorrow most brilliant legal thinkers points the way to a saner tomorrow. The 2024/25 Author Events Series is presented by Comcast. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 4/30/2025)