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Celebrate the finalists in the 2022 Poetry Contest with the Enoch Pratt Free Library and Little Patuxent Review! The three finalists, Maryland's Poet Laureate, and LPR’s head editor read.
Caitlin Wilson, the winner of the 2022 Poetry Contest, is a Maryland poet. She holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her writing has appeared in ENTROPY, filling Station, Iron Horse Literary Review, McNeese Review, RHINO, Rogue Agent, and Wildness. She was a 2021 Sewanee Writer’s Conference contributor and recipient of VCU’s 2021 and 2020 Graduate Poetry Awards, a 2019 AWP Intro Journals Project award, the 2018 Henrietta Spiegel Creative Writing Award, and a Jiménez-Porter Literary Prize for Poetry. She previously served as managing editor of Blackbird.
Alicia Potee, a 2022 Poetry Contest finalist, is a Maryland native and 2002 graduate of St. John’s College in Annapolis. Her poems have appeared in The Comstock Review, Hawaii-Pacific Review, and The Baltimore Review, among other places. She lives in Towson with her two kids and a rescued mutt named Romeo.
Robert Schreur, a 2022 Poetry Contest finalist, is a psychotherapist and clinical supervisor in community psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. A volume of his selected poems, That Said, was published in 2018. He has lived in Baltimore for 37 years.
Grace Cavalieri is Maryland’s tenth Poet Laureate. Her new books are Grace Art: Poems & Paintings and The Secret Letters of Madame de Stael (both 2021). She founded and produces The Poet and the Poem for public radio, now from the Library of Congress, celebrating 45 years on-air. This series of several hundred poets will be shot to the moon in the Lunar Codex in 2022 as the first podcast series on the moon. Grace’s forthcoming book is The Long Game: Selected and New Poems (2022). She has a poem in LPR's summer 2022 issue.
Chelsea Lemon Fetzer, a contest judge, holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and earned her MFA in Fiction at Syracuse University in 2008. She is a 2019 Rubys recipient for the Literary Arts and a recipient of the Maryland State Arts Council’s 2022 Independent Artist Award. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in journals such as Callaloo, Tin House, Mississippi Review, and Minnesota Review. Her essay “Speck” appears in The Beiging of America: Personal Narratives about Being Mixed Race in the 21st Century. Fetzer teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Baltimore, serves as vice chair on the board of CityLit Project, and is lead editor of the Little Patuxent Review.
Pictured: (top row) Alicia Potee, Caitlin Wilson, Robert Schreur, (bottom row) Grace Cavalieri, Chelsea Lemon Fetzer.
Recorded On: Tuesday, August 16, 2022
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Join us for a reading by Lori Jakiela, who won the 2021 Wicked Woman Poetry Prize for her manuscript, How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?, and the contest judge, Nancy Naomi Carlson.
Lori Jakiela is the author of the memoir Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe (2016), which received the 2016 Saroyan Prize from Stanford University. She is also the author of the memoirs Miss New York Has Everything, The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious, and Portrait of the Artist as a Bingo Worker, as well as the poetry collections Spot the Terrorist! and How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen? Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and more. Recently, actress Kristen Bell chose Jakiela's New York Times' Modern Love essay, "The Plain Unmarked Box Arrived," to perform on the Times' Modern Love podcast. Jakiela writes a monthly column, Stories of Our Neighbors, for Pittsburgh Magazine and directs the undergraduate Creative and Professional Writing Program at The University of Pittsburgh's Greensburg campus. She lives in her hometown of Trafford, PA, with her husband, the author Dave Newman, and their children. For more, visit her author website at http://lorijakiela.net.
Nancy Naomi Carlson, twice an NEA literature translation grant recipient, has published eleven titles (seven translated). An Infusion of Violets (Seagull, 2019) was called “new & noteworthy” by The New York Times. An associate editor for Tupelo Press, her work has appeared in such journals as The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Paris Review, and Poetry. Learn more at www.nancynaomicarlson.com.
Doritt Carroll, BrickHouse Books Poetry Editor, and Clarinda Harriss, BrickHouse Books Director and Editor-in-Chief, hosts this event.
Read "Former 90s Supermodel Cindy Crawford Says People Shouldn’t Worry About Aging" by Lori Jakiela.
Read "Sequoia" by Nancy Naomi Carlson.
Learn more about the Wicked Woman Poetry Prize.Recorded On: Thursday, October 14, 2021
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Poets Sylvia Dianne “Ladi Di” Beverly, Patrick Washington, Diane Wilbon Parks, and Hiram Larew with Cliff Bernier on harmonica present and discuss poems, music, and artwork about America’s history of slavery. This powerful, all-too-timely 60-minute program reimagines the voices and legacy of those enslaved at the historic Woodlawn Plantation Estate in Fairfax, VA.
Sylvia Dianne Beverly is an internationally acclaimed poet, presenting poetry in London, England, at the Lewisham Theatre. A collection of her work is housed at George Washington University's Gelman Library. She is a member of A Splendid Wake, Gelman Library, George Washington University. Also, she has been featured at the Smithsonian National Museum of History, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum, and other Smithsonians. Ladi Di as she is affectionally called is a founding member of the poetry ensemble "Collective Voices." She is a proud member of Writers on the Green Line, Poetry X Hunger, Poetry Poster Project, and Voices of Woodlawn. Ladi Di celebrated the 40th anniversary of host Grace Cavalieri, reading on her show, The Poet and the Poem, at the Library of Congress. Also, she is a founding member of the Anointed PENS (Poets Empowered to Nurture Souls) Poetry Ministry, out of Ebenezer AME Church, an alum of Poet-In-Progress with Poet Laureate of the District of Columbia, the late Dolores Kendrick. She is author of two books (Forever In Your Eyes and Cooking Up South), both on Amazon. Recently her poetry appears in several international anthologies, the Moonstone Press Anthology, and as part of Mike Maggio's 30 for 30 series for National Poetry Month 2021. Ladi Di is also called "Love Poet." The late Dr. Maya Angelou is her hero. She is the proud matriarch of her family. Celebrating Black History 2018, she and her family received posthumously for her Dad a Congressional Gold Medal from the United States Marines. She is a Poet of Excellence in Prince Georges County 2020. Poetry is her passion. Contact her at [email protected] or on Facebook.
Patrick Washington has spent over two decades performing, conducting interactive workshops, and spreading love for the spoken, the written, and the rhythmic word across this country. His engaging have taken him across the country and back, from Washington's storied U Street circuit, to television and off-Broadway theater performances. Patrick was commissioned to create a poem dedicating the monument to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King which he performed at the unveiling on the National Mall on October 16th, 2011. A teaching artist at heart, he has launched his own arts education company, Dialect of Prince George's, and with it created the Youth Poet Laureate program, giving young people the opportunity to collaborate with city officials and serve as poetic ambassadors for their community.
Diane Wilbon Parks is a visual poet and artist; she has written two poetry collections and a children’s book. Diane is the founder of The Write Blend, a culturally diverse poetry circle, and was recognized as a 2020 Prince George’s County Poet of Excellence. She celebrated the permanent installation of one of her poems and artwork as a permanent sign at the Patuxent Research Refuge - North Tract. Diane’s poetry has been widely featured and highlighted throughout the DMV through the Poetry Poster Project which was exhibited throughout Maryland and at the House of Delegates in Annapolis. Diane has been a long-standing literary advocate and leader in the poetry community. Her poetry has been featured in newsletters, online magazines, and anthologies, and recently included in the international anthology Singing in the Dark and international magazine Wexford Women; locally in the Annapolis Westfield Magazine. Her interviews are included in the 43rd and 44th anniversaries of Grace Cavalieri’s The Poet and the Poem at the Library of Congress. Diane is a USAF Veteran and Senior IT Program Manager. She resides in Maryland with husband, two children, and dog, Cooper.
Hiram Larew’s next collection of poems will be published by Atmosphere Press. He has organized the Poetry Poster Project, Poetry X Hunger, and Voices of Woodlawn. He lives in Churchton, MD.
Clifford Bernier is the author of three poetry collections; he has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and his The Silent Art won the 2010 Gival Press Poetry Award. He appears on harmonica in the Accumulated Dust world music series and is featured on the EP Post-Columbian America. A member of the Washington Writers Collection, he has featured on NPR’s The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress and lives in Northern Virginia.
Pictured: (top row) Clifford Bernier, Sylvia Dianne Beverly, (bottom row) Hiram Larew, Diane Wilbon Parks, Patrick Washington.
Recorded On: Wednesday, August 11, 2021
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Celebrate the finalists in the 2021 Poetry Contest with the Enoch Pratt Free Library and Little Patuxent Review! The three finalists, another contributor to the summer issue, and LPR’s head editor read.
Steven Hollies, the winner of the 2021 Poetry Contest, is a Rockville native living mostly inside his head, a 2019 graduate of Howard Community College, and a drop-out from many other times and places. He enjoys playing volleyball, guitar, hooky, jokes, games, with words, around, along, it cool, hard to get, with fire, and the fool. Read "Body/language," the poem that won the 2021 Poetry Contest.
Virginia Crawford, a 2021 Poetry Contest finalist, is a long-time teaching artist with the Maryland State Arts Council. She has co-edited two anthologies: Poetry Baltimore, poems about a city and Voices Fly, An Anthology of Exercises and Poems from the Maryland State Arts Council Artist-in-Residence Program from CityLit Press. She earned degrees in Creative Writing from Emerson College, Boston, and The University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Her book Touch appeared in 2013 from Finishing Line Press. Apprentice House Press published questions for water in April 2021. She writes and lives in Baltimore. Learn more at virginiacrawford.com.
Rosemary Hutzler, a 2021 Poetry Contest finalist, teaches, writes, and mothers in northwest Baltimore. Growing up on an island near Seattle, she was imprinted by natural beauty, quirky houses, and iconoclastic personalities. She also lived in Maine, Connecticut, France, and Brooklyn before settling into Baltimore and its Jewish community. Her teachers have included John Hollander, Michael Collier, Mark Strand, and Gerald Stern. Her work has appeared in the Texas Observer, the Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore City Paper, the Forward, Nimrod, and elsewhere. Read her translation of R.M. Rilke's "Grown Woman" and her review of a republication of Ellen La Motte's Backwash of War.
.chisaraokwu. (she/her), a contributor to LPR's summer 2021 issue, is an Igbo American actor, poet, and healthcare futurist. Her poetry and essays have appeared in many journals, including Berkeley Poetry Review, Cutthroat, Obsidian, and Tinderbox Poetry. Named a Cave Canem Fellow in 2020, she looks forward to post-pandemic travel. Read her poem "The Suicide Bomber Climbs A Mountain & Leaves A Note."
Chelsea Lemon Fetzer, a contest judge, holds an MFA in Fiction from Syracuse University. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in journals such as Callaloo, Tin House, Mississippi Review, and Minnesota Review. Her essay “Speck” appears in The Beiging of America: Personal Narratives about being Mixed Race in the 21st Century. She is a 2019 Rubys recipient for the Literary Arts. Fetzer currently teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Baltimore. She serves on the board of CityLit Project and as head editor of Little Patuxent Review, a literary and arts journal that publishes creative work from the Mid-Atlantic region and beyond. Read her poem "flare."
Pictured: (top row) Virginia Crawford, Steven Hollies, Rosemary Hutzler, (bottom row) .chisaraokwu., Chelsea Lemon Fetzer.
Recorded On: Wednesday, July 21, 2021
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Leslie Gray Streeter is in conversation with Melanie Hood-Wilson about her book, Black Widow.
Looking at widowhood through the prism of race, mixed marriage, and aging, Black Widow: A Sad-Funny Journey Through Grief for People Who Normally Avoid Books with Words Like "Journey" in the Title redefines the stages of grief, from coffin shopping to day-drinking, to being a grown-ass woman crying for your mommy, to breaking up and making up with God, to facing the fact that life goes on even after the death of the person you were supposed to live it with. While she stumbles toward an uncertain future as a single mother raising a baby with her own widowed mother (plot twist!), Leslie looks back on her love story with Scott, recounting their journey through racism, religious differences, and persistent confusion about what kugel is. Will she find the strength to finish the most important thing that she and Scottd?
Tender, true, and endearingly hilarious, Black Widow is a story about the power of love, and how the only guide book for recovery is the one you write yourself.
Leslie Gray Streeter is an author, veteran journalist and speaker. whose memoir Black Widow, was published in March 2020 by Little, Brown and Company. Until recently, she was the longtime entertainment and lifestyle columnist and writer for the Palm Beach Post. A native of Baltimore, MD and a University of Maryland graduate, she and her work have been featured in The Miami Herald, the Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Atlantic, the Today show, SiriusXM, O, The Oprah Magazine and more. She lives with her son Brooks and her mother Tina in her hometown of Baltimore, which she moved back to last summer. She’s a slow runner, an amateur vegan cook and a true crime and “Law and Order” enthusiast, as well as a proud former regular at the Northwood branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library!
After receiving her BA in ‘93 and MSEd in ’94 from Sarah Lawrence College, Melanie Hood-Wilson returned to Baltimore to teach. In 2001, she was hired to lead the Single Step Program at CCBC, growing the program from eight students to over 300 and winning five local and statewide awards.
In 2019, she launched Melanie Hood-Wilson and Associates which provides trainings and accountability planning in diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as academic and disabilities support.Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.
Recorded On: Tuesday, July 13, 2021
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Presented in partnership with the Reginald F. Lewis Museum.
Annette Gordon-Reed is in conversation with Lawrence Jackson about her new book, On Juneteenth.
In ON JUNETEENTH, Gordon-Reed combines her own scholarship with a personal and intimate reflection of an overlooked holiday that has suddenly taken on new significance in a post-George Floyd world.
As Gordon-Reed writes, “It is staggering that there is no date commemorating the end of slavery in the United States.” Yet, Texas—the last state to free its slaves—has long acknowledged the moment on June 19, 1865, when US Major General Gordon Granger proclaimed from his headquarters in Galveston that slavery was no longer the law of the land. ON JUNETEENTH takes us beyond the stories of Gordon-Reed’s childhood, providing a Texan’s view of the long, non-traditional road to a national recognition of the holiday.
Gordon-Reed presents the saga of a frontier defined as much by the slave plantation owner as the mythic cowboy, rancher, or oilman. Reworking the “Alamo” narrative, she shows that enslaved Blacks—in addition to Native Americans, Anglos, and Tejanos—formed the state’s makeup from the 1500s, well before Africans arrived in Jamestown. That slave-and race-based economy not only defined this fractious era of Texas independence, but precipitated the Mexican-American War and the resulting Civil War.
A commemoration of Juneteenth and the fraught legacies of slavery that still persist, On Juneteenth is a stark reminder that the fight for equality is ongoing.
Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. Author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, she lives in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Lawrence Jackson is the author of the award-winning books Chester B. Himes: A Biography and The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics. In 2002 he published Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius, 1913-1952 and he has written a memoir on race and family history called My Father’s Name: A Black Virginia Family after the Civil War. Professor Jackson earned a PhD in English and American literature at Stanford University, and he is a 2019 Guggenheim fellowship awardee. A Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and History at Johns Hopkins University, he founded the Billie Holiday Project for Liberation Arts to create opportunities for enhanced intellectual and artistic relations between Hopkins and Baltimore City, his hometown. He is completing a book about his return called Job’s Labyrinth, or, Shelter.
The Brown Lecture Series is supported by the Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Foundation.
Recorded On: Wednesday, June 23, 2021
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Join us for a virtual reading by Virginia Crawford, E. Doyle-Gillespie, Meg Eden, Brian Gilmore, Joseph Harrison, Christine Higgins, and Michael Salcman, seven local poets with recent books.
Virginia Crawford, author of questions for water (Apprentice House Press, 2021), is a long-time teaching artist with the Maryland State Arts Council. She has co-edited two anthologies: Poetry Baltimore, poems about a city and Voices Fly, An Anthology of Exercises and Poems from the Maryland State Arts Council Artist-in-Residence Program. She earned degrees in Creative Writing from Emerson College, Boston, and The University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Her book Touch appeared in 2013 from Finishing Line Press. She writes and lives in Baltimore with her family.
E. Doyle-Gillespie is a Baltimore City Police officer. A 15-year veteran of the force, he has worked in patrol, operations, and education among other specializations. His books of poetry include Masala Tea and Oranges, On the Later Addition of Sancho Panza, Socorro Prophecy, and Aerial Act. His most recent title is Gentrifying the Plague House, an exploration of our world of social upheaval and pandemic. He is a former teacher who holds a BA in History from George Washington University, and a Master of Liberal Arts from Johns Hopkins University.
Meg Eden is a 2020 Pitch Wars mentee and teaches creative writing at Anne Arundel Community College. She is the author of five poetry chapbooks, the novel Post-High School Reality Quest (2017), and the poetry collection Drowning in the Floating World (2020). She runs the Magfest MAGES Library blog, which posts accessible academic articles about video games. Find her online at www.megedenbooks.com or on Twitter at @ConfusedNarwhal.
Brian Gilmore, Washington, D.C., poet and longtime public-interest lawyer, is the author of four collections of poetry: elvis presley is alive and well and living in harlem, Jungle Nights and Soda Fountain Rags, We Didn’t Know Any Gangsters, and come see about me, marvin, which received a 2020 Michigan Notable Book Award. He is a Cave Canem Fellow and Kimbilio Fellow and twice recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award. He currently teaches social justice law at Michigan State University.
Joseph Harrison is the author of six books of poems, including Someone Else’s Name, Identity Theft, Shakespeare’s Horse, and, most recently, Sometimes I Dream That I Am Not Walt Whitman. His poetry has been published in numerous journals (such as The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, Raritan, and The Yale Review) and several anthologies (including Best American Poetry, the Library of America's American Religious Poems, and Norton’s Leadership: Essential Writings of Our Greatest Thinkers). He is Senior American Editor for the Waywiser Press.
Christine Higgins is the author of Hallow, a full-length collection of poetry published in spring 2020 (Cherry Grove). She was the second-place winner in the Poetry Box competition for her chapbook, Hello, Darling, in 2019. She is the co-author of In the Margins, A Conversation in Poetry. She has been the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Award for both poetry and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in America, Poetry East, Naugatuck River Review, and Windhover. Learn more at www.christinehigginswriter.com.
Michael Salcman, poet, physician and art critic, served as chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum and CityLit. Poems appear in Arts & Letters, Café Review, Hudson Review, New Letters, and Raritan. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti; The Enemy of Good Is Better; his popular anthology, Poetry in Medicine; A Prague Spring, Before & After, winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize; and Shades & Graces: New Poems (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020), inaugural winner of The Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize.Listen to “Thoughts on Making Soup and War” by Virginia Crawford.
Read "Oasis Bridesmaids" by E. Doyle-Gillespie.
Read “Rikuzentakata” by Meg Eden.
Read "detroit sketch #1 (for m.l.)" by Brian Gilmore.
Read “Mark Strand” by Joseph Harrison.
Read “The Boy” by Christine Higgins.
Listen to “In-Painting” and “The Cult of Beauty” by Michael Salcman.Pictured: (top row) Virginia Crawford, E. Doyle-Gillespie, (middle row) Meg Eden, Brian Gilmore, Joseph Harrison, (bottom row) Christine Higgins, Michael Salcman.
Recorded On: Wednesday, June 16, 2021
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Alec MacGillis is in conversation with Jesse J. Holland about his new book, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America .
Alec MacGillis is a senior reporter at ProPublica. MacGillis previously reported for The New Republic, The Washington Post, and the Baltimore Sun. He won the 2016 Robin Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, the 2017 Polk Award for National Reporting, and the 2017 Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic, New York, Harper's, and New York Times Magazine, among other publications. A resident of Baltimore, MacGillis is the author of The Cynic, a 2014 biography of Sen. Mitch McConnell, and the forthcoming Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America.
Jesse J. Holland is an award-winning writer, journalist and television personality. Jesse is host of the Saturday edition of C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, can be seen weekly as a political analyst on the Black News Channel’s DC Live and occasionally on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and other news outlets for news and analysis.
He is the author and editor of the new Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda prose anthology released in February 2021 from Titan Books and Marvel, the first prose anthology featuring the first mainstream black superhero. He is also author of The Black Panther: Who Is The Black Panther? prose novel, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award in 2019 and The Invisibles: The Untold Story of African American Slavery Inside The White House, which was named as the 2017 silver medal award winner in U.S. History in the Independent Publisher Book Awards and one of the top history books of 2016 by Smithsonian.com. Jesse also wrote Star Wars: The Force Awakens - Finn’s Story young adult novel and Black Men Built The Capitol: Discovering African American History In and Around Washington, D.C.
Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.
Recorded On: Wednesday, June 2, 2021
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Presented in partnership with AARP Maryland.
Justin Fenton is in conversation with Clarence Davis about his book, We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption.
In this urgent book, award-winning investigative journalist Justin Fenton distills hundreds of interviews, thousands of court documents, and countless hours of video footage to present the definitive account of the entire scandal of the Gun Trace Task Force. The result is an astounding, riveting feat of reportage about a rogue police unit, the city they held hostage, and the ongoing struggle between American law enforcement and the communities they are charged to serve.
Justin Fenton has been a reporter at the Baltimore Sun since 2005, covering crime and the justice system for the past 13 years. He was part of the Pulitzer-finalist team that covered the death of Freddie Gray and was twice named a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists, for his coverage of rapes that were being discounted by police and a series inside a homicide investigation. "We Own This City" is his first book, and is the basis for a forthcoming HBO miniseries. He is a graduate of the University of Maryland.
Clarence Davis, affectionately known as “Tiger”, has served his community in many different capacities. He is a former Post Commander of Otha Spriggs Memorial American Legion Post, a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Black Vets of All Wars, Vietnam Veterans of America, and he founded the African American Patriots Consortium, which promotes and celebrates the history of African-Americans in defense of the Nation.
Professionally, Davis has served veterans as Director of Veterans Affairs at Catonsville Community College and as Director of the Mondawmin Vet Center. Additionally, he served on the National Faculty of the VA’s Outreach Program. Davis was an Associate Professor of History at Essex Community College from 1986-96 and is retired from a faculty/lecturer position in history at Morgan State University. As with his service to veterans, he has received many awards for excellence and his dedication to people.
In November 1982, Davis was elected to the House of Delegates of the Maryland General Assembly where he held several leadership positions prior to his retirement in December 2006. Lastly, Tiger served in the capacity of AARP Maryland State President from 2012 until 2017.
Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.
Recorded On: Thursday, May 20, 2021
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Audrey Clare Farley is in conversation with Carrie Callaghan about her work and her newest book, The Unfit Heiress.
For readers of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and The Phantom of Fifth Avenue, The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt is a page-turning drama of fortunes, eugenics and women's reproductive rights framed by the sordid court battle between Ann Cooper Hewitt and her socialite mother.
Audrey Clare Farley is a writer, book reviewer, and historian of twentieth-century American fiction and culture. Having earned a PhD in English from University of Maryland, College Park in 2017, she occasionally lectures in history and literature at local universities. Her essay on Ann Cooper Hewitt, published in July 2019 in Narratively, was the publication’s second most-read story of the year. Her writing on the eugenics movement and other topics has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Public Books, Lady Science, Longreads, and Marginalia Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor. She lives in Hanover, Pennsylvania.
Carrie Callaghan is the author of the historical novels A Light of Her Own (2018) and Salt the Snow (2020). Her short stories have been published in multiple literary journals, and she is a senior editor with the Washington Independent Review of Books. She lives in Maryland with her family and three ridiculous cats. She loves seasons of all kinds, history, and tea.
Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.
Recorded On: Thursday, May 6, 2021
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Presented in partnership with CityLit Project.
Morgan Jerkins is in conversation with Teri Henderson about her work. In this talk, Jerkins discusses her literary journey, culminating in the release of her newest work, Caul Baby.
Following the critical and popular success of her first two books of nonfiction, New York Times bestselling author Morgan Jerkins returns with her electrifying fiction debut, Caul Baby, a family saga filled with secrets, betrayal, intrigue, and magic.
Desperate to be a mother after multiple pregnancies have ended in heartbreak, Laila turns to the Melancons, an old and powerful Harlem family known for their caul, a precious layer of skin that is the secret source of their healing power. When the deal for Laila to acquire a piece of caul to protect her baby falls through and her child is stillborn, she is overcome with grief and rage and blames the family for the loss.
What she doesn’t know is that she has another connection to the Melancons: her niece, Amara, an ambitious college student, soon secretly delivers a baby girl she names Hallow and gives her to the Melancons to raise as one of their own.
Hallow is special, born with a caul, and the Melancons’ matriarch believes she will restore the family’s waning prosperity. As a child, Hallow is sheltered in the Melancons’ decrepit brownstone, but as she grows up, she to become suspicious of the Melancon women, particularly wondering about Josephine, the woman she calls mother, and the matriarch, Maman, who only seems to care about Hallow’s caul.
As the Melancons’ desperation to maintain their status grows, Amara, now a successful lawyer running for district attorney, looks for a way to avenge her longstanding grudge against the family for their crime against her beloved aunt Laila.
When mother and daughter finally cross paths, Hallow must decide where her loyalty lies.
Morgan Jerkins is the author of Wandering in Strange Lands and the New York Times bestseller This Will Be My Undoing and a Senior Culture Editor at ESPN’s The Undefeated. Jerkins is a visiting professor at Columbia University and a Forbes 30 Under 30 leader in media, and her short-form work has been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Elle, Esquire, and the Guardian, among many other outlets. She is based in Harlem.
Teri Henderson (b. Fort Worth, TX, 1990) is a curator, co-director of WDLY, and writer. Henderson holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Texas Christian University. She formerly held a curatorial internship at Ghost Gallery in Seattle, Washington. During that time she also helped launch the social media campaign for the non-profit access to justice platform PopUpJustice!. She also previously served as the Art Law Clinic Director for Maryland Volunteer Lawyers For The Arts. She was published in the St. James Encyclopedia of Hip Hop Culture. Her work as co-director of WDLY addresses shrinking the gap between the spaces that contemporary artists of color inhabit and the resources of the power structures of the art world through the curation and artistic production of events. Henderson recently founded the Black Collagists Arts Incubator. Henderson is currently a staff writer for BmoreArt as well as the Connect+Collect gallery coordinator.
Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.
Recorded On: Tuesday, May 4, 2021
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Join us for readings and discussion inspired by the Washington Writers' Publishing House's new anthology, This Is What America Looks Like: Poetry and Fiction from DC, Maryland, and Virginia, 111 works by 100 writers. Editor Kathleen Wheaton describes this anthology as "a picture of our time, our shared losses, our shared life."
The event features a panel of writers representing the anthology.
Poet Sarah Browning’s books are Killing Summer and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden. She co-founded and for 10 years directed Split This Rock. Her fellowships include ones from the Lillian E. Smith Center, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Yaddo, Mesa Refuge, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Adirondack Center for Writing.
Hayes Davis is the author of Let Our Eyes Linger (Poetry Mutual Press, 2016). His work appears in many journals and anthologies. He was a member of Cave Canem’s first cohort of fellows. A high-school English teacher, he lives in Silver Spring with his wife, poet Teri Ellen Cross Davis.
Caron Garcia Martinez is a writer, teacher, and former diplomat who grew up in Los Angeles. A graduate of Williams College, the London School of Economics and Political Science (MS, Psychology), and George Mason University (MFA), Caron has taught at American University since 2008. Caron's published work is in short fiction and essays, and her current writing project is a novel set in Mexico in 1910, built on family stories recalled by her abuela, Celia.
Adam Schwartz’s debut collection of stories, The Rest of the World, won the Washington Writers' Publishing House 2020 prize for fiction. His stories have won prizes sponsored by Poets & Writers, Philadelphia Stories, and Baltimore City Paper and appeared in numerous literary journals. He has stories forthcoming in Raritan and Gargoyle. He has an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. For 23 years, he has taught high school in Baltimore.
Panel moderator Kathleen Wheaton grew up in California, studied at Stanford University, and worked for 20 years as a journalist in Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Bethesda, Maryland. Her fiction has appeared in many journals and three anthologies, and she is a five-time recipient of Maryland State Arts Council grants. Her collection, Aliens and Other Stories, won the 2013 Washington Writers' Publishing House Fiction Prize. Since 2014, she has served as president and managing editor of the Washington Writers’ Publishing House.
The anthology's poetry editor, Jona Colson, and fiction editor, Caroline Bock, will also feature in this event.
Learn more about This Is What America Looks Like.
Recorded On: Wednesday, April 21, 2021
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Do spirits return, and can we communicate with the dead? Baltimore’s Spiritualists thought so, but magicians worked to disprove them. Learn about spirit mediums, the Ouija Board, and Baltimore’s group of amateur magicians, the Demons Club.
Presented by Maryland Department librarian Julie Saylor. Q and A with Julie Saylor and Mike Rose. Mike Rose is a local magician, magic historian, and author of Maryland's Ambassador of Magic: Phil Thomas and the Yogi Magic Mart.
Recorded On: Monday, March 15, 2021
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Poets Joseph Ross and Michael Torres read from and discuss their new books.
Joseph Ross is the author of four books of poetry: Raising King (2020), Ache (2017), Gospel of Dust (2013), and Meeting Bone Man (2012). His poems appear in many places including The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, Poet Lore, Xavier Review, Southern Quarterly, and Drumvoices Revue. He has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations and won the 2012 Pratt Library / Little Patuxent Review Poetry Prize. He recently served as the 23rd Poet-in-Residence for the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society in Howard County, Maryland. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C., and writes regularly at www.JosephRoss.net.
Michael Torres was born and brought up in Pomona, California, where he spent his adolescence as a graffiti artist. His debut collection of poems, An Incomplete List of Names (Beacon Press, 2020), was selected by Raquel Salas Rivera for the National Poetry Series. His honors include awards and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the McKnight Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CantoMundo, VONA Voices, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, and the Loft Literary Center. Currently he’s an Assistant Professor in the MFA program at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and a teaching artist with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. Visit him at: michaeltorreswriter.com.
Read "On John Coltrane's 'After the Rain'" by Joseph Ross.
Read "Stop Looking at My Last Name Like That" by Michael Torres.Recorded On: Wednesday, March 10, 2021
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CityLit Project joins the Enoch Pratt Free Library in presenting the CityLit Festival - Reimagined: a virtual celebration of the literary arts
In an exhilarating tale of colliding worlds, Emily St. John’s The Glass Hotel paints a breathtaking portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives. In Jenny Offill’s funny and urgent Weather, the foreboding sense of doom commands a family and presents a nation in crisis, and how we weather it. The authors will be in a conversation moderated by Marion Winik, author of The Big Book of the Dead.
Jenny Offill is the author of the novels Last Things (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the L.A. Times First Book Award); Dept. of Speculation, which was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Pen Faulkner Award and the International Dublin Award; and most recently Weather, an instant New York Times Bestseller. She lives in upstate New York and teaches at Syracuse University and in the low residency program at Queens University.
Emily St. John Mandel's five novels include The Glass Hotel and Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award and has been translated into thirty-two languages. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.
University of Baltimore professor Marion Winik is the author of The Big Book of the Dead and winner of the 2019 Towson Prize for Literature. Among her ten other books are First Comes Love and Above Us Only Sky. Her award-winning Bohemian Rhapsody column appears monthly at Baltimore Fishbowl, and her essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, and elsewhere. A board member of the National Book Critics Circle, she writes book reviews for People, Newsday, The Washington Post, and Kirkus Reviews; she hosts The Weekly Reader podcast at WYPR. She was a commentator on NPR for fifteen years; her honors include an NEA Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction. More info at marionwinik.com.
The Writer's Room is a new Festival highlight designed to engage festival attendees, who are also writers, in an informal conversation with the featured guest authors.
Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.
Recorded On: Tuesday, March 2, 2021
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Are you interested in getting your writing published? Do you want tips and tricks on how to become a published author of Africanfuturistic novels or short stories? Or learn how to self-publish in the genre?
Then join us for a panel discussion and Q&A on how the genre reflects the societal and cultural struggles of African people and their descendants here and abroad. Come along on a journey to explore how to get this type of work published in a world where black and brown people are still seen as the “other”.
Panelists include: Nnedi Okorafor, Jalynn Harris, Saida Agostini, and Afua Richardson.
Nnedi Okorafor is a Nigerian-American author of Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism for children and adults. Her works include WHO FEARS DEATH (in development at HBO into a TV series), the BINTI novella trilogy, THE BOOK OF PHOENIX, the AKATA books and LAGOON. She is the winner of Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Locus and Lodestar Awards and her debut novel ZAHRAH THE WINDSEEKER won the prestigious Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature. Her next novel, IKENGA, will be in stores August 2020.
Nnedi has also written comics for Marvel, including BLACK PANTHER: LONG LIVE THE KING and WAKANDA FOREVER (featuring the Dora Milaje) and the SHURI series, an Africanfuturist comic series LAGUARDIA (from Dark Horse) and her short memoir BROKEN PLACES AND OUTER SPACES. Nnedi is also cowriter the adaptation of Octavia Butler’s WILD SEED with Viola Davis and Kenyan film director Wanuri Kahiu. Nnedi holds a PhD (literature) and two MAs (journalism and literature). She lives with her daughter Anyaugo and family in Illinois.
Saida Agostini is a queer Afro-Guyanese poet whose work explores the ways that Black folks harness mythology to enter the fantastic. Saida’s poetry is featured and/or forthcoming in Plume, Barrelhouse Magazine, the Black Ladies Brunch Collective's anthology, Not Without Our Laughter, amongst other publications. Her first collection of poems, just let the dead in, was a finalist for the Center of African American Poetry & Poetics’ 2020 Book Prize, as well as the New Issues Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, STUNT (Neon Hemlock Press, October 2020) explores the history of Nellie Jackson, a Black woman entrepreneur who operated a brothel for sixty years in Natchez, Mississippi.
A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow and Pushcart Prize nominee, Saida has been awarded honors and support for her work by the Watering Hole and Blue Mountain Center, as well as a 2018 Rubys Grant funding travel to Guyana to support the completion of her first manuscript. She lives online at saidaagostini.com
Jalynn Harris is a poet, educator, and book designer from Baltimore, MD. She founded SoftSavagePress for the sole purpose of promoting visual and literary works by Black people. She earned her MFA from the University of Baltimore, where she was the inaugural recipient of Michael F. Klein fellowship for social justice. Her work has been featured in Transition Magazine, Little Patuxent Review, Scalawag, and elsewhere. Exit Thru the Afro, queer museum in verse, is her first poetry chapbook.
Recorded On: Thursday, February 18, 2021
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The event is also part of OSI-Baltimore’s Talking About Race Series.
Lawrence T. Brown is in conversation about his book, The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America. Presented in partnership with AARP Maryland and OSI-Baltimore Fellows Advisory Board.
The world gasped in April 2015 as Baltimore erupted and Black Lives Matter activists, incensed by Freddie Gray's brutal death in police custody, shut down highways and marched on city streets. In The Black Butterfly—a reference to the fact that Baltimore's majority-Black population spreads out on both sides of the coveted strip of real estate running down the center of the city like a butterfly's wings—Lawrence T. Brown reveals that ongoing historical trauma caused by a combination of policies, practices, systems, and budgets is at the root of uprisings and crises in hypersegregated cities around the country.
Putting Baltimore under a microscope, Brown looks closely at the causes of segregation, many of which exist in current legislation and regulatory policy despite the common belief that overtly racist policies are a thing of the past. Drawing on social science research, policy analysis, and archival materials, Brown reveals the long history of racial segregation's impact on health, from toxic pollution to police brutality. Beginning with an analysis of the current political moment, Brown delves into how Baltimore's history influenced actions in sister cities like St. Louis and Cleveland, as well as its adoption of increasingly oppressive techniques from cities like Chicago.
But there is reason to hope. Throughout the book, Brown offers a clear five-step plan for activists, nonprofits, and public officials to achieve racial equity. Not content to simply describe and decry urban problems, Brown offers up a wide range of innovative solutions to help heal and restore redlined Black neighborhoods, including municipal reparations. Persuasively arguing that because urban apartheid was intentionally erected it can be intentionally dismantled, The Black Butterfly demonstrates that America cannot reflect that Black lives matter until we see how Black neighborhoods matter.
Lawrence T. Brown is a researcher and visiting associate professor with the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and a former associate professor at Morgan State University in the School of Community Health and Policy. He is a racial equity consultant and the cofounder of the lead poisoning awareness initiative #BmoreLEADfree. He was a 2012 OSI-Baltimore Community Fellow and a founding member of the Fellows Advisory Board.
Jean Accius is senior vice president for AARP Thought Leadership and International Affairs. His areas of expertise include aging, caregiving and long-term care policy.
Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.
Recorded On: Wednesday, February 17, 2021
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On the anniversary of Lucille Clifton’s passing, join Enoch Pratt Free Library and the Clifton House in a celebration of her generous spirit and writing. Our esteemed featured speaker is Natasha Trethewey.
Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, Monument (2018), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award; Thrall (2012); Native Guard (2006), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002); and Domestic Work (2000), which was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. She is also the author of the memoir Memorial Drive (2020). Her book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, appeared in 2010. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. At Northwestern University she is a Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. In 2012 she was named Poet Laureate of the State of Mississippi and and in 2013 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Recorded On: Saturday, February 13, 2021
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Join us for a conversation about the life and legacy of Elijah Cummings between Dr. Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, book collaborator James Dale, and moderator Dr. Freeman Hrabowski. Presented in partnership with the Reginald F. Lewis Museum.
Part memoir, part call to action, We’re Better Than This is the story of our modern-day democracy and the threats that we all must face together, as well as a retrospective on the life and career of one of our country’s most inspirational politicians. We’re Better Than This reminds people that in this country we don’t elect kings, and we cannot afford four more years of this false one.
Dr. Maya Rockeymoore Cummings is a social entrepreneur, speaker, writer, and strategist who’s on a mission to drive society toward inclusion. After a quarter of a century of working on innovative public policy and multimillion-dollar social change initiatives in the government, nonprofit, and private sectors, Maya is a policy and political expert who understands how to build and sustain cross-sector collaborations, diverse coalitions, dynamic diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies, and effective education campaigns. An accomplished public speaker and author, Maya has appeared in a variety of media outlets such as CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and BET and her writings have been published in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, and the Washington Post among other publications. She has served on numerous boards including the National Association of Counties Financial Services Corporation, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and the National Academy of Social Insurance. She is the recipient of multiple honors such as the Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellowship Award and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Fellowship Award and has been a candidate for Maryland governor and the U.S. Congress. A former chair of the Maryland Democratic Party, Maya earned her B.A. in political science from Prairie View A&M University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in political science, with an emphasis in public policy, from Purdue University. She is the widow of the late Congressman Elijah E. Cummings and lives in West Baltimore with her dog Andy.
James Dale has been author-collaborator on a number of books on topics including business, medicine, and life lessons. His works include The Power of Nice with agent-negotiator Ron Shapiro; Just Show Up with Hall of Fame baseball player Cal Ripken Jr.; and The Q Factor with Super Bowl–winning coach Brian Billick.
Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, has served as President of UMBC (The University of Maryland, Baltimore County) since 1992. His research and publications focus on science and math education, with special emphasis on minority participation and performance. He chaired the National Academies’ committee that produced the 2011 report, Expanding Underrepresented Minority Participation: America’s Science and Technology Talent at the Crossroads. He was named in 2012 by President Obama to chair the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans. His 2013 TED talk highlights the “Four Pillars of College Success in Science.” A child-leader in the Civil Rights Movement, Hrabowski was prominently featured in Spike Lee’s 1997 documentary, Four Little Girls, on the racially motivated bombing in 1963 of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Born in 1950 in Birmingham, Alabama, Hrabowski graduated from Hampton Institute with highest honors in mathematics. He received his M.A. (mathematics) and Ph.D. (higher education administration/statistics) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The Brown Lecture Series is supported by the Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Foundation.
Recorded On: Wednesday, February 10, 2021
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Carl Phillips reads from his poetry and discusses it with Lia Purpura.
Carl Phillips is the author of 15 books of poetry, most recently Pale Colors in a Tall Field (FSG, 2020). His other books include Wild Is the Wind (FSG, 2018), winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called it “haunting and contemplative as the torch song for which the collection is named.” His selected poems, Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006, was published by FSG in 2007. Other books include The Tether (FSG, 2002), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Double Shadow (FSG, 2012), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Silverchest (FSG, 2014), a finalist for the Griffin Prize. He recently published a chapbook, Star Map with Action Figures (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019). A four-time finalist for the National Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, his other honors include the Lambda Literary Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Award, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets, for which he served as Chancellor from 2006-2012.
Lia Purpura is the author of nine collections of essays, poems, and translations. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, her awards include Guggenheim, NEA, and Fulbright Fellowships, as well as four Pushcart Prizes, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Nonfiction, and others. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, Agni, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore, MD, where she is Writer in Residence at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Recorded On: Tuesday, February 2, 2021
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