ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library

 Co-presented with Pacifica Archives Join us for a live broadcast (on KPFK 90.7 FM) dedicated to the voice of author and civil rights activist James Baldwin. Brian DeShazor, host of From the Vault radio program will air rare recordings of Baldwin from 1963-1968, including: an oration called the Artist’s Struggle for Integrity; a reading from Giovanni’s Room; Baldwin’s fiery speech after the murder of four girls in Birmingham, Alabama; and his introduction of Dr. Martin Luther King (taped in the home of Marlon Brando) weeks before King’s assassination. DeShazor is joined by two writers who’ve thought deeply about Baldwin’s work—novelist Nina Revoyr and Melvin L. Rogers, Associate Professor of Political Science and African-American Studies at UCLA—to reflect on Baldwin’s impact on literature and society. Click here for photos from the program. 

 For twenty years, groundbreaking poets Eileen Myles (Chelsea Girls; I Must be Living Twice) and Maggie Nelson (National Book Critics Circle Award, The Argonauts) have been friends, mutual influences, and interlocutors on the experiences of living in a poetry and gender inflected writing world. Myles’ latest work—a collection of old and new poems—refracts a radical world and a compelling life.  Nelson’s genre-bending memoir, The Argonauts, calls for radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking.   Together on stage to read both poetry and prose, these two ground-breaking writers then will join in conversation to, as Myles says, “let thoughts rip.”Click here for photos from the program.

In partnership with PEN Center USA, ALOUD presents the culminating event of PEN’s 2016 Emerging Voices Fellowship to mark the program’s 20th anniversary. Revisit this evening of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction with readings from the 2016 Fellows: Marnie Goodfriend, Jian Huang, Wendy Labinger, Natalie Lima, and Chelsea Sutton; featuring an introduction from this year’s Emerging Voices mentors: Carmiel Banasky, Claire Bidwell Smith, Patrick O’Neil, Mike Padilla, and Alicia Partnoy. The Emerging Voices Fellowship is a literary mentorship program aiming to provide new writers who are isolated from the literary establishment with the tools, skills, and knowledge they need to launch a professional writing career.  

 For three years, award-winning journalist Ben Ehrenreich has been traveling to and living in the West Bank, living with Palestinian families in its largest cities and smallest villages. Placing readers in the footsteps of ordinary Palestinians, Ehrenreich’s new book, The Way to the Spring, offers some of the most empathetic reporting ever to emerge from the turbulent region. With a keen eye for detail, he paints a vivid portrait of life in three Palestinian villages, interspersed with crash-course history lessons on the Israel-Palestine conflict. In conversation with Amy Wilentz, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author and former Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker, Ehrenreich discusses the journalist’s mission to listen and understand the complexities of human experience.Click here for photos from the program. 

 Like dreams, poetry and song enter our lives by way of a mystery—unrecognized and often uninvited. Both represent the speaking of the otherwise unspeakable: the place where real truth is unencumbered by fact, time is made elastic, and narrative emerges from the abstract to tell us something of who we are. Listen in for a special evening of music and conversation with two leading voices as songwriters and authors Rosanne Cash and Joe Henry (both multi-GRAMMY Award winners) reflect on the transcendence of language through poetry and song.Click here for photos from the program. 

 Hailed as “an inspiration” by writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing, traces 300 years of history and family lineage through a sweeping account of the many descendants of two half-sisters born in 18th century Ghana. From the beginnings of slavery to the Harlem Renaissance to 21st century California, the novel captures with stunning immediacy how the memory of captivity was inscribed on the soul of a nation. Join as Gyasi takes the ALOUD stage for a discussion with comparative mythologist and scholar Ayana A.H. Jamieson.Click here for photos from the program.

 How does one become a writer? For acclaimed novelist Judith Freeman— born the sixth child of eight in a devout Mormon household, married at seventeen, and divorced  at twenty-two with a young child—it was an unlikely path. In her arresting, lyrical memoir set in the patriarchal cloister of Utah in the 1950s and 1960s, she explores the circumstances and choices that informed her course through a thicket of profound difficulties towards becoming. Joined by L.A. native and novelist Michelle Huneven, Freeman visits ALOUD to share her illuminating portrait of resilience and self-discovery. Click here for photos from the program. 

 Co-presented with the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center. Chef, food personality, bestselling author of Fresh Off the Boat, and inspiration behind the hit television show of the same name, Eddie Huang made his ALOUD debut with a brash new memoir about love, meaning, and returning to your ancestral homeland. Double Cup Love takes readers on a cultural romp from Williamsburg dive bars to the skies of Mongolia, from Michelin-starred restaurants to street-side soup peddlers in Chengdu. Listen as Fresh Off the Boat star, Constance Wu—who plays Eddie’s unforgettable mother—interviews Huang about family, food, and broken hearts.  Visit our website for photos from the program. 

 Like writing, cities are all about process, the back-and-forth between our aspirations and our abilities; we walk to discover them and to discover ourselves. In this dialogue, moderated by Los Angeles native Louise Steinman, Vivian Gornick and David L. Ulin investigate the role of the city as both literary and psychic landscape. For Gornick, who was born and raised in the Bronx and is the author of the new memoir of self-discovery, The Odd Woman and the City, New York is the city that provokes. While for Ulin, as a Manhattan-raised Southern California transplant and author of the compelling inquiry, Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, L.A. is the terrain that inspires. What do their journeys have in common? What sets these two cities, and their literature, apart?Click here for photos of the program. 

 Visionary writer Maxine Hong Kingston has been writing about war and peace since her landmark 1976 book The Woman Warrior. Her lifelong efforts on this theme often touched on the Vietnam War, from China Men to The Fifth Book of Peace. These works influenced award-winning novelist and critic Viet Thanh Nguyen as he dealt with the war in both fiction (The Sympathizer) and scholarship (Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War). Both writers will share the ALOUD stage to discuss their own personal histories with the war, and the responsibility of literature in depicting war machines and peace movements.Click here for photos from the program. 

 New Yorker writer William Finnegan leads a counter life as an excessively compulsive surfer. In his deeply lyrical self-portrait Barbarian Days, Finnegan chronicles his lifelong adventures from a young man chasing waves all over the world to becoming a distinguished writer and war reporter. Part coming-of-age story, part thriller, part cultural study, Finnegan’s vivid memoir explores the gradual mastering of a little understood art. Join Finnegan as he returns to the Pacific coast to discuss his revelatory pursuit of the perfect wave with David Rensin, author of ALL FOR A FEW PERFECT WAVES: The Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki Dora. Click here for photos from the program.   

 From the Watts Towers in Los Angeles to the Forbidden City in Beijing, Geoff Dyer’s newest collection of essays, White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World, explores what defines place: where do we come from, what are we, where are we going? The elegant, witty, and always inquisitive Dyer returns to ALOUD to reflect on his unexpected findings with Jonathan Lethem — celebrated for his novels, essays, and short stories — to illuminate the questions we ask when we step outside ourselves.Click here for photos from the program. 

Award-winning poet and rapper Kate Tempest’s electrifying debut novel takes us into the beating heart of London in this multi-generational tale of drugs, desire, and belonging. The Bricks That Built the Houses explores a cross-section of contemporary urban life with a powerful moral microscope, giving us intimate stories of ordinary lives, and questions how we live with and love one another. Heralded by critics and fans alike for her powerful performances, Tempest takes the ALOUD stage to present her dynamic new work.Click here for photos from the program. 

 Our third annual gathering unites students from five Southland graduate writing programs—CalArts, Otis College, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, and USC—to share recent work and tune our ears to the future of language. What are the ideas, forms, questions, syntaxes, images, and narratives of our immediate future? Who better as our compass in the wilds of the now than emerging writers?Click here for photos from the program.

 Juan Felipe Herrera grew up the son of Mexican immigrants in the migrant fields of California, and became the first Latino Poet Laureate of the United States. Exuberant and socially engaged, reflective and healing, wildly inventive and unpredictable, the award-winning poet will discuss his life’s work as it ranges from Aztlan to Paris, San Bernardino to Florida and back; from Larry King and Oprah, to the Janis Joplin days in the City by the Bay. Join us for a brimming, wide-open evening as Herrera blazes the endless chasms of culture on the “Laureate Trail.”Click here for photos from the program.