ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library

 Best-selling author, prize-winning historian, and Mother Jones co-founder Adam Hochschild offers a sweeping new history of the Spanish Civil War. Spain In Our Hearts is a nuanced international tale of idealism and heartbreaking suffering told through a dozen characters, including Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, who reveal the full tragedy and importance of the war. Hochschild returns to ALOUD to explore the complicated conflict that would galvanize Americans in their pursuit of democracy across the world just before the opening battle of World War II.Click here for photos from the program. 

 Through the etymology of words, the OED exhibits the shape-shifting nature of language across time, reflecting how it bends to the task of describing our evolving human experience. But is all change good? What is the role of the dictionary in reporting, recording, and refereeing language variation and change? Linguist, political commentator and author of The Power of Babel and Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, John McWhorter talks with genre-busting author of House of Leaves Mark Z. Danielewski about whether dictionaries support or inhibit the idiosyncratic use of language as a means of creative expression. Presented as part of the Library Foundation’s project, Hollywood is a Verb: Los Angeles Tackles the Oxford English Dictionary. Click here for photos from the program.

 The best-selling author of the National Book Critics Circle Award-Winner How to Live, a spirited account of twentieth century intellectual movements and revolutionary thinkers, delivers a timely new take on the lives of influential philosophers Sartre, De Beauvoir, Camus, and others. At The Existentialist Café journeys to 1930s Paris to explore a passionate cast of philosophers, playwrights, anthropologists, convicts, and revolutionaries who would spark a rebellious wave of postwar liberation movements. From anticolonialism to feminism and gay rights, join Bakewell as she discusses with David L. Ulin what the pioneering existentialists can teach us about confronting questions of freedom today.Click here for photos of the program. 

 A New York Times bestseller and award-winning sensation, Helen Macdonald’s story of adopting and raising one of nature’s most vicious predators has soared into the hearts of millions of readers worldwide. Following the sudden death of her father, Macdonald battled with a fierce and feral goshawk to stave off her own depression. With ALOUD’s Louise Steinman, author of the far-reaching memoir about her father’s past, The Souvenir, Macdonald will discuss her transcendent account of human versus nature and the essential lessons she learned from her foray into falconry.Click here for photos from the program.

 As mass incarceration has reached record levels, professor, journalist, and visionary founder of the Prison to College Pipeline (P2CP), Baz Dreisinger has traveled behind bars in nine countries to rethink the state of justice in a global context. Her eye-opening new book, Incarceration Nations, offers a first-person odyssey through the modern prison systems of the world and gives voices to the millions silenced behind bars. Join Dreisinger as she discusses her timely work and urges for a massive overhaul in prison reform in the U.S. and across the globe.Click here for photos from the program. 

 In a potentially historic election year for women, Ellen R. Malcolm, the pioneering founder of the three-million-member EMILY’s List and one of the most influential players in today’s political landscape, tells the dramatic inside story of the rise of women in elected office in her new book, When Women Win. Malcolm will share the ALOUD stage with Ann Friedman, journalist and co-host of the popular podcast Call Your Girlfriend, to discuss the heartbreaking losses and unprecedented victories of some of the toughest political contests of the past three decades.Click here for photos from the program. 

 The OED represents arguably the first example of global crowd-sourcing and documents a language rich in loanwords from other cultures. At the same time, it has been considered emblematic of the British Empire’s colonial enterprise. Writer Jamaica Kincaid and linguist/author Sarah Ogilvie (Words of the World: a Global History of the OED) discuss the complexities of this relationship. Presented as part of the Library Foundation’s project, Hollywood is a Verb: Los Angeles Tackles the Oxford English Dictionary.

 With DJ Lynnée Denise Co-presented with Clockshop Ten years after the passing of Los Angeles’ own Octavia E. Butler–one of America’s best science fiction writers and one of the few African-American women in the field— ALOUD celebrates Butler’s legacy. Navigating the dystopic L.A. that Butler often described in her short stories and novels, this panel will explore connections between Butler’s peers and colleagues, and the generation of writers and scholars who follow, and how Butler’s futuristic work resonates today. Part of Radio Imagination, artists and writers in the archive of Octavia E. Butler, a year-long program produced by Clockshop. Click here for photos from the program.

 One of the most talked-about books of last year (nominated for the Man Booker Prize and The National Book Award), A Little Life is a profoundly bold epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century. Yanagihara follows the tragic and transcendent lives of four men—an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—who meet as college roommates and move to New York to spend the next three decades adrift, buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. Join Yanagihara for an intimate look at this masterful depiction of heartbreak and brotherly love.**Click here for photos from the program. 

 Artist Rachel Sussman has traveled around the world to photograph organisms—trees, lichens, bacteria—that are 2,000 or more years old. Confronting lives that extend so much longer than human lifespans challenges us to rethink the context of our human communities and the more-than-human environments into which we are embedded. What does it mean to take a picture of a 4,000-year-old tree at a fraction of a second? How has human intervention in nature given rise to a new geological age? Sussman, a LACMA Lab Artist and author of the New York Times bestseller, The Oldest Living Things in the World, and Ursula K. Heise, a professor in the Department of English and the Institute of Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, will discuss these questions of nature, technology, and our understanding of time to the backdrop of Sussman’s stunning images.**Click here for photos and video from the event. 

 Betancourt, the extraordinary Colombian French politician and activist, whose New York Times bestselling memoir chronicled her six and a half year captivity in the Colombian jungle by the FARC, offers a stunning debut novel about freedom and fate. Set against the backdrop of Argentina’s Dirty War and infused with magical realism, The Blue Line is a breathtaking love story and deeply felt portrait of a woman coming of age as her country falls deeper and deeper into chaos. Hear from Betancourt about this new work that draws on themes from her own remarkable life—political oppression, individual courage, hope, and faith—as ordinary people are caught up in the hurricanes of history.**Click here for photos and video from the event. 

 Acclaimed poet and Pulitzer Prize finalist Elizabeth Alexander, who composed and delivered the 2009 inauguration poem for President Obama, offers a deeply felt meditation on the blessings of family, art and community following the death of her husband in her memoir, The Light of the World. Poet Kevin Young, author of ten books of poetry, winner of the Lenore Marshall Award and a finalist for the National Book Award, gathers twenty years of highlights from his extraordinary career in his new compilation Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015. Longtime friends Alexander and Young share the stage for poetry, companionship, and to discuss their newest works: lyrical forays into life’s passages through grief and joy.**Click here for photos and video from the event. 

 Allen Ginsberg spoke of “the voice in the burning bush,” that illuminates as in a fire, yet never destroys even as it burns. Luis Rodriguez, L.A. Poet Laureate; Michael Meade, author, storyteller, and mythologist; and John Densmore, musician and author, have all been at the forefront of sparking social and cultural change, seeking to push the boundaries of their disciplines in order to open greater possibility for human connectivity and healing. In a world of turmoil and destruction, how can we learn to speak to each other? Share in an illuminating evening of readings, stories and performance to fuel our minds and souls.**Click here for photos and video from the program. 

 Brian Seibert, a dance critic for The New York Times, offers an authoritative account of the great American art of tap dancing in his new book, What the Eye Hears. Seibert’s entertaining history illuminates tap’s complex origins—from the jig and clog influences brought from Africa by slaves, to its growth as a cousin to jazz in the vaudeville circuits, to its ubiquity on Broadway and in Hollywood, and finally its post-World War II decline and more recent reinvention. Seibert, born and raised in Los Angeles, will take the ALOUD stage to discuss tap’s influence on American culture, including the legacy of L.A.’s thriving tap scene. With archival film footage and special performances by the young L.A. choreographer Sarah Reich, acclaimed as one of the new leaders in tap, this program will be sure to move you.**Click here for photos from the event. 

 A poisoned apple and a monkey’s paw with the power to change fate; a girl whose extraordinarily long hair causes catastrophe; a man with one human arm and one swan’s wing; and a house deep in the forest, constructed of gumdrops and gingerbread, vanilla frosting and boiled sugar. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours transforms the mythic figures of our childhood in his newest work, A Wild Swan and Other Tales. Cunningham discusses bringing to life these never-before-told moments of beloved fairy tales with the ever-imaginative novelist Aimee Bender. Join us for an enchanting evening of reimagined—and sometimes darkly perverse—bedtime stories with two of today’s most gifted storytellers.**Click here for photos from the event.