ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library

 The acclaimed author and passionate explorer of subjects from the Oxford English Dictionary to earthquakes to the Atlantic Ocean, offers an enthralling new biography of the Pacific Ocean. In his latest journey, Winchester travels from the Bering Strait to Cape Horn, the Yangtze River to the Panama Canal, and to the many small islands and archipelagos that lie in between. From the dying coral reefs to climate change to the military rise of China, Winchester explores our relationship to this imposing force of nature and its role in our modern world. ALOUD welcomes Winchester to the Pacific coast for a paean to this magnificent sea of beauty, myth, and imagination.**Click here for photos of the event.  

 The panic began in 1692, when a minister’s daughter began to scream and convulse. It ended less than a year later, but not before 19 men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) and Cleopatra unpacks the fantastical story of the Salem Witch Trials in her latest seminal work, The Witches. Aside from suffrage, the Salem Witch Trials represent the only moment in the shaping of the future republic when women played a central role in American history. Hear from one of our most acclaimed historians as she unveils one of the first great American mysteries.**Click here for photos of the event. 

 In a new memoir, the award-winning novelist, poet, and beloved author of The House on Mango Street, shares over three decades of true stories, essays, talks, and poems to offer a richly illustrated compilation of her storied life and career. Opening doors onto the Chicago neighborhoods where she grew up, her abode in Mexico haunted by her ancestors, a Greek white-washed island, a borrowed guest room, her purple house in San Antonio, and more, Cisneros sheds light on the real and imagined places that inspired her writing even as she struggled to define her own idea of home. Reflecting on the private journey of a life in writing, ALOUD welcomes Cisneros to the stage for a reading and conversation.**Click here for photos from the event. NOTE: This program includes portions in both English and Spanish. 

 In a revelatory testament of what it means to be black in America today, this timely new memoir solidifies Coates as one of today’s most important writers on the subject of race. Composed as letters to his teenage son, Coates bears witness to his own experiences as a young black man while moving between emotionally charged reportage of the recent shootings of unarmed black men by police. Coates—a national correspondent for The Atlantic, which published his landmark 2014 essay, “The Case for Reparations,” and author of the previous memoir, The Beautiful Struggle—arrives at a transcendent vision of the past and present to offer hope for his son’s future. Join us for a momentous conversation with Coates and historian Robin D.G. Kelley about America’s way forward.**Click here for photos of the event. 

 Roberta Kaplan, the renowned litigator who recently won the defining United States v. Windsor case to defeat the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), takes us behind the scenes of this gripping legal journey in her new book, Then Comes Marriage. Award-winning activist and scholar Lillian Faderman’s latest book, The Gay Revolution, begins in the 1950s, when the law classified gays and lesbians as criminals, then moves to the present to offer a sweeping account of the modern struggle for gay, lesbian, and trans rights. Following this summer’s landmark Supreme Court decision supporting gay marriage, hear from two of today’s most influential champions for equality.**Click here for photos of the event. 

 Award-winning Egyptian American feminist writer and commentator Mona Eltahawy is no stranger to controversy. Through her articles in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and more, she has fought for the autonomy, security, and dignity of Muslim women, drawing widespread supporters and detractors. Now, in her first book, she offers an illuminating and incendiary manifesto on the repressive forces—political, cultural, and religious—that reduce millions of women to second-class citizens. Hear from Eltahawy—a woman motivated by hope and fury—about her revolutionary new book and this bold call to action for equal rights in the Middle East.**Click here for photos from the event. 

 What does it mean to devote yourself to helping others? Larissa MacFarquhar, a staff writer for The New Yorker, follows the joys and defeats of people living lives of extreme ethical commitment in her new book, Strangers Drowning. Jessica Jackley, co-founder of the revolutionary micro-lending site Kiva, in her book, Clay Water Brick, explores the triumphs and difficulties of using entrepreneurship to change the world. Sharing inspiring—and sometimes unsettling—stories of do-gooders from around the world, MacFarquhar and Jackley will challenge us to think about what we value most, and why.**Click here for photos from the event. 

 The award-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia delivers an exhilarating new novel about the creative partnership of marriage, and the yoke joining love, art, and power. Framed in Greek mythology and told from the opposing perspectives of husband and wife, Fates and Furies digs beneath the surface of a “good” marriage and vividly explores the duplicitous nature of a loving, yet surprisingly complicated relationship over the course of 24 years. One of the most talented writers of her generation, Groff visits ALOUD to discuss her dazzling literary masterpiece that will stir both the mind and the heart.**Click here to see photos from the program. 

Over the past three decades, the critically acclaimed and bestselling author of three previous memoirs, Mary Karr has elevated the art of the deeply personal genre to become one of the most influential memoirists working today. In her newest work, Karr pulls back the curtain on her craft. The rare, brilliant practitioner who is also a distinguished teacher, Karr breaks down key elements from her favorite memoirs and reflects on the challenges of transforming memories for the page. Reserve your seat at ALOUD for a master class with a master craftsman.**Click here to see photos from the program.

 In the wake of an historic summer of groundbreaking Supreme Court decisions, Justice Stephen Breyer returns to ALOUD to discuss the ever-evolving influences on America’s highest court. In his latest book, The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities, Justice Breyer considers the great legal challenges facing our increasingly globalized and interdependent world. From sweeping national security policy to the use of online sites like Airbnb for international commerce, judicial awareness is no longer contained within America’s borders. Hear from one of today’s most pragmatic legal luminaries on how the world beyond our national frontiers is steering American law, and how this expansion is drawing American jurists into a new role of “constitutional diplomats.” Co-presented with The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts **Click here for photos of the event. 

 Returning to ALOUD after receiving the 2012 Los Angeles Public Library Literary Award for his distinguished commitment to libraries and literature, Rushdie shares his newest work of fiction. Inspired by the traditional “wonder tales” of the East and set in a strange near-future New York City, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights blends history, mythology, and a timeless love story. Satirical and bawdy, full of cunning and folly, kismet and karma, rapture and redemption, Rushdie’s novel is a masterpiece about the age-old conflicts that remain in today’s world. Discussing this work with Héctor Tobar, one of L.A.’s most respected voices, Rushdie takes the stage for a magical evening of storytelling.**Click here to see photos from the program. 

Laura KarpmanWith performance by Janai Brugger (soprano), Victoria Kirsch (piano), Taura Stinson (voice) and David Young (bass)From Africa to the Americas, the south to the north, cities to suburbs, opera to jazz, gospel to be-bop, and “shadows to fire”—discover “Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz,” Hughes’ response to the riots at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival. Emmy Award-winning composer Laura Karpman, originally commissioned by Carnegie Hall to create the first vocal performance of Hughes’ poem, created an orchestral composition with plural voices including Hughes’, projected images, and recorded selections drawn from a dozen musical traditions, in an epic tapestry evoking the turbulent flux of American cultural life. This special presentation of “Ask Your Mama,” adapted for the ALOUD stage, features Karpman and soprano Janai Brugger, and marks the release of a new recording of the orchestral work. *Click here to see photos from the program!

Leslie Jamison and Meghan DaumIn conversation with Molly Pulda, Provost's Postdoctoral Scholar in the Humanities, USCLeslie Jamison’s critically acclaimed The Empathy Exams confronts our personal and cultural urgency to feel. In The Unspeakable, Los Angeles Times opinion columnist Meghan Daum defiantly pushes back against the false sentimentality and shrink-wrapped platitudes that surround so much of contemporary American experience. With piercing insight and wit, hear from two of today’s most thought-provoking and intimately honest essayists, grappling with the modern complexities of being human.*Click here to see photos from the program!  

Panel discussion with Ron Finley, Elizabeth Medrano and Neelam SharmaIn conversation with author Josh Kun, author and professor, USC Annenberg School for CommunicationThe L.A. food scene is as trendy, tweeted, pop-upped, and profit-busting as it’s ever been, and yet more people are going hungry at a greater rate than perhaps any other moment in the city’s history. As the USDA has declared, Los Angeles is the nation’s “epicenter of hunger,” where the phrase “food insecurity”—lacking reliable access to nutritious and safe food—has become as much a part of the local vernacular for activists and organizers as sunshine and traffic. In a special collaboration with the Library Foundation to rediscover the Los Angeles Public Library’s vast archive, USC professor Josh Kun uses the Library’s menu collection to explore the shaping of Los Angeles. With vintage menus as our guides, join Kun for a conversation about the struggles and triumphs of contemporary food activism with urban gardener Ron Finley, the Healthy School Food Coalition’s Elizabeth Medrano and Community Services Unlimited Inc.’s Neelam Sharma.*Click here to see photos from the program! 

Lynell George and Marisela NorteWith live DJ mix by Frosty of dublab“Love, Los Angeles” is a letter in progress—a series of notes, fragments, reflections and odes—written by two native daughters navigating the quickly-changing landscape of contemporary Los Angeles. Through photographs and texts, journalist and essayist Lynell George and writer Marisela Norte have tunneled on foot from Boyle Heights to Venice and the Miracle Mile to Arcadia, crisscrossing time, place, dreams, and memory. Share in these in-the-moment observations of hope, grit, faith and longing as they are presented for the first time on stage, and eavesdrop on this intimate look into the heart of our city.*Click here to see photos from the program.