Detailed Event List
Liz Cheney — Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning - with Mark Leibovich — at Sixth & I
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In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump and many around him, including other elected Republican officials, intentionally breached their oath to the Constitution: they ignored the rulings of dozens of courts, plotted to overturn a lawful election, and provoked a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021.
Liz Cheney, who served as a member of Congress from 2017 to 2023 and as Chair of the House Republican Conference, was one of the few Republican officials to take a stand against these efforts. She witnessed the attack first-hand and then helped lead the Congressional Select Committee investigation into how it happened.
In Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning, Cheney shares a gripping account of the insurrection from inside the halls of Congress and tells the story of this perilous moment in our history—from those who helped Trump spread the stolen election lie to those whose actions preserved our constitutional framework, and the risks we still face.
Cheney will be in conversation with Mark Leibovich, a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of five books including the #1 New York Times bestsellers, This Town and Thank You for Your Servitude.
John Reeves — Soldier of Destiny: Slavery, Secession, and the Redemption of Ulysses S. Grant — at Conn Ave
Captain Ulysses S. Grant, an obscure army officer who was expelled for alcohol abuse in 1854, rose to become general-in-chief of the United States Army in 1864. What accounts for this astonishing turn-around during this extraordinary decade? Was it destiny? Or was he just an ordinary man, opportunistically benefiting from the turmoil of the Civil War to advance to the highest military rank?
Soldier of Destiny reveals that Grant always possessed the latent abilities of a skilled commander--and he was able to develop these skills out West without the overwhelming pressure faced by more senior commanders in the Eastern theater at the beginning of the Civil War. Grant was a true Westerner himself and it was his experience in the West--before and during the Civil War--that was central to his rise.
From 1861 to 1864, Grant went from being ambivalent about slavery to becoming one of the leading individuals responsible for emancipating the slaves. Before the war, he lived in a pro-slavery community near St. Louis, where there were very few outright abolitionists. During the war, he gradually realized that Emancipation was the only possible outcome of the war that would be consistent with America's founding values and future prosperity. Soldier of Destiny tells the story of Grant's connection to slavery in far more detail than has been done in previous biographies.
Grant's life story is an almost inconceivable tale of redemption within the context of his fraught relationships with his antislavery father and his slaveholding wife. This narrative explores the poverty, inequality, and extraordinary vitality of the American West during a crucial time in our nation's history. Writers on Grant have tended to overlook his St. Louis years (1854-1860), even though they are essential for understanding his later triumphs.
Walt Whitman described Grant as "a common trader, money-maker, tanner, farmer of Illinois--general for the republic, in its terrific struggle with itself, in the war of attempted secession. Nothing heroic, as the authorities put it--and yet the greatest hero. The gods, the destinies, seem to have concentrated upon him."
John Reeves is the author of A Fire in the Wilderness and The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee. He has taught European and American history at Lehman College, Bronx Community College, and Southbank University in London. John received an MA in European History from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. You can learn more about him at john-reeves.com. He lives near Washington, DC.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Ani Gjika — An Unruled Body - with Jung Hae Chae — at Conn Ave
This event is in partnership with KAMA DC.
Ani Gjika was born in Albania and came of age just after the fall of Communism, a time in which everyone had a secret to keep and young women were afraid to walk down the street alone. When her family immigrates to America, Gjika finds herself far from the grandmother who helped raise her, grappling with a new language, and isolated from aging parents who are trying in their own ways to survive. Then she meets a young man whose mind leans toward writing as hers does, and Ani falls in love--at least, she thinks it's love.
Set across four countries--Albania, Thailand, India, and the U.S.--An Unruled Body tells the story of a young woman's journey to selfhood through the lenses of language, sexuality, and identity, and how she learned to find freedom of expression on her own terms.
Gjika will be in conversation with Jung Hae Chae. Jung Hae Chae is the author of the forthcoming memoir-in-essays, Pojangmacha People (Graywolf Press, 2025), winner of the 2022 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Her work has been distinguished with the 2021 Crazyhorse Prize in Nonfiction, the 2019 Emerging Writers Contest in Nonfiction from Ploughshares, and a 2019 Pushcart Prize in nonfiction. Her writing can be found in AGNI, Guernica, New England Review, Ploughshares, swamp pink (formerly Crazyhorse), and in the Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee. Her work has been supported by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Sewanee Writers Conference, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, and others.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Bushra Rehman — Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion - with Jeffrey Lofton — at Conn Ave
Razia Mirza grows up amid the wild grape vines and backyard sunflowers of Corona, Queens, with her best friend, Saima, by her side. When a family rift drives the girls apart, Razia's heart is broken. She finds solace in Taslima, a new girl in her close-knit Pakistani-American community. They embark on a series of small rebellions: listening to scandalous music, wearing miniskirts, and cutting school to explore the city.
When Razia is accepted to Stuyvesant, a prestigious high school in Manhattan, the gulf between the person she is and the daughter her parents want her to be, widens. At Stuyvesant, Razia meets Angela and is attracted to her in a way that blossoms into a new understanding. When their relationship is discovered by an Aunty in the community, Razia must choose between her family and her own future.
Punctuated by both joy and loss, full of '80s music and beloved novels, Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion is a new classic: a fiercely compassionate coming-of-age story of a girl struggling to reconcile her heritage and faith with her desire to be true to herself.
Bushra Rehman grew up in Corona, Queens. She is co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism, and author of the poetry collection Marianna's Beauty Salon and the dark comedy Corona, one of the New York Public Library's favorite books about NYC .
Rehman will be in conversation with Jeffrey Dale Lofton. Jeffrey Dale Lofton hails from Warm Springs, Georgia, but has called Washington, DC, home for over three decades. During those early years he spent many a night treading the boards of the DC theater and performing arts centers, though he ultimately stepped away from acting for other, more traditional work. He has Master's degrees in both Public Administration and Library and Information Science, and today works as a senior advisor at the Library of Congress, surrounded by books and people who love books--in short, paradise.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Bernard Jankowski — Music in the Halls: The Heart and Heartbreak of Teaching at a High Poverty School in Washington, DC - with Grace Cavalieri — at Conn Ave
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Julie Farnam — Domestic Darkness: An Insider's Account of the January 6th Insurrection, and the Future of Right-Wing Extremism — at Conn Ave
After being named Assistant Director of Intelligence for the Capitol Police just days before the 2020 election, Julie Farnam warned its leadership of the upcoming insurrection, sharing that "Congress itself is the target on the 6th." Tragically, her warnings were ignored.
Domestic Darkness takes us inside the explosive events of January 6, 2021, revealing how the Capitol Police disregarded intelligence about the right-wing extremists who would seize the capitol on that fateful day.
In addition to offering a harrowing view of what it was like on the ground, watching the violence unfold and knowing it could have been prevented, Domestic Darkness also examines the specific groups and ideologies, such as the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, QAnon, and white supremacists, who were central to the events of January 6th and who, emboldened by Trump and other right-wing leaders, continue to be a threat to our democracy. The book will also explore what happened within the Capitol Police in the wake of the insurrection, and how to address future dangers from domestic terrorism.
With the 2024 presidential election just around the corner, we need to look at the lessons January 6th taught us to ensure something like that never happens again.
Julie Farnam served as the Assistant Director of Intelligence for the United States Capitol Police during one of the most tumultuous periods in this country's history. During her time there, she oversaw the identification and vetting of nearly 20,000 threats against members of Congress, most of which were made by U.S. citizens who adhered to extremist ideologies. She also warned of the potential for violence on January 6, 2021.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
[EVENT MOVED FROM 11/11/23] Emily Wilson — The Iliad — at Conn Ave
This event has been moved from Saturday 11/11/23.
When Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017--revealing the ancient poem in a contemporary idiom that was "fresh, unpretentious and lean" (Madeline Miller, Washington Post)--critics lauded it as "a revelation" (Susan Chira, New York Times) and "a cultural landmark" (Charlotte Higgins, Guardian) that would forever change how Homer is read in English. Now Wilson has returned with an equally revelatory translation of Homer's other great epic--the most revered war poem of all time.
The Iliad roars with the clamor of arms, the bellowing boasts of victors, the fury and grief of loss, and the anguished cries of dying men. It sings, too, of the sublime magnitude of the world--the fierce beauty of nature and the gods' grand schemes beyond the ken of mortals. In Wilson's hands, this thrilling, magical, and often horrifying tale now gallops at a pace befitting its legendary battle scenes, in crisp but resonant language that evokes the poem's deep pathos and reveals palpably real, even "complicated," characters--both human and divine.
The culmination of a decade of intense engagement with antiquity's most surpassingly beautiful and emotionally complex poetry, Wilson's Iliad now gives us a complete Homer for our generation.
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 scholarship, 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.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Lauren Grodstein — We Must Not Think of Ourselves - with Amy Schwartz — at Conn Ave
This event is in partnership with Moment Magazine.
On a November day in 1940, Adam Paskow becomes a prisoner in the Warsaw Ghetto, where the Jews of the city are cut off from their former lives and held captive by Nazi guards, and await an uncertain fate. Weeks later, he is approached by a mysterious figure with a surprising request: Will he join a secret group of archivists working to preserve the truth of what is happening inside these walls? Adam agrees and begins taking testimonies from his students, friends, and neighbors. He learns about their childhoods and their daydreams, their passions and their fears, their desperate strategies for safety and survival. The stories form a portrait of endurance in a world where no choices are good ones.
One of the people Adam interviews is his flatmate Sala Wiskoff, who is stoic, determined, and funny--and married with two children. Over the months of their confinement, in the presence of her family, Adam and Sala fall in love. As they desperately carve out intimacy, their relationship feels both impossible and vital, their connection keeping them alive. But when Adam discovers a possible escape from the Ghetto, he is faced with an unbearable choice: Whom can he save, and at what cost ?
Inspired by the testimony-gathering project with the code name Oneg Shabbat, New York Times bestselling author Lauren Grodstein draws readers into the lives of people living on the edge. Told with immediacy and heart, We Must Not Think of Ourselves is a piercing story of love, determination, and sacrifice for the many fans of literary World War II fiction such as Kristin Harmel's The Book of Lost Names and Lauren Fox's Send for Me.
Lauren Grodstein is the author of Our Short History, The Washington Post Book of the Year The Explanation for Everything, and the New York Times-bestselling A Friend of the Family, among other works. Her stories, essays, and articles have appeared in various literary magazines and anthologies, and have been translated into French, German, Chinese, and Italian, among other languages. Her work has also appeared in Elle, The New York Times, Refinery29, Salon.com, Barrelhouse, Post Road, and The Washington Post. She is a professor of English at Rutgers University-Camden, where she teaches in the MFA program in creative writing.
Grodstein will be in conversation with Amy Schwartz. Amy E. Schwartz is Moment Magazine’s opinion and book editor, as well as editor of the magazine’s popular “Ask the Rabbis” section. Schwartz was a longtime editorial writer and op-ed columnist at The Washington Post, covering education, science and culture. She has also worked at Harper’s, The New Republic and The Wilson Quarterly. She is president of the non-denominational Jewish Study Center in Washington, DC and speaks and runs workshops on topics of Jewish commentary, psalms and literature nationwide.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Peter Breslow — Outtakes: Stumbling Around the World for NPR - with Scott Simon — at Conn Ave
In 1982, an aspiring journalist knocked on the door of a fledgling news organization named National Public Radio looking for a job. NPR decided to take a chance on Peter Breslow and for the next four decades they grew up together. In Outtakes, Breslow offers an unvarnished, often hilarious, look behind the scenes of one of the world’s preeminent journalistic institutions. Readers are there as history unfolds live on the radio: Breslow orchestrating coverage during the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the Pulse nightclub shooting. Engaging and immersive, it is startling story after story from someone on the frontlines of journalism. Travel with him up Mt. Everest (recorder in hand), enjoy Oreos with an Afghan tribal leader, feel your knees shake atop the Empire State Building, and watch rattlesnake venom drip from his microphone. Peter Breslow’s chronicles are breathtaking and a master class in audio storytelling.
For decades Peter Breslow roamed the planet as a senior producer for NPR’s All Things Considered and Weekend Edition. He has won multiple journalism honors, including two Peabody Awards. Peter grew up in River Edge, New Jersey, worships the music of Muddy Waters and rides his bike whenever he can. He has twin daughters Eden and Danielle, and lives in Washington, DC with his wife Jessica and their dog Sadie.
Breslow will be in conversation with Scott Simon. Scott Simon is the host of Weekend Edition Saturday and is one of the hosts of NPR's morning news podcast Up First. He has reported from all fifty states, five continents, and ten wars, from El Salvador to Sarajevo to Afghanistan and Iraq. His books have chronicled character and characters, in war and peace, sports and art, tragedy and comedy.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Gene Luen Yang & LeUyen Pham - Lunar New Year Love Story - Conn Ave
When Val’s love for Valentine’s Day turns into a high school disaster, she’s ready to give up on the idea of love altogether. Everyone in her family has been unlucky in love, and she is pretty sure she’s cursed anyway. But when a Lunar New Year festival introduces her to a local group of lion dancers, it ignites her lost passion for dance and introduces her to a pair of cute cousins with a lot to offer. Can Val figure out love as she learns more about herself in this Lunar New Year Love Story? This graphic novel’s coming-of-age story will draw readers in while the dynamic and joyful illustrations sweep them away.
About the Contributors:
Gene Luen Yang writes, and sometimes draws, comic books and graphic novels. He was named the 2016 Library of Congress National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, and advocates for the importance of reading, especially reading diversely. His graphic novel American Born Chinese is a National Book Award finalist and Printz Award winner. His two-volume graphic novel Boxers & Saints won the LA Times Book Prize and was a National Book Award Finalist. His nonfiction graphic novel, Dragon Hoops, received an Eisner award and a Printz honor. In 2016, he was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.
LeUyen Pham has illustrated more than one hundred books for children, including the Caldecott Honor book Bear Came Along by Richard T. Morris and the bestselling Princess in Black series by Shannon and Dean Hale. She is the co-creator, along with Shannon Hale, of the bestselling graphic memoirs Real Friends, Best Friends, and Friends Forever. Her own books include The Bear Who Wasn't There and Big Sister, Little Sister. A graduate of the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, LeUyen lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons.
Ages 14+
Daniel Schulman — The Money Kings - with David Corn — at Conn Ave
Joseph Seligman arrived in the United States in 1837, with the equivalent of $100 sewn into the lining of his pants. Then came the Lehman brothers, who would open a general store in Montgomery, Alabama. Not far behind were Solomon Loeb and Marcus Goldman, among the "Forty-Eighters" fleeing a Germany that had relegated Jews to an underclass.
These industrious immigrants would soon go from peddling trinkets and buying up shopkeepers' IOUs to forming what would become some of the largest investment banks in the world--Goldman Sachs, Kuhn Loeb, Lehman Brothers, J. & W. Seligman & Co. They would clash and collaborate with J. P. Morgan, E. H. Harriman, Jay Gould, and other famed tycoons of the era. And their firms would help to transform the United States from a debtor nation into a financial superpower, capitalizing American industry and underwriting some of the twentieth century's quintessential companies, like General Motors, Macy's, and Sears. Along the way, they would shape the destiny not just of American finance but of the millions of Eastern European Jews who spilled off steamships in New York Harbor in the early 1900s, including Daniel Schulman's paternal grandparents.
In The Money Kings, Schulman unspools a sweeping narrative that traces the interconnected origin stories of these financial dynasties. He chronicles their paths to Wall Street dominance, as they navigated the deeply antisemitic upper class of the Gilded Age, and the complexities of the Civil War, World War I, and the Zionist movement that tested both their burgeoning empires and their identities as Americans, Germans, and Jews.
Daniel Schulman is the New York Times best-selling author of Sons of Wichita, a biography of the Koch family that was a finalist for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award. The deputy Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones, he lives in Massachusetts, with his wife and sons.
Schulman will be in conversation with David Corn. David Corn is a veteran Washington journalist and political commentator. He is the Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones magazine and an analyst for MSNBC. He is the author or co-author of four New York Times bestsellers, including the #1 bestseller Russian Roulette, Showdown, and Hubris, and the author of the novel Deep Background
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Jeffrey Blount — Mr. Jimmy From Around the Way - with Kevin Barr — at Conn Ave
After a highly publicized fall from grace, James attempts to flee from the chaos in his life. He ends up in a community he had never heard of before, one that has been neglected and ignored by everyone in rural Ham, Mississippi. A place of abject poverty, the neighborhood is commonly referred to as "Around the Way."
Within a place forgotten by the rest of the world, politics can be a dangerous game. When a troubling discovery is made, the entire neighborhood is rocked to its core and James is forced to confront his own past in order to help the community have a future. He will have to find the strength to fight for the neighbors he once disregarded and avert a heart-breaking disaster.
A self-identified failure is forced to uncover the wisdom of his past in order to recognize that money can't solve every problem. Full of never-ending twists and turns, no one can prepare themselves for the surprises in store. Mr. Jimmy From Around the Way is a story about failure, self-discovery, empowerment, and the possibility of redemption.
Jeffrey Blount is the award-winning author of three novels. His most recent book, The Emancipation of Evan Walls was the winner of the 2020 National Indie Excellence Award for African American fiction. He is also an Emmy award-winning television director and a 2016 inductee to the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame. During a 34-year career at NBC News, Jeffrey directed a decade of Meet The Press, the Today show, NBC Nightly News, and major special events. He is the first African- American to direct the Today show. He is also an award-winning documentary scriptwriter for films and interactives that are now on display in the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture. In 2017 and 2018, Jeffrey served as Journalist in Residence and Shapiro Fellow at the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University. A Virginia native, he graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with a degree in Communications/Broadcast Journalism. Born and raised in Smithfield, Virginia, he now lives in Washington, DC.
Blount will be in conversation with Kevin Barr. Now retired after a 45-year career as a teacher, English Dept. Chair, High School Principal, and Associate Head of School at Georgetown Day School, Barr is currently testing the truth of Christopher Robin’s lament that “they won’t let you do Nothing.” One of the great pleasures of Barr’s time at GDS was co-teaching a class on Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God with Jeffrey Blount. As a teacher, reader, and citizen, Barr has a particular interest in American Literature and Culture and more particularly the space where Black America, White America, and Indigenous America meet.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Joshua Green — The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics — at The Wharf
In his classic book Devil's Bargain, Joshua Green chronicled how the forces of economic populism on the right, led by the likes of Steve Bannon, turned Donald Trump into their flawed but powerful vessel. In The Rebels, he gives an epic account of the long struggle that has played out in parallel on the left, told through an intimate reckoning with the careers of the three political figures who have led the charge most prominently. Based on remarkable inside sourcing and razor-sharp analysis, The Rebels uses the grand narrative of a political party undergoing tumult and transformation to tell an even larger story about the fate of America.
For many years, as Green recounts, the Democrats made their bed with Wall Street and big tech, relying on corporate money for electioneering and embracing the worldview that technological and financial innovation and globalization were a powerful net good, a rising tide lifting all boats. Yes, there were howls of pain, but they were written off by most of the elites as the moaning of sore losers mired in the past. There were always some Democratic politicians representing the old labor base who resisted the new dispensation, but these figures never made it very far on a national level. For one thing, they didn't have the money. But as income inequality ballooned, widening the gulf between the wealthy elite and everyone else, pressures began to build.
With the 2008 crisis, those forces finally erupted into plain sight, turning this book's protagonists into national icons. At its heart, The Rebels tells the riveting human story of the rise and fight of Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from the financial crisis on, as outrage over the unfairness of the American system formed a flood tide of political revolution. That same tide that would sweep Trump into office was blunted on the left, as the Democratic party found itself riven by culture war issues between its centrists and its progressives. But the winds behind economic populism still howl at gale force. Whether the Democrats can bridge their divisions and home in on a vision that unites the party, and perhaps even the country, in the face of the most violently deranged political landscape since the Civil War will be the ultimate test of the legacies of all three characters.
A masterful account of one of the defining political stories of our age, The Rebels cements Joshua Green's stature at the first rank of American writers explaining how we've arrived at this pass and what lies ahead.
Joshua Green is a national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek. He has also written for the New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Vanity Fair. Green regularly appears on CNN, MSNBC, HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, and PBS's Washington Week and Frontline.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Jeremy Norton — Trauma Sponges: Dispatches from the Scarred Heart of Emergency Response - with Michele Harper — at Conn Ave
In this remarkable memoir, Jeremy Norton marshals twenty-two years of professional experience to offer, with compassion and critique, an extraordinary portrayal of emergency responders. Trauma Sponges captures in arresting detail the personal and social toll the job exacts, as well as the unique perspective afforded by sustained direct encounters with the sick, the dying, and the dead.
From his first days as a rookie firefighter and emergency medical technician to his command of a company as a twenty-year veteran, Norton documents the life of an emergency responder in Minneapolis: the harrowing, heartbreaking calls, from helping the sick and hurt, to reassuring the scared and nervous, to attempting desperate measures and providing final words. In the midst of the uncertainty, fear, and loss caused by the Covid pandemic, Norton and his crew responded to the scene of George Floyd's murder. The social unrest and racial injustice Norton had observed for years exploded on the streets of Minneapolis, and he and his fellow firefighters faced the fires, the injured, and the anguish in the days and months that followed.
Norton brings brutally honest insight and grave social conscience to his account, presenting a rare insider's perspective on the insidious role of sexism and machismo in his profession, as well as an intimate observer's view of individuals trapped in dire circumstances and a society ill equipped to confront trauma and death. His thought-provoking, behind-the-scenes depiction of the work of first response and last resort starkly reveals the realities of humanity at its finest and its worst.
Jeremy Norton has been a firefighter/EMT with the Minneapolis Fire Department since 2000; he was promoted to captain in 2007 and heads Station 17 in south Minneapolis. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., he received a bachelor's degree from Tufts University and a master's degree in creative writing from Boston University. After teaching high school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Norton moved to Minneapolis, where he taught creative writing at the Loft Literary Center before joining the MFD.
Norton will be in conversation with Michele Harper. Michele Harper, MD is an award-winning physician, New York Times bestselling author, and nationally recognized speaker whose work centers on individual healing and social justice. Her debut memoir, The Beauty in Breaking, was a New York Times Notable Book and Indie Next Pick. Dr. Harper’s writing has also been featured in Zora and Elemental on Medium.com, and The Cut. Dr. Harper received her BA in Psychology from Harvard University and her MD from the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook. She is a proud graduate of the Lincoln Medical & Mental Health Center emergency medicine residency program in the South Bronx, where she received the Joel Gernsheimer Award for excellence in emergency medicine. She is honored to have received the Gold Foundation National Humanism in Medicine Medal and a MacDowell Fellowship. Dr. Harper currently lives in the Washington, D.C. area.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Theodore Wheeler — The War Begins in Paris — with Ron Hansen — at Conn Ave
Paris, 1938. Two women meet: Mielle, a shy pacifist and shunned Mennonite who struggles to fit in with the elite cohort of foreign correspondents stationed around the city; the other, Jane, a brash, legendary American journalist, who is soon to become a fascist propagandist.
When World War II makes landfall in the City of Lights, Mielle falls under Jane's spell, growing ever more intoxicated by her glamour, self-possession, and reckless confidence. But as this recklessness devolves into militarism and an utter lack of humanity, Mielle is seized by a series of visions that show her an inescapable truth: Jane Anderson must die, and Mielle must be the one to kill her.
Structured as a series of dispatches filed from around Europe and based on the misadventures of a real journalist-turned-Nazi mouthpiece, The War Begins in Paris is a cat-and-mouse suspense that examines the relentlessness of propaganda, the allure of power, and how far one woman will go for the sake of her morality.
Theodore Wheeler is the author of Kings of Broken Things and In Our Other Lives. His writing has been featured in The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, Boulevard, Narrative, LitHub, and many more journals. He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Nebraska Arts Council, and Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. He has received residencies and support from institutions including the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, AWP Intro Journals Award, and Nebraska Book Awards. For fourteen years Theodore worked as a journalist who covered law and politics, including the last two presidential elections, and now teaches creative writing in the English Department at Creighton University. He is also director of Omaha Lit Fest and, with his wife, operates Dundee Book Company, an independent neighborhood bookshop.
Wheeler will be in conversation with Ron Hansen. Ron Hansen is the author of ten novels and two short story collections, including The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Atticus, a finalist for the National Book Award. He graduated from Creighton University in Omaha, studied with John Irving at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and was the Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., Professor in Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University in northern California.
This event is free with first come, first serve seating.
Marcia A. Zug —You'll Do: A History of Marrying for Reasons Other Than Love — at Conn Ave
Americans hold marriage in such high esteem that we push people toward it, reward them for taking part in it, and fetishize its benefits to the point that we routinely ignore or excuse bad behavior and societal ills in the name of protecting and promoting it.
In eras of slavery and segregation, Blacks sometimes gained white legal status through marriage. Laws have been designed to encourage people to marry so that certain societal benefits could be achieved: the population would increase, women would have financial security, children would be cared for, and immigrants would have familial connections.
As late as the Great Depression, poor young women were encouraged to marry aged Civil War veterans for lifetime pensions. The widely overlooked problem with this tradition is that individuals and society have relied on marriage to address or dismiss a range of injustices and inequities, from gender- and race-based discrimination, sexual violence, and predation to unequal financial treatment.
One of the most persuasive arguments against women's right to vote was that marrying and influencing their husband's choices was just as meaningful, if not better. Through revealing storytelling, Zug builds a compelling case that when marriage is touted as "the solution" to such problems, it absolves the government, and society, of the responsibility for directly addressing them.
Marcia Zug is a family law professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College and The Yale Law School. Her previous book, B uying A Bride, explored the history of mail order marriage in the United States. She lives in Columbia, SC with her husband and two daughters.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Kyle Chayka — Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture - with Evan Osnos — at Conn Ave
From coffee shops to city grids to TikTok feeds the world round, algorithmic recommendations dictate our experiences. The algorithm is present in the neon signs and exposed brick of an Internet cafe in Nairobi, and the skeletal, modern furniture of an Airbnb in Portland. Over the last decade, this network of mathematically determined choices has taken over, almost unnoticed, as we've grown increasingly accustomed to an insipid new normal. But to have our tastes, behaviors, and emotions governed by computers, while convenient, does nothing short of call the very notion of free will into question.
This ever-tightening web woven by algorithms is called "Filterworld." Kyle Chayka shows us how online and offline spaces alike have been engineered for seamless consumption, becoming a source of pervasive anxiety in the process. Users of technology have been forced to contend with data-driven equations that try to anticipate their desires--and often get them wrong. What results is a state of docility that allows tech companies to curtail human experiences--human lives--for profit.
The evidence of Filterworld's flattening of culture is everywhere, from plastic surgery-enabled "Instagram Face" to popular songs that use the same palette of hushed voices and synthesizers. The lowest common denominator is promoted at the expense of what is complex, diverse, or challenging.
In Filterworld, Chayka traces this creeping, machine-guided curation as it infiltrates the furthest reaches of our digital, physical, and psychological spaces. With algorithms increasingly influencing not just what culture we consume, but what culture is produced, urgent questions arise: What happens when shareability supersedes messiness, innovation, and creativity--the qualities that make us human? What does it mean to make a choice when the options have been so carefully arranged for us? Is personal freedom possible on the Internet?
To the last question, Filterworld argues yes. But in order to escape Filterworld, and to transcend it, we must first understand it.
Kyle Chayka is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes a column on digital technology and the impact of the Internet and social media on culture. His debut nonfiction book, The Longing for Less, an exploration of minimalism in life and art, was published in 2020. As a journalist and critic he has contributed to many publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, The New Republic, and Vox. He was the first staff writer of the art publication Hyperallergic. Kyle is also the co-founder of Study Hall, an online community for journalists, and Dirt, a newsletter about digital culture. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Chayka will be in conversation with Evan Osnos. Evan Osnos is a staff writer at The New Yorker, a CNN contributor, and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Based in Washington D.C., he writes about politics and foreign affairs. Osnos was the China Correspondent at The New Yorker from 2008 to 2013. His first book, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, won the 2014 National Book award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2020, he published the international bestseller, Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now, based on interviews with Biden, Barack Obama, and others. His latest book, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury was published in September 2021. Prior to The New Yorker, Osnos worked as the Beijing bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune, where he contributed to a series that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
David Herszenhorn — The Dissident: Alex Navalny: Profile of a Political Prisoner — at Conn Ave
The Dissident is the story of how one fearless man, offended by the dishonesty and criminality of the Russian political system, mounted a relentless opposition movement and became President Vladimir Putin's most formidable rival--so despised that the Russian leader makes a point of never uttering Navalny's name.
There's an old saying that Russia without corruption isn't Russia. Alexey Navalny refuses to accept this proposition. His stubborn insistence that Russians can defy the stereotype and create an entirely different country made him such a threat to Putin that the Kremlin wanted him exiled--or dead--and now seems intent on keeping him locked in a prison colony for decades.
International correspondent David M. Herszenhorn, weaves together the threads of Navalny's remarkable life and work:
- The assassination attempt with a military-grade nerve agent by an FSB hit squad in Siberia, his recovery, and the vigilante-style investigation with news outlet Bellingcat to identify and confront his own would-be killers;
- Navalny's personal biography as part of the generation that straddled the end of the Soviet Union and birth of the Russian Federation, including childhood summers with his Ukrainian grandparents near Chernobyl, and his fellowship at Yale University, which spurred conspiracy theories about his ties to the U.S.;
- His anti-corruption investigations that exposed billions in graft at Russia's biggest state-owned companies and vast bribe-taking by top Russian officials, including his blockbuster revelations about Putin's Black Sea Palace;
- His political activism, including huge street protests, his bid for Moscow mayor in 2013, renegade run for president in 2017, his controversial views on nationalism, gun rights and Crimea, his transformation into a prisoner of conscience bravely denouncing Putin's war of aggression in Ukraine, and more.
Riveting and complex, The Dissident introduces readers to modern Russia's greatest agitator, a man willing to sacrifice his freedom--and even his own life--to build the decent, democratic country he wants to live in and hopes to pass on to his children.
David M. Herszenhorn is Russia, Ukraine, and East Europe editor of the Washington Post and former chief Brussels correspondent and associate editor of Politico Europe. Before Politico, he worked at the New York Times for more than twenty years as a reporter, Washington correspondent, and international correspondent based in Moscow. He appears regularly on television and radio to comment on politics, public policy, and international affairs.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Nell Greenfieldboyce — Transient and Strange: Notes on the Science of Life — at The Wharf
In her career as a science reporter, Nell Greenfieldboyce has reported from inside a space shuttle, the bottom of a coal mine, and the control room of a particle collider; she's presented news on the color of dinosaur eggs, ice worms that live on mountaintop glaciers, and signs of life on Venus. In this, her debut book, she delivers a wholly original collection of powerful, emotionally raw, and unforgettable personal essays that probe the places where science touches our lives most intimately.
Expertly weaving her own experiences of motherhood and marriage with an almost devotional attention to the natural world, Greenfieldboyce grapples with the weighty dualities of life: birth and death, constancy and impermanence, memory and doubt, love and aging. She looks for a connection to the universe by embarking on a search for the otherworldly glint of a micrometeorite in the dust, consults meteorologists and storm chasers on the eerie power of tornadoes to soothe her children's anxieties, and processes her adolescent oblivion through the startling discovery of black holes. Inspired throughout by Walt Whitman's invocation to the "transient and strange," she remains attuned to the wildest workings of our world, reflecting on the incredible leap of the humble flea or the echoing truth of a fetal heartbeat.
A beautiful blend of explanatory science, original reporting, and personal experience, Transient and Strange captures the ache of ordinary life, offering resonant insights into both the world around us and the worlds within us.
Nell Greenfieldboyce is a science correspondent for National Public Radio. Before joining NPR, she was a science reporter at magazines including U.S. News & World Report and New Scientist, where she received the Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award for Young Science Journalists. She lives in Washington, DC.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Vanessa Chan — The Storm We Made - with Shannon Sanders — at Conn Ave
Malaya, 1945. Cecily Alcantara's family is in terrible danger: her fifteen-year-old son, Abel, has disappeared, and her youngest daughter, Jasmin, is confined in a basement to prevent being pressed into service at the comfort stations. Her eldest daughter Jujube, who works at a tea house frequented by drunk Japanese soldiers, becomes angrier by the day.
Cecily knows two things: that this is all her fault; and that her family must never learn the truth.
A decade prior, Cecily had been desperate to be more than a housewife to a low-level bureaucrat in British-colonized Malaya. A chance meeting with the charismatic General Fuijwara lured her into a life of espionage, pursuing dreams of an "Asia for Asians." Instead, Cecily helped usher in an even more brutal occupation by the Japanese. Ten years later as the war reaches its apex, her actions have caught up with her. Now her family is on the brink of destruction--and she will do anything to save them.
Spanning years of pain and triumph, told from the perspectives of four unforgettable characters, The Storm We Made is a dazzling saga about the horrors of war; the fraught relationships between the colonized and their oppressors, and the ambiguity of right and wrong when survival is at stake.
Vanessa Chan was born and raised in Malaysia. Her short stories have been published in Electric Lit, Kenyon Review, Ecotone, and more. She was the 2021 Stanley Elkin scholar at the Sewanee Writers Conference and has also received scholar awards to attend the Bread Loaf and Tin House writers' conferences. The Storm We Made is her first novel.
Chan will be in conversation with Shannon Sanders. Shannon Sanders is a Black writer and attorney and the author of the forthcoming linked short story collection Company. Sanders’s short fiction was the recipient of a 2020 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and has appeared in several publications including One Story, TriQuarterly, Joyland, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with her husband and three sons.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Michele Norris — Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think about Race and Identity — at Sixth & I
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All books will be pre-signed by the author. A book signing will follow the event for those who would like their book personalized.
In the twelve years since Peabody and Emmy Award-winning journalist Michele Norris first prompted people to share their thoughts on race in just six words, over half a million people have submitted their stories to The Race Card Project. Shocking in their depth and revealing the full spectrum of emotions, the stories offer a 360-degree view of how Americans see themselves and one another.
Our Hidden Conversations is a compilation of these stories, along with richly reported essays and photographs that provide a window into America during a tumultuous era. The book offers an honest, if sometimes uncomfortable, conversation about race and identity, permitting us to eavesdrop on deep-seated thoughts, private discussions, and long submerged memories. Our Hidden Conversations reminds us that even during times of great division, honesty, grace, and a willing ear can provide a bridge toward empathy and understanding.
Michele Norris is a columnist for The Washington Post Opinion Section, the host of the Audible Original Podcast “Your Mama’s Kitchen,” and former co-host of NPR’s “All Things Considered.”
Jessica Roy — American Girls: One Woman's Journey into the Islamic State and Her Sister's Fight to Bring Her Home - with Nibras Basitkey — at Conn Ave
Raised in a restrictive Jehovah's Witness community in Arkansas, sisters Lori and Sam Sally spent their teens and twenties moving around the South and Midwest, working low-wage jobs and falling in and out of relationships. Caught in an eternal sibling rivalry--where younger, quieter Lori protected outgoing, reckless Sam--the two women eventually married a pair of brothers and settled down in Elkhart, Indiana, just around the corner from each other. And it was there that their lives totally diverged.
While Lori was ultimately able to leave her violent marriage, Sam was drawn deeper into hers--and deeper into the control of a husband who slowly radicalized, via the internet, into a jihadist. With their daughter and Sam's child from a previous relationship, the couple moved to Raqqa, Syria, where Moussa fought for ISIS and Sam, who never even converted to Islam, attempted to survive and protect her children from airstrikes, extremist indoctrination, and the brutality of the ISIS system. In Raqqa, Sam's oldest son appeared in several Islamic State propaganda videos, and she participated in ISIS's practice of enslaving Yezidi women and children. Sam says her husband coerced her to move, but Lori--who quit her job and worked tirelessly to try get Sam out of Syria--isn't so sure.
American Girls combines an in-depth examination of Sam and Lori's lives with on-the-ground reporting from Iraq, providing readers with a rare glimpse into the world of American women who join ISIS. Interweaving deeply reported narrative drama with expert analysis, the book explores how the subjugation and abuse experienced by women in the United States, women like Sam and Lori, are the same themes that enable the rise of patriarchal, extremist ideologies like the one espoused by ISIS.
Fascinating, resonant, and moving, American Girls is an unforgettable journey--from small-town Arkansas to Raqqa, from domestic abuse to a militant terrorist organization--all told through the extraordinary story of two close, complicated sisters.
Jessica Roy is the Digital Director of Elle magazine, where she oversees content and strategy for the website and writes and edits stories primarily about style, culture, and global issues. American Girls is based on a feature she wrote in 2019, "Two Sisters and the Terrorist Who Came Between Them." Jessica studies Arabic and reports frequently from the MENA region; she has written about women's rights in Saudi Arabia, refugee displacement in Iraq, Kurdish female fighters in Syria, and Yezidi survivors of ISIS. She is also an adjunct professor at New York University, where she teaches writing and editing for online platforms. She lives in Brooklyn.
Roy will be in conversation with Nibras Basitkey. Nibras Basitkey was born and raised in northern Iraq. She is a Yazidi refugee who advocates for girls' education and economic development in the Middle East. She is a program assistant at the Atlantic Council's empowerME Initiative, which aims to empower the next generation of Middle Eastern women leaders. Nibras is a graduate of Creighton University, where she earned a Bachelor of Science in business administration and economics. She is a fluent speaker of Kurdish (Sorani and Kurmanji dialects) and Arabic. In addition to her work at the Atlantic Council, Nibras has also worked for the Malala Fund, the Free Yezidi Foundation, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Religious Freedom Institute, and the Iraq Mission to the United Nations.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Bécquer Seguín — The Op-Ed Novel: A Literary History of Post-Franco Spain - with Chris Lehmann — at The Wharf
Public intellectuals come in many different stripes, but most of them gain a following at least in part from their writing, whether in the form of magazine articles, newspaper columns, or full-length nonfiction. A few--James Baldwin and Joan Didion are celebrated examples--start out as novelists before turning to the rough-and-tumble of current affairs. In The Op-Ed Novel, Bécquer Seguín undertakes the first book-length study of how contemporary literature is shaped by opinion journalism, focusing on fiction writers who took to the papers in post-Franco Spain and became stewards of their country's cultural, economic, and political future.
Following Spain's transition to democracy in the late 1970s and early 1980s, internationally acclaimed novelists such as Javier Cercas, Antonio Muñoz Molina, and Javier Marías seized the opportunity to populate the opinion pages of the newly legal free press. The Op-Ed Novel analyzes how the argumentative styles and preoccupations of their columns in El País, Spain's most widely read daily, bled into their fiction. These and other authors used their novels to settle scores with fellow intellectuals, make speculative historical claims, and advance partisan political projects. At the same time, their literary technique greatly invigorated opinion journalism.
A lively guide to the terroir of contemporary Spanish literature, The Op-Ed Novel offers a bird's-eye view of both the post-Franco intellectual climate and the changing role of the novelist in public life.
Bécquer Seguín is Assistant Professor of Iberian Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a regular contributor to The Nation.
Seguín will be in conversation with Chris Lehmann. Chris Lehmann is the D.C. Bureau chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. He was formerly editor of The Baffler and The New Republic, and is the author, most recently, of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville House, 2016).
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Kamilah Cole - So Let Them Burn - with Roseanne A. Brown - at Conn Ave in the Children and Teens Department
Five years after Faron defeated the evil Langlish Empire, a now teenaged Faron is told by the gods who have empowered her that she must kill her sister Elara. Elara, on the other hand, has become entangled with an enemy Langlish dragon and discovers shocking secrets in the Empire that could change everything. Told in a dual narrative, these sisters must find a way to avoid the god’s decision, even if it means burning down their world.
About the Author:
Kamilah Cole works in publishing and So Let Them Burn is her first novel. A graduate of NYU, Kamilah is currently based in the Tri-State Area, playing video games.
Cole will be in conversation with Roseanne “Rosie” A. Brown. Brown was born in Ghana and grew up in central Maryland. After previously working as a teacher, journalist, and editorial intern, she has written young adult novels and the Serwa Boateng series. Rosie currently lives outside Washington, D.C. with her dog.
Ages 13-17
Tina Nguyen — The MAGA Diaries: My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right-Wing (And How I Got Out) - with David Frum — at Conn Ave
Her very first job was working for a little-known journalist named Tucker Carlson. She's chugged Mountain Dews with the first Breitbart writers, poured over conspiracy theories from COVID-19 deniers, and visited the apocalyptic Patriot Church deep in the woods of the Pacific Northwest. The right is now a MAGA cult. And Tina Nguyen knows because she was raised by it, back when it wasn't one.
In 2008, in the weeks leading up to the election of Barack Obama, Nguyen was a history-loving, politics-obsessed college student at Claremont McKenna College, drawn there by a boyfriend--and a research institute called the Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom. Swept up by pro-America rhetoric and promises of a career in journalism, Nguyen was drawn into the world of right-wing student activism, and the early days of the movement now known as MAGA. In The MAGA Diaries, she tells not only her story of loving and leaving the conservative movement (well before Trump), but the history of the right-wing, painting a shocking picture of how they recruit, train, and indoctrinate generations of young people in search of opportunity--think dinners with Peter Thiel, conventions that rival Coachella, and the ever-elusive promise of future job security--and shape them into the influential leaders and supporting cast of tomorrow's Republican party. They are ruthless in building robust networks of power, even if it means demolishing entire civic institutions, from women's rights to fair elections--and staging a coup when it doesn't work out.
In The MAGA Diaries, Nguyen pulls back the curtain on the conservative machine for the first time, shining a light on the systematized on-ramp for young Republicans. These are the new leaders of the right, and it's urgent we start paying attention.
Tina Nguyen is a national correspondent for Puck, covering the world of Donald Trump and the American right. Previously, Nguyen was a White House reporter for Politico, a staff reporter for Vanity Fair Hive, and an editor at Mediaite. She was nominated for a James Beard Award for her coverage of the restaurant industry while working at The Braiser. A Brooklyn transplant, Nguyen graduated from Claremont McKenna College and lives in Washington.
Nguyen will be in conversation with David Frum. David Frum is a staff writer at the Atlantic. His most recent book is Trumpocalypse (HarperCollins: 2020). From 2001-2002, he served as speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush. In 2009-2012, he owned and operated the website FrumForum.com, for which Tina Nguyen wrote a column. He and his wife Danielle Crittenden Frum have three children and live in Washington DC and Wellington Ontario.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Kim Prothro Williams — Hidden Alleyways of Washington, DC: A History — at Conn Ave
Alleyways in Washington, DC, have always been a fundamental part of the city's life and economy. Deliberately hidden from public view by the capital's early planners, DC's alleys were created to provide access to stables, carriage houses, and other utility buildings. But as the city grew and property values rose, the nature of some alleys and their buildings changed, resulting in a parallel world of residential, manufacturing, and artistic spaces. Kim Prothro Williams reveals this world in a fascinating and richly illustrated history.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the city's inhabited alleys were often unsanitary spaces that were home to its poorest residents. These conditions spurred Progressive Era campaigns to demolish alley dwellings, which in turn led to the displacement of minority and disadvantaged communities. Today, many remaining alleyways, with their intimately scaled buildings, have been transformed into vibrant commercial and residential spaces. Yet this new wave of development raises questions about how spaces that were once reserved for the city's poorest residents now cater to the wealthy.
This book is a must-have for anyone with an interest in Washington, social history, architecture, or historical preservation.
Kim Prothro Williams is an architectural historian and National Register coordinator at the DC Historic Preservation Office. She is the author of several books about historic places and communities, including, most recently, Lost Farms and Estates of Washington, DC (2018).
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Dennis Romano — Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City - with David Ignatius — at Conn Ave
No city stirs the imagination more than Venice. From the richly ornamented palaces emerging from the waters of the Grand Canal to the dazzling sites of Piazza San Marco, visitors and residents alike sense they are entering, as fourteenth-century poet Petrarch remarked, "another world." During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Venice was celebrated as a model republic in an age of monarchs. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it became famous for its freewheeling lifestyle characterized by courtesans, casinos, and Carnival. When the city fell on hard times following the collapse of the Republic in 1797, a darker vision of Venice as a place of decay, disease, and death took hold. Today tourists from around the globe flock to the world heritage site as rising sea levels threaten its very foundations.
This comprehensive account reveals the adaptations to its geographic setting that have been a constant feature of living on water from Venice's origins to the present. It examines the lives of the women and men, noble and common, rich and poor, Christian, Jew, and Muslim, who built not only the city but also its vast empire that stretched from Northern Italy to the eastern Mediterranean. It details the urban transformations that Venice underwent in response to environmental vulnerability, industrialization, and mass tourism. Alongside the city's commercial prominence has been its dramatically changing political role, including its power as a city-state, regional stronghold, and overseas empire, as well as its impact on the development of fascism. Throughout, Dennis Romano highlights the city's cultural achievements in architecture, painting, and music, particularly opera.
This richly illustrated volume offers a stunning portrait of this most singular of cities.
Dennis Romano is the Dr. Walter Montgomery and Marian Gruber Professor of History emeritus at Syracuse University. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including The Likeness of Venice: A Life of Doge Francesco Foscari, 1373-1457 and Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297-1797. Romano is an honorary fellow of the Venetian Athenaeum. He lives in Washington, DC.
Romano will be in conversation with David Ignatius. David Ignatius is a prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post and has been covering the Middle East and the CIA for nearly four decades. He has written several New York Times bestsellers. He lives in Washington, D.C.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Veera Hiranandani - Amil and the After - at Conn Ave
Now that Amil and his twin sister Nisha have safely arrived at their destination, they must learn to cope with shifting uncertainties while working through the trauma and loss incurred on their journey caused by Partition. As the twins learn to adapt to their new life, they come across a young boy whose life is in even greater turmoil – can they help him when their lives are so uncertain? A standalone companion to The Night Diary, Amil tells his richly detailed story interspersed with his drawings to his late mother.
About the Author:
Veera Hiranandani is the award-winning author of several books for young people most notably the Newbery Honor-winning The Night Diary which also received the 2019 Walter Dean Myers Honor Award, the 2018 Malka Penn Award for Human Rights in Children’s Literature, and several other honors. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and a former book editor at Simon & Schuster, she now teaches creative writing and lives in the New York area with her family.
Ages 8-12
Senator Jeff Merkley & Mike Zamore — Filibustered!: How to Fix the Broken Senate and Save America — at Conn Ave
If we want to fix what ails America, we have to fix the Senate. And if we want to fix the Senate, we must fix the broken filibuster.
In a compelling and powerfully argued book, Senator Jeff Merkley and his longtime chief of staff tell the insiders' story of how the Senate used to work and how the filibuster came to cripple the self-styled "World's Greatest Deliberative Body" with paralyzing gridlock. And they make the surprising case that restoring a modified version of the old-style, talking filibuster may just be our democracy's path back from the brink.
For nearly two centuries, the Senate designed by the Founders served the purpose they envisioned: it was a deliberative legislative body where the nation's thorniest challenges were hashed out. Senators had the ability to speak at length and offer any manner of amendments to influence bills, and then when all had had a say, the Senate voted. Senators who objected to passing a bill could wage a defiant filibuster--in the spirit of fictional Senator Smith who talked until he collapsed in order to block a corrupt railroad deal in the classic 1939 film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But at the end of the day, nearly all legislation, amendments, and nominations went to a vote, and the majority prevailed.
Today, however, thanks to abuse of a fifty-year-old reform intended to make it easier for the Senate to pass legislation, the exceedingly difficult, rare filibuster has morphed, plunging the Senate into dysfunction and threatening the very foundations of our democracy. Now, the minority party can simply declare a "no-talk" filibuster, insisting on a supermajority of sixty votes to pass nearly any bill or a lengthy process to confirm any of the president's nominees--giving themselves a veto over the majority's agenda. Wildly popular bills languish, judgeships and administrative posts remain unfilled, but ordinary citizens can't see why because the obstruction all takes place behind closed doors.
Filibustered! combines a marvelous romp through key moments in filibuster history--from the first filibuster in 1841 through Southern Dixiecrat filibusters of civil rights legislation, up through Mitch McConnell's transformation of the filibuster into a routine tool of perennial gridlock--with firsthand accounts of recent high-profile legislative fights, and a compelling argument that the key to the Senate's future may be found in its past.
Senator Jeff Merkley has served in the U.S. Senate since 2009 and has been a champion of reforming our democracy and a vigorous advocate for tackling inequality and climate change. He has written a number of proposals to restore the talking filibuster and responded to the Gorsuch Supreme Court nomination with the eighth-longest speech in Senate history, clocking in at nearly fifteen and a half hours. The author of America Is Better Than This and Filibustered! (The New Press), he lives in Portland, Oregon.
Mike Zamore was Senator Jeff Merkley's longtime chief of staff and a twenty-two year veteran of Capitol Hill. The co-author (with Senator Merkley) of Filibustered! (The New Press), he is a leading expert on Senate procedure and lives in Washington, DC.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Benjamin Herold — Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs - with Michael Eric Dyson — at Conn Ave
Outside Atlanta, a middle-class Black family faces off with a school system seemingly bent on punishing their teenage son. North of Dallas, a conservative white family relocates to an affluent suburban enclave, but can't escape the changes sweeping the country. On Chicago's North Shore, a multiracial mom joins an ultraprogressive challenge to the town's liberal status quo. In Compton, California, whose suburban roots are now barely recognizable, undocumented Hispanic parents place their gifted son's future in the hands of educators at a remarkable elementary school. And outside Pittsburgh, a Black mother moves to the same street where the author grew up, then confronts the destructive legacy left behind by white families like his.
Education journalist Benjamin Herold braids these human stories together with local and national history to make Disillusioned an astonishing reading experience--and an urgent argument that suburbia and its schools are locked in a devastating cycle that has brought America to a point of crisis. For generations, upwardly mobile white families have extracted opportunity from the nation's heavily subsidized suburbs, then moved on before the bills for maintenance and repair came due, leaving the mostly Black and Brown families who followed to clean up the ensuing mess. Now, though, rapidly shifting demographics and the reality that endless expansion is no longer feasible are disrupting that pattern. Forced to face truths that their communities were built to avoid, everyday suburban families suddenly find themselves at the center of the nation's most pressing debates: How do we confront America's troubled history? How do we build a future in which all children can thrive?
In exploring these questions, Herold pulls back the curtain on suburban public schools and school boards, which he argues are the new ground zero in the fight to revive the country's faltering promise. Then, alongside Bethany Smith--the mother from his old neighborhood, who contributes a powerful epilogue to the book--Herold offers a path toward renewal. The result is nothing short of a journalistic masterpiece.
Benjamin Herold explores America’s beautiful and busted public education system. His award-winning beat reporting, feature writing, and investigative exposés have appeared in Education Week, PBS NewsHour, NPR, and the Public School Notebook. Herold has a master’s degree in urban education from Temple University in Philadelphia, where he lives with his family and has worked as a waiter, researcher, documentary filmmaker, and training specialist for rape-crisis and domestic-violence prevention organizations.
Herold will be in conversation with Michael Eric Dyson. Michael Eric Dyson, a Distinguished University Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies, College of Arts & Science, and of Ethics and Society, Divinity School, and NEH Centennial Chair at Vanderbilt University—is one of America’s premier public intellectuals and the author of numerous New York Times bestsellers including Tears We Cannot Stop, What Truth Sounds Like, JAY-Z, and Long Time Coming. A winner of the 2018 nonfiction Southern Book Prize, Dr. Dyson is also a recipient of two NAACP Image awards and the 2020 Langston Hughes Festival Medallion. Former president Barack Obama has noted: “Everybody who speaks after Michael Eric Dyson pales in comparison.”
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Marcy Norton — The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals After 1492 - with Peter Brannen — at The Wharf
When the men and women of the island of Guanahani first made contact with Christopher Columbus and his crew on October 12, 1492, the cultural differences between the two groups were vaster than the oceans that had separated them. There is perhaps no better demonstration than the divide in their respective ways of relating to animals. In The Tame and the Wild, Marcy Norton tells a new history of the colonization of the Americas, one that places wildlife and livestock at the center of the story. She reveals that the encounters between European and Native American beliefs about animal life transformed societies on both sides of the Atlantic.
Europeans' strategies and motives for conquest were inseparable from the horses that carried them in military campaigns and the dogs they deployed to terrorize Native peoples. Even more crucial were the sheep, cattle, pigs, and chickens whose flesh became food and whose skins became valuable commodities. Yet as central as the domestication of animals was to European plans in the Americas, Native peoples' own practices around animals proved just as crucial in shaping the world after 1492. Cultures throughout the Caribbean, Amazonia, and Mexico were deeply invested in familiarization: the practice of capturing wild animals--not only parrots and monkeys but even tapir, deer, and manatee--and turning some of them into "companion species." These taming practices not only influenced the way Indigenous people responded to human and nonhuman intruders but also transformed European culture itself, paving the way for both zoological science and the modern pet.
Marcy Norton is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the award-winning Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Huntington Library.
Norton will be in conversation with Peter Brannen. Peter Brannen is an award-winning (and often losing) science journalist and contributing writer at The Atlantic. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired, Aeon, The Boston Globe, Slate and The Guardian among other publications. His book, The Ends of the World, about the five major mass extinctions in Earth's history, was published in 2017 by Ecco. Peter is currently a visiting scholar at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, and an affiliate at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He was formerly a 2018 Scripps Fellow at CU-Boulder, a 2015 journalist-in-residence at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center at Duke University, and a 2011 Ocean Science Journalism Fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, MA. His essays have been featured in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series and in The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg. Peter is from the Boston area and is a placental mammal.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Kaveh Akbar — Martyr! - with Clint Smith — at Conn Ave
A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.
Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.
Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.
Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic. He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine. He lives in Iowa City.
Akbar will be joined in conversation with Clint Smith, a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times Bestseller, and the poetry collections Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award and most recently Above Ground. His poetry collection, Above Ground, was recently published on March 28th. Smith is also the host of the YouTube series Crash Course Black American History. Born and raised in New Orleans, he currently lives in Maryland with his wife and their two children.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Uché Blackstock, MD — Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine - with Eugene Scott — at Conn Ave
Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, it never occurred to Uché Blackstock and her twin sister, Oni, that they would be anything but physicians. In the 1980s, their mother headed an organization of Black women physicians, and for years the girls watched these fiercely intelligent women in white coats tend to their patients and neighbors, host community health fairs, cure ills, and save lives.
What Dr. Uché Blackstock did not understand as a child--or learn about at Harvard Medical School, where she and her sister had followed in their mother's footsteps, making them the first Black mother-daughter legacies from the school--were the profound and long-standing systemic inequities that mean just 2 percent of all U.S. physicians today are Black women; the racist practices and policies that ensure Black Americans have far worse health outcomes than any other group in the country; and the flawed system that endangers the well-being of communities like theirs. As an ER physician, and later as a professor in academic medicine, Dr. Blackstock became profoundly aware of the systemic barriers that Black patients and physicians continue to face.
Legacy is a journey through the critical intersection of racism and healthcare. At once a searing indictment of our healthcare system, a generational family memoir, and a call to action, Legacy is Dr. Blackstock's odyssey from child to medical student to practicing physician--to finally seizing her own power as a health equity advocate against the backdrop of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Dr. Uché Blackstock is a physician and thought leader on bias and racism in healthcare. She appears on air regularly as an MSNBC medical contributor and is the founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity, as well as a former associate professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine and the former faculty director for recruitment, retention, and inclusion in the Office of Diversity Affairs at NYU School of Medicine. Dr. Blackstock received both her undergraduate and medical degrees from Harvard University, making her and her twin sister, Oni, the first Black mother-daughter legacies from Harvard Medical School. Dr. Blackstock currently lives in her hometown of Brooklyn, New York, with her two school-age children.
Dr. Blackstock will be in conversation with Eugene Scott. Eugene Scott is a senior political reporter for Axios focused on the 2024 election. An award-winning journalist, Scott has spent two decades covering politics at the local, national and international levels and travels the country frequently giving lectures on matters related to politics and media. Most recently, he was a national political reporter at The Washington Post focused on identity politics. In addition to writing, Scott regularly provides political analysis on MSNBC, CBS and NPR. Following the 2020 presidential election, he hosted The Next Four Years, Amazon’s top original podcast. And he contributed a chapter to FOUR HUNDRED SOULS: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 which topped the New York Times’ bestseller list. Prior to becoming a fellow at the Georgetown University Institute of Politics, Scott covered national politics for CNN. He began his newspaper career at the Cape Argus in Cape Town, South Africa not long after beginning his journalism career with BET News’ Teen Summit. Scott received his master’s degree from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and his bachelor’s from the University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism and Media. He is a D.C. native and continues to live in the Nation’s Capital.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Kate Manne — Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia — at Conn Ave
For as long as she can remember, Kate Manne has wanted to be smaller. She can tell you what she weighed on any significant occasion: her wedding day, the day she became a professor, the day her daughter was born. She's been bullied and belittled for her size, leading to extreme dieting. As a feminist philosopher, she wanted to believe that she was exempt from the cultural gaslighting that compels so many of us to ignore our hunger. But she was not.
Blending intimate stories with the trenchant analysis that has become her signature, Manne shows why fatphobia has become a vital social justice issue. Over the last several decades, implicit bias has waned in every category, from race to sexual orientation, except one: body size. Manne examines how anti-fatness operates--how it leads us to make devastating assumptions about a person's attractiveness, fortitude, and intellect, and how it intersects with other systems of oppression. Fatphobia is responsible for wage gaps, medical neglect, and poor educational outcomes; it is a straitjacket, restricting our freedom, our movement, our potential.
In this urgent call to action, Manne proposes a new politics of "body reflexivity"--a radical reevaluation of who our bodies exist in the world for: ourselves and no one else. When it comes to fatphobia, the solution is not to love our bodies more. Instead, we must dismantle the forces that control and constrain us, and remake the world to accommodate people of every size.
Kate Manne is an associate professor of philosophy at Cornell University, where she’s been teaching since 2013. Before that, she was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Manne did her graduate work in philosophy at MIT and is the author of two previous books, Down Girl and Entitled.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Historical Fiction Panel with Jenni Walsh and Virginia Pye - with Mary Kay Zuravleff - at The Wharf
Unsinkable - Violet Jessop is Miss Unsinkable.
Violet is a stewardess and wartime nurse who not only survives a shipwreck but also two sinkings, one on the infamous Titanic. No one can understand why she would return to sea, but Violet is simply trying to survive. Her childhood was fraught with illness and death in her family. Her distraught mother is too ill to work, that responsibility falling to Violet as the oldest of nine. When the world enters the Great War, she becomes aboard as a nurse, helping men who could very well be her brothers. But disaster strikes again, this time as the Britannic strikes a mine. Miraculously, Violet survives, but her obligation to her mother and siblings still remains, leaving Violet to wonder if she'll ever be able to put her tumultuous life at sea behind her and pursue a life and love all her own.
Daphne has survived calamity of her own.
Daphne Chaundanson grows up as an unwanted child after her mother died in a tragedy. She throws herself into education, collecting languages like candy in a desperate attempt to finally earn her father's approval. When the Special Operations Executive invites her to be an agent in France in World War II, her childhood of anonymity and her love of languages make her the perfect fit. She sees it as an opportunity to help the country she loves and live up to her father's expectations. But unthinkable moments of challenge and resilience change Daphne in ways she could never expect, including an eye-opening encounter where she must come to terms with the secrets in her own past.
Two unsinkable women. Two stories of survival, family, and finding one's own happiness. One connection that reshapes both their lives forever.
Jenni L. Walsh worked for a decade enticing readers as an award-winning advertising copywriter before becoming an author. Her passion lies in transporting readers to another world, be it in historical or contemporary settings. She is a proud graduate of Villanova University, and lives in the Philadelphia suburbs with her husband, daughter, son, and various pets. Jenni is the author of historical novels Becoming Bonnie, Side by Side, A Betting Woman, and The Call of the Wrens. She also writes books for children, including the nonfiction She Dared series and historical novels Hettie and the London Blitz, I Am Defiance, By the Light of Fireflies, and Over and Out.
The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann - Victoria Swann is a successful author of romance and adventure novels who becomes a champion of women's rights as she takes on the literary establishment and finds her true voice, both on and off the page. Everything changes for Victoria when she goes against her publisher's demands and abandons her frivolous style to tell her own story. Her new, young, Harvard-bred editor becomes her unexpected ally as she fights for the women who have been her faithful readers. Set in Gilded Age Boston, The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann shows writing and reading as acts of defiance and revision in life and revision on the page as intimately entwined.
Virginia Pye's story collection Shelf Life of Happiness won the 2019 IPPY Gold Medal for Short Fiction and her two historical novels set in China, Dreams of the Red Phoenix and River of Dust, also received literary awards. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is Fiction Editor at Pangyrus and has taught writing at NYU, UPenn, and at GrubStreet Writing Center in Boston..
Walsh and Pye will be in conversation with Mary Kay Zuravleff. Zuravleff is the award-winning author of American Ending, Man Alive, and The Bowl is Already Broken. She is the recipient of the American Academy of Art's Rosenthal Award, the James Jones First Novel Award, and multiple Artist Fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts. She has taught writing at American University, the Chautauqua Institution, Johns Hopkins and George Mason Universities, and she has written and edited extensively for the Smithsonian. Her essays and short stories have appeared in such venues as American Short Fiction, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, This Is What America Looks Like, and Why I Like This Story. She grew up in Oklahoma and has made Washington, DC, her home.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Kristin Carlucci Weed — Get Me Carlucci: A Daughter Recounts Her Father's Legacy of Service - with Shonna Waters — at Conn Ave
Once called "Washington's ultimate survivor" by The Washington Post, Frank C. Carlucci III served six presidents, traveled the world on behalf of his country, and ultimately rose to prominence as Secretary of Defense. Through every chapter of his extraordinary and varied career, American leaders had a common refrain: "Get me Carlucci!"
Get Me Carlucci combines Carlucci's own words with interviews from his contemporaries and context from his daughter, Kristin Carlucci Weed, who completes her late father's story while keeping his "characteristic deadpan humor and tell-it-like-it-is sensibility, no frills and no fuss."
While Carlucci did not seek the spotlight, his work shaped the world. As a young Foreign Service Officer, he weathered the turmoil and excitement of the Congo Crisis of the 1960s, and as Ambassador to Portugal in the 1970s, he played a crucial role in the country's transition to democracy. With a dynamic mind and a knack for building relationships, Carlucci then returned to the U.S. to serve in Washington. As Deputy Director of the CIA, National Security Advisor, and eventually Secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan, he defined American Cold War policy.
Starting with Carlucci's childhood and early military days, Get Me Carlucci is a unique look at the wide-ranging career of one of the twentieth century's most important behind-the-scenes actors. "The President thought the world of him," said Carlucci's friend and mentee Colin Powell. "I thought the world of him."
Carlucci's story is one of service, hard work, and true statesmanship as the grandson of an Italian stonecutter becomes an indispensable voice at the highest levels of American government.
Kristin Carlucci Weed grew up in McLean, Virginia, as the daughter of former Secretary of Defense Frank C. Carlucci. Carlucci Weed attended Duke University and Johns Hopkins University, focusing on international affairs and public policy. After working in policy research in the U.S. and in Europe, she returned to the leafy suburbs of Washington, DC, where she settled with her US Air Force husband in 2020. When she is not driving one of her three children to their activities, she can be found on the tennis court or planning her next globetrotting adventure. Get Me Carlucci is her first book.
Weed will be in conversation with Dr.Shonna Waters. Dr. Shonna Waters is a renowned speaker and thought leader, shaping conversations on creating human-centered organizations, management and leadership, and women's leadership. With over 23 years of organizational psychology and business expertise, she possesses a deep understanding of today's business challenges and opportunities and the strategies to build more effective and sustainable organizations for the future. A frequent speaker at industry conferences, corporate events, and podcasts, Dr. Waters has engaged with audiences worldwide, sharing her insights and moderating discussions with celebrities, corporate executives, and thought leaders like Josh Bersin, Bear Grylls, and Pau Gasol. Her expertise extends into publications, including two acclaimed books, The Practical Guide to HR Analytics and The Coaching Shift, and contributions to handbooks, peer-reviewed publications, and popular media outlets. She has been cited in CNBC, Fast Company, Forbes, and Axios. Beyond speaking and writing, Dr. Waters is a respected professor, technology executive, consultant, and coach.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Abbott Kahler — Where You End — at Conn Ave
When Kat Bird wakes up from a coma, she sees her mirror image: Jude, her twin sister. Jude's face and name are the only memories Kat has from before her accident. As Kat tries to make sense of things, she believes Jude will provide all the answers to her most pressing questions:
Who am I?
Where am I?
What actually happened?
Amid this tragedy, Jude sees an irresistible opportunity: she can give her sister a brand-new past, one worlds away from the lives they actually led. She spins tales of an idyllic childhood, exotic travels, and a bright future.
But if everything was so perfect, who are the mysterious people following Kat? And what explains her uncontrollable flashes of violent anger, which begin to jeopardize a sweet new romance?
Duped by the one person she trusted, Kat must try to untangle fact from fiction. Yet as she pulls at the threads of Jude's elaborate tapestry, she has no idea of the catastrophe she's inviting. At stake is not just the twins' relationship, but their very survival.
Intensely creepy and beautifully written, Abbott Kahler's Where You End is an unforgettable tale of intrigue, revenge, and the quest for redemption.
Abbott Kahler, formerly writing as Karen Abbott, is the New York Times bestselling author of Sin in the Second City; American Rose; Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy; and The Ghosts of Eden Park, which was an Edgar Award finalist for best fact crime and a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award. Her next nonfiction book, Then Came the Devil, is forthcoming in 2025. She is also the host of Remus: The Mad Bootleg King, a forthcoming podcast from iHeartRadio about legendary Jazz Age bootlegger George Remus. A native of Philadelphia, she lives in New York City and in Greenport, New York, where she is at work on her next novel.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Antonia Hylton — Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum - with Astead Herndon — at Conn Ave
On a cold day in March of 1911, officials marched twelve Black men into the heart of a forest in Maryland. Under the supervision of a doctor, the men were forced to clear the land, pour cement, lay bricks, and harvest tobacco. When construction finished, they became the first twelve patients of the state's Hospital for the Negro Insane. For centuries, Black patients have been absent from our history books. Madness transports readers behind the brick walls of a Jim Crow asylum.
In Madness, Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton tells the 93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. She blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade-worth of investigative research and archival documents. Madness chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton also grapples with her own family's experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for generations.
As Crownsville Hospital grew from an antebellum-style work camp to a tiny city sitting on 1,500 acres, the institution became a microcosm of America's evolving battles over slavery, racial integration, and civil rights. During its peak years, the hospital's wards were overflowing with almost 2,700 patients. By the end of the 20th-century, the asylum faded from view as prisons and jails became America's new focus.
In Madness, Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people's bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system. It is a captivating and heartbreaking meditation on how America decides who is sick or criminal, and who is worthy of our care or irredeemable.
Antonia Hylton is a Peabody and Emmy-award winning journalist at NBC News reporting on politics and civil rights, and the co-host of the hit podcast Southlake. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, where she received prizes for her investigative research on race, mass incarceration and the history of psychiatry. She lives in Brooklyn.
Hylton will be in conversation with Astead Herndon. Astead W. Herndon is a national politics reporter for the New York Times and a political analyst for CNN. He reports and hosts "The Run Up," a political podcast from The New York Times that debuted ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. Previously, Herndon was an integral part of the Times political coverage in the 2018 midterm elections and the 2020 presidential elections. In 2020, Herndon was named to the Forbes Magazine's 30 Under 30 media list. His reporting -- on white grievance and former President Donald Trump -- was included among the New York Times package that was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prizes. Last year, "The Run Up" was named "one of the best podcasts of 2022" by The Economist.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Donna Hemans — The House of Plain Truth - with Lauren Francis-Sharma — at Conn Ave
When Pearline abruptly leaves her life in Brooklyn and returns to her childhood home in Jamaica to care for her dying father, Rupert, she leaves her grown daughter to cope, overwhelmed, with her granddaughters back in Brooklyn.
But Pearline isn't prepared for Rupert's puzzling deathbed wish that she find siblings she hasn't seen in 60 years. What is revealed in the wake of Rupert's death is the secret that splintered the family. Moving through time and place, The House of Plain Truth charts the family's traumatic past in Cuba, where Rupert had sought a better life and where three of Pearline's siblings remained when the rest of the family left for Jamaica. Everything Pearline learns challenges what she knows about her family and the place she has always called home.
In lush, lyrical prose inspired by the author's own family story, this novel explores the divided loyalties within a family, the true meaning of home, and what one woman has to sacrifice to get what she ultimately wants.
Donna Hemans is the author of two previous novels, River Woman and Tea By the Sea, which won the Lignum Vitae Una Marson Award. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Electric Literature, Ms. Magazine, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. She is also the owner of DC Writers Room, a co-working studio for writers based in Washington, DC. Born in Jamaica, she lives in Maryland, and received her undergraduate degree in English and Media Studies from Fordham University and an MFA from American University.
Hemans will be in conversation with Lauren Francis-Sharma. Lauren Francis-Sharma is the author of Book of the Little Axe, the 2020 American Library Association’s “Libraries Transform Book Pick” and a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Award in Fiction. Her first novel, 'Til the Well Runs Dry was awarded the Honor Fiction Prize by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Lauren is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan Law School. Her more recent work can be found at Barrelhouse, ElectricLit, The Lily, as well as the anthology, Us Against Alzheimer’s. Lauren is a book reviewer for The San Francisco Chronicle, a MacDowell Fellow, serves on the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, and is the Assistant Director of Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Dr. Jen Gunter — Blood: The Science, Medicine, and Mythology of Menstruation — at Conn Ave
Most women can expect to have hundreds of periods in a lifetime. And yet few are given the tools to understand the science of their own cycle, how it changes over their lifetime, and how it connects to their overall health.
Despite its significance, most education about menstruation focuses either on increasing the chances of pregnancy or preventing it. And while both are crucial, women deserve to know more about their bodies than just what happens in service to reproduction. Instead, the patriarchy has weaponized menstruation through outdated cultural norms, medical dismissal, inadequate menstrual accommodations, and useless products. To distinguish medicine from mythology, people need information. To advocate for ourselves, we need to know how our bodies work. Consequently, many people suffer in silence, thinking their bodies are uniquely broken, or they turn to disreputable sources.
This is the true curse, and the way we break that curse is with knowledge.
In this practical, inclusive guide to menstruation, Dr. Jen Gunter delivers empowerment through knowledge. She explains what's typical, what's concerning, and when to seek care, while also examining the historical and social myths which keep women uninformed and disenfranchised. Written with the no-nonsense expertise and frank, fearless wit that have made Dr. Gunter today's most trusted voice in women's health, Blood gives women the tools to take back control of their bodies and kick menstrual shame to the curb. Period.
Dr. Jen Gunter is an internationally bestselling author, obstetrician, and gynecologist with more than three decades of experience as a vulvar and vaginal diseases expert. Considered “the world's most famous—and outspoken—gynecologist,” (The Guardian), her New York Times and USA Today bestselling books, The Vagina Bible and The Menopause Manifesto, have been translated into 25 languages. She is the host of Jensplaining, a CBC/Amazon Prime video series that highlights the impact of medical misinformation on women, and the recipient of the 2020 NAMS Media Award from The North American Menopause Society. Her 2020 TED Talk, “Why Can’t We Talk About Periods?” received more than two million views in its first six months, leading to the launch of her popular podcast on the TED Audio Collective, “Body Stuff with Dr. Jen Gunter.” Originally from Winnipeg, Canada, she lives with her sons in San Francisco,CA.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Camilla Nord — The Balanced Brain: The Science of Mental Health - with Ted Scheinman — at The Wharf
There are many routes to mental well-being. In this groundbreaking book, neuroscientist Camilla Nord offers a fascinating tour of the scientific developments that are revolutionising the way we think about mental health, showing why and how events--and treatments--can affect people in such different ways.
In The Balanced Brain, Nord explains how our brain constructs our sense of mental health--actively striving to maintain balance in response to our changing circumstances. While a mentally healthy brain deals well with life's turbulence, poor mental health results when the brain struggles with disruption. But just what is the brain trying to balance? Nord describes the foundations of mental health in the brain--from the neurobiology of pleasure, pain and desire to the role of mood-mediating chemicals like dopamine, serotonin and opioids. She then pivots to interventions, revealing how antidepressants, placebos and even recreational drugs work; how psychotherapy changes brain chemistry; and how the brain and body interact to make us feel physically (as well as mentally) healthy. Along the way, Nord explains how the seemingly small things we use to lift our moods--a piece of chocolate, a walk, a chat with a friend--work on the same pathways in our brains as the latest treatments for mental health disorders.
Understanding the cause of poor mental health is one of the crucial questions of our time. But the answer is unique to each of us, and it requires finding what helps our brains rebalance and thrive. With so many factors at play, there are more possibilities for recovery and resilience than we might think.
Camilla Nord leads the Mental Health Neuroscience Lab at the University of Cambridge. Her research has been featured in the New Statesman, the Daily Mail and the British Journal of Psychiatry, and on the BBC.
Nord will be in conversation with Ted Scheinman. Ted Scheinman is a senior editor at Smithsonian magazine and author of Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan (2018). His essays and reporting have appeared in or on the Atlantic, the BBC, the Chronicle of Higher Education, GQ, the New Republic, the New York Times, the Paris Review, Slate, and many more. He is also a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Paul Starobin — Putin's Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia - with Fiona Hill — at Conn Ave
Since Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, some one million Russians have fled the country and gone into exile. Motivated by opposition to the war, by guilt for their country's deeds, by personal hatred for the Czar-like Putin, and by a vision of a better Russia, shorn of autocracy, the exiles have mounted an organized resistance to Putin's rule.
The resistance includes followers of the imprisoned Putin opponent Alexi Navalny, dissident Russian Orthodox priests, and journalists feeding Russians back home the kind of coverage that Kremlin-controlled media censors. Most aggressively, some exiles are actively aiding the Ukrainian fight against Russia's armed forces in hopes of hastening Russia's defeat and Putin's demise.
Paul Starobin, a veteran analyst of Russia, travels to places like Armenia and Georgia to meet with exiles and has conversations with prominent figures throughout Europe and America, as he takes measure of this rebellion--and its potential to fix a nation plagued by revanchist imperial dreams.
Putin's Exiles is an indispensable work for anyone trying to understand Russia today--to go beyond Putin's propaganda and the tightly controlled narrative inside the country, and look outside its borders to the diaspora of Russian exiles, who are imagining and fighting for the future of their country.
Paul Starobin, a former Moscow bureau chief for Businessweek and former contributing editor of The Atlantic, has been writing about Russia and Russians for more than a quarter century. He is the author of three books, including After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age, and Madness Rules the Hour: Charleston, 1860 and the Mania for War. He has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. He lives in Cape Cod, MA.
Starobin will be in conversation with Fiona Hill. Fiona Hill is the Robert Bosch Senior Fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. From 2017 to 2019, she served as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council. Coauthor of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin and The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold, she holds a master's degree in Soviet studies and a doctorate in history from Harvard University and a master's in Russian and modern history from St. Andrews University in Scotland. She also has pursued studies at Moscow's Maurice Thorez Institute of Foreign Languages. Hill is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and lives in the Washington, DC, area.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Kiley Reid — Come and Get It - with Glory Edim — at Conn Ave
It’s 2017 at the University of Arkansas, and Millie Cousins—a senior resident assistant at Belgrade Dormitory—just wants to graduate, get a job, and buy a house. One of her residents, Kennedy Washburn, is a junior transfer who has come to Fayetteville for a fresh start. And Agatha Paul is a writer and visiting professor who is itching for her next topic. When Agatha offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity to help each other further their own interests, Millie naturally jumps at the chance. But Millie’s starry-eyed side hustle soon becomes jeopardized by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks, and illicit intrigue, forcing them all to question just how much of themselves they are willing to trade to get what they want.
A fresh and intimate portrait of desire, consumption, and reckless abandon, Come and Get It is a tension-filled story about indiscretion and bad behavior that explores the choices we make for and about money; the casual, unconscious ways we communicate class; and the things that can and cannot be paid for. It’s a fierce and honest story for our times—and a striking reminder to “rejoice that Kiley Reid is only just getting started” (NPR).
Kiley Reid is the author of Such a Fun Age, which was a New York Times bestseller and longlisted for the Booker Prize. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Playboy, The Guardian, and others. Reid is currently an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.
Reid will be in conversation with Glory Edim. Glory Edim is the Director of Marketing at Politics & Prose and founder of Well-Read Black Girl, a book club and digital platform that celebrates the uniqueness of Black literature and sisterhood. She edited the Well-Read Black Girl anthology, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and named a best book of the year by Library Journal. The winner of the Innovator’s Award from the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, Edim worked as a creative strategist for over ten years and serves on the board of New York City’s Housing Works Bookstore.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Tim Schwab & Amy Schiller — The Bill Gates Problem & The Price of Humanity — at The Wharf
Join us for a discussion on the state of philanthropy with Tim Schwab and Amy Schiller!
The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire - Through his vaunted philanthropy, Bill Gates transformed himself from a tech villain into one of the most admired people on the planet. Even as divorce proceedings and allegations of misconduct have recently tarnished his public image, the beneficence of the Gates Foundation, celebrated for spending billions to save lives around the globe, is taken as a given. But as Tim Schwab shows in this fearless investigation, Gates is still exactly who he was at Microsoft: a bully and monopolist, convinced of his own righteousness and intent on imposing his ideas, his solutions, and his leadership on everyone else. At the core, he is not a selfless philanthropist but a power broker, a clever engineer who has innovated a way to turn extreme wealth into immense political influence--and who has made us believe we should applaud his acquisition of power, not challenge it.
Piercing the blinding halo that has for too long shielded the world's most powerful (and most secretive) charitable organization from public scrutiny, The Bill Gates Problem shows how Gates's billions have purchased a stunning level of control over public policy, private markets, scientific research, and the news media. Whether he is pushing new educational standards in America, health reforms in India, global vaccine policy during the pandemic, or Western industrialized agriculture throughout Africa, Gates's heady social experimentation has shown itself to be not only undemocratic, but also ineffective. In many places, Bill Gates is hurting the very people he intends to help.
No less than dark-money campaign contributions or big-business political lobbying, Bill Gates's philanthropic empire needs to be seen as a problem of money in politics. It is a dangerous model of unconstrained power that threatens democracy and demands our attention.
Tim Schwab is an investigative journalist based in Washington, DC. His groundbreaking reporting on the Gates Foundation for The Nation, Columbia Journalism Review, and The British Medical Journal has been honored with an Izzy Award and a Deadline Club Award. The Bill Gates Problem is his first book.
The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong -- And How to Fix It - The word "philanthropy" today makes people think big money--Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffet, and Andrew Carnegie come to mind. The scope of suffering in the world seems to demand an industry of giving, and yet for all the billions that are dispensed, the wealthy never seem to lose any of their money and nothing seems to change.
Journalist, academic and consultant Amy Schiller shows how we get out of this stalemate by evaluating the history of philanthropy from the ideas of St. Augustine to the work of Lebron James. She argues philanthropy's contemporary tendency to maintain obscene inequality and reduce every cause to dehumanizing technocratic terms is unacceptable, while maintaining an optimism about the soul and potential of philanthropy in principle.
For philanthropy to get back to its literal roots--the love of humanity--Schiller argues that philanthropy can no longer be premised around basic survival. Public institutions must assume that burden so that philanthropy can shift its focus to initiatives that allow us to flourish into happier, more fulfilled human beings. Philanthropy has to get out of the business of saving lives if we are to save humanity.
Amy Schiller is a journalist, academic, and consultant. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College in the Society of Fellows. She previously held fellowships at Stanford University and Bard College. Her writing has been published in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Nation, and The Daily Beast and has been quoted as an expert on philanthropy in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Bloomberg, and Slate. She has also had a nearly 15-year career in major gift fundraising consulting. She has worked in a wide range of settings, from international humanitarian nonprofits to a major New York City dance company.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández — Welcome the Wretched: In Defense of the Criminal Alien - with Karla McKanders — at Conn Ave
In the fevered battles over immigration, Democrats and Republicans alike agree on this: that migrants who have committed a crime have no place in this country. Yet time and again, it has been shown that targeting migrants because they have committed a crime is a short-sighted appeal to nativist fear. To predicate a migrant's right to stay in the country on whether they are law-abiding and therefore deserving or "criminal" and undeserving does little to improve public safety and has an especially devastating impact on low-income migrants of color.
While César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández's first book, Migrating to Prison, focuses on the explosion of migrant detention centers over the past decades, Welcome the Wretched tackles head-on what happens when a deeply flawed and racist criminal legal system and immigration system converge to senselessly cruel effect. Drawing on everything from history to legal analyses and philosophy, García Hernández counters the fundamental assumption that criminal activity has a rightful place in immigration matters, arguing that instead of using the criminal legal system to identify people to deport, the United States should place a reimagined sense of citizenship and solidarity at the center of immigration policy.
César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández is the Gregory H. Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Ohio State University Mortiz College of Law and an immigration lawyer. He has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Guardian, and many other venues. The author of Crimmigration Law as well as Migrating to Prison and Welcome the Wretched (both published by The New Press), he lives in Denver, Colorado.
García Hernández will be in conversation with Karla McKanders. Karla McKanders is an expert in civil rights, immigration, and race in the law. McKanders was recently appointed the new director of the Thurgood Marshall Institute, the multidisciplinary research and advocacy center within NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. Prior to the Institute, McKanders taught at Vanderbilt University Law School. Her scholarship has examined the history of how immigration laws have reified race by legislating cultural norms that reinforce racial divisions in the United States.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Keith Boykin — Why Does Everything Have to Be About Race?: 25 Arguments That Won't Go Away — at Conn Ave
The most toxic racial arguments share one of five traits. They try to erase Black history, prioritize white victimhood, deny Black oppression, promote myths of Black inferiority, or rebrand racism as something else entirely. They're all designed to distract society from racial justice, but now we have the tools to debunk them.
With a mixture of personal experience, reportage, and extensive research, Keith Boykin takes a wrecking ball to twenty-five of the most widespread deceptions about race, such as:
- The Civil War was about states' rights, not slavery
- Affirmative action is reverse discrimination
- Critical Race Theory is indoctrinating children to hate one another
and shows us how to refute lies, myths, and misinformation with history, knowledge, and truth.
Keith Boykin is a New York Times-bestselling author, TV and film producer, and former CNN political commentator. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School, Keith served in the White House, cofounded the National Black Justice Coalition, cohosted the BET talk show My Two Cents, and taught at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University in New York. He's a Lambda Literary Award-winning author and editor of seven books. He lives in Los Angeles.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Hisham Matar — My Friends — at Union Market
One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat, and has the sense that his life has been changed forever. Obsessed by the power of those words--and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zowa--Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh.
There, thrust into an open society that is miles away from the world he knew in Libya, Khaled begins to change. He attends a protest against the Qaddafi regime in London, only to watch it explode into tragedy. In a flash, Khaled finds himself injured, clinging to life, unable to leave Britain, much less return to the country of his birth. To even tell his mother and father back home what he has done, on tapped phone lines, would expose them to danger.
When a chance encounter in a hotel brings Khaled face-to-face with Hosam Zowa, the author of the fateful short story, he is subsumed into the deepest friendship of his life. It is a friendship that not only sustains him but eventually forces him, as the Arab Spring erupts, to confront agonizing tensions between revolution and safety, family and exile, and how to define his own sense of self against those closest to him.
A devastating meditation on friendship and family, and the ways in which time tests--and frays--those bonds, My Friends is an achingly beautiful work of literature by an author working at the peak of his powers.
Hisham Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo, and has lived most of his life in London. His memoir The Return was the recipient of many awards, including the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and the Rathbones Folio Prize. It was also shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Costa Biography Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Matar is also the author of the novels In the Country of Men, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Anatomy of a Disappearance. His most recent book is A Month in Siena. Matar is a professor at Barnard College and Columbia University, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an honorary fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Linnea Axelsson — Aednan: An Epic — at Conn Ave
In Northern Sámi, the word Ædnan means the land, the earth, and my mother. These are all crucial forces within the lives of the Indigenous families that animate this groundbreaking book: an astonishing verse novel that chronicles a hundred years of change: a book that will one day stand alongside Halldór Laxness's Independent People and Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter as an essential Scandinavian epic.
The tale begins in the 1910s, as Ristin and her family migrate their herd of reindeer to summer grounds. Along the way, forced to separate due to the newly formed border between Sweden and Norway, Ristin loses one of her sons in the aftermath of an accident, a grief that will ripple across the rest of the book. In the wake of this tragedy, Ristin struggles to manage what's left of her family and her community.
In the 1970s, Lise, as part of a new generation of Sámi grappling with questions of identity and inheritance, reflects on her traumatic childhood, when she was forced to leave her parents and was placed in a Nomad School to be stripped of the language of her ancestors. Finally, in the 2010s we meet Lise's daughter, Sandra, an embodiment of Indigenous resilience, an activist fighting for reparations in a highly publicized land rights trial, in a time when the Sámi language is all but lost.
Weaving together the voices of half a dozen characters, from elders to young people unsure of their heritage, Axelsson has created a moving family saga around the consequences of colonial settlement. Ædnan is a powerful reminder of how durable language can be, even when it is borrowed, especially when it has to hold what no longer remains. "I was the weight / in the stone you brought / back from the coast // to place on / my grave," one character says to another from beyond the grave. "And I flew above / the boat calling / to you all: // There will be rain / there will be rain."
Linnea Axelsson is a Sámi-Swedish writer, born in the province of North Bothnia in Sweden. In 2018, she was awarded the August Prize for this book. She lives in Stockholm, Sweden. Linnea’s US tour is being implemented with the assistance of a grant from the Swedish Arts Council.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Hena Khan - Drawing Deena - at Conn Ave
Deena dreams of being an artist and painting masterpieces. But her parents want her to study for a money-making career. Deena discovers a way that her art can help the family clothing business, but will this be enough to convince Deena’s mother to allow her to follow her dreams?
About the Author:
Hena Khan is a Pakistani American writer and winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Children’s Literature. She is the author of numerous middle grade novels including Amina’s Voice. Hena lives in her hometown of Rockville, Maryland, with her family.
Ages 9-12
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Jake Johnston — Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti — at Conn Ave
Haiti's state is near-collapse: armed groups have overrun the country, many government officials have fled after the 2021 assassination of President Moise and not a single elected leader holds office, refugees desperately set out on boats to reach the US and Latin America, and the economy reels from the after-effects of disasters, both man-made and natural, that destroyed much of Haiti's infrastructure and institutions. How did a nation founded on liberation--a people that successfully revolted against their colonizers and enslavers--come to such a precipice?
In Aid State, Jake Johnston, a researcher and writer at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC, reveals how long-standing US and European capitalist goals ensnared and re-enslaved Haiti under the guise of helping it. To the global West, Haiti has always been a place where labor is cheap, politicians are compliant, and profits are to be made. Over the course of nearly 100 years, the US has sought to control Haiti and its people with occupying police, military, and euphemistically-called peacekeeping forces, as well as hand-picked leaders meant to quell uprisings and protect corporate interests. Earthquakes and hurricanes only further devastated a state already decimated by the aid industrial complex.
Based on years of on-the-ground reporting in Haiti and interviews with politicians in the US and Haiti, independent aid contractors, UN officials, and Haitians who struggle for their lives, homes, and families, Aid State is a conscience-searing book of witness.
Jake Johnston is Senior Research Associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. and has been the leading writer for the center's Haiti: Relief and Reconstruction Watch website since February 2010, just weeks after a 7.0 earthquake devastated Haiti. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, ABC News, Boston Review, Truthout, and The Intercept, and elsewhere. He grew up in Portland, Maine and lives in Washington, D.C.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Alyson Gerber - The Liars Society - with Katherine Marsh - at Conn Ave in the Children and Teens Department
Scholarship kid Weatherby is trying to fit in at her father’s old private school while legacy student Jake is focused on upholding the family name. But when money for a sailing retreat goes missing, Weatherby and Jake team up to continue the school tradition, while each hiding their own secrets. With their reputations on the line, can these two sailing rivals work together in this fast-paced school mystery?
About the Author:
Alyson Gerber is the author of several critically acclaimed middle school novels. A former marketing director, Alyson is a graduate of two New England prep schools who earned her MFA in creative writing at the New School. She grew up in New England and now lives in New York City with her family.
Gerber will be in conversation with Katherine Marsh. Marsh is an award-winning author of novels for middle-grade readers including Nowhere Boy, winner of the Middle East Book Award; The Night Tourist, winner of the Edgar Award for Best Juvenile Mystery; Jepp, Who Defied the Stars, a New York Times Notable; and The Door By The Staircase, a Junior Library Guild selection. Her most recent book, The Lost Year, was a 2023 National Book Award Finalist.
Ages 9-12
James Ponti - City Spies: Mission Manhattan - at Conn Ave
After a young climate activist is threatened at a rally in Venice, the City Spies jump into action in their latest adventure. Following a trail that leads them from Europe to the greatest city on earth, aka New York, each member of this young MI6 team must use their unique skills and their cutting-edge technology to catch the perpetrators on a high-speed chase that leads though and under the stacks of the New York Public Library.
About the Author:
James Ponti is the Edgar winner and New York Times Bestselling author of three middle grade book series, City Spies, Framed, Dead City and the forthcoming Sherlock Society. He is also an Emmy–nominated television writer and producer who has worked for many networks. He lives with his family in Orlando, Florida.
Ages 9-12
James Ponti & Hena Khan - City Spies: Mission Manhattan & Drawing Deena - at the Wharf
This event will be held at the Politics and Prose Wharf Location.
About City Spies: Mission Mahattan:
After a young climate activist is threatened at a rally in Venice, the City Spies jump into action in their latest adventure. Following a trail that leads them from Europe to the greatest city on earth, aka New York, each member of this young MI6 team must use their unique skills and their cutting-edge technology to catch the perpetrators on a high-speed chase that leads though and under the stacks of the New York Public Library.
About Drawing Deena:
Deena dreams of being an artist and painting masterpieces. But her parents want her to study for a money-making career. Deena discovers a way that her art can help the family clothing business, but will this be enough to convince Deena’s mother to allow her to follow her dreams?
About the Authors:
James Ponti, author of City Spies: Mission Manhattan, is the Edgar winner and New York Times Bestselling author of three middle grade book series, City Spies, Framed, Dead City and the forthcoming Sherlock Society. He is also an Emmy–nominated television writer and producer who has worked for many networks. He lives with his family in Orlando, Florida.
Hena Khan, author of Drawing Deena is a Pakistani American writer and winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Children’s Literature. She is the author of numerous middle grade novels including Amina’s Voice. Hena lives in her hometown of Rockville, Maryland, with her family.
Ages 9-12
Karen Outen — Dixon, Descending — at Conn Ave
Dixon was once an Olympic-level runner. But he missed the team by two-tenths of a second, and ever since that pain decades ago, he hasn't allowed a goal to consume him. But when his charming older brother, Nate, suggests that they attempt to be the first Black American men to summit Mount Everest, Dixon can't refuse. The brothers are determined to prove something--to themselves and to each other.
Dixon interrupts his orderly life as a school psychologist, leaving behind disapproving friends, family, and one particularly fragile student, Marcus. Once on the mountain, they are met with extreme weather conditions, oxygen deprivation, and precarious terrain. But as much as they've prepared for this, Mt. Everest is always fickle. And in one devastating moment, Dixon's world is upended.
Dixon returns home and attempts to resume his job, but things have shifted: for him and for the students he left behind when he chose Mt. Everest. Ultimately, Dixon must confront the truth of what happened on the mountain and come to terms with who can and cannot be saved. Dixon, Descending offers us a captivating, shattering portrait of the ways we're reshaped by our decisions--and what it takes to angle ourselves, once again, toward hope.
Karen Outen's fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, The North American Review, Essence, and elsewhere. She is a 2018 recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award and has been a fellow at both the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan and the Pew Fellowships in the Arts. She received an MFA from the University of Michigan. She lives in Maryland.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
James Grady — The Smoke in Our Eyes - with Louis Bayard — at Conn Ave
Set in 1959, the "year the music died," The Smoke in Our Eyes is a cinematic, clock-ticking saga set in a small Montana town. When a fatal car accident shatters ten-year-old Lucas's world, he finds himself confronting crime and vengeance, humor and heroism, all against the backdrop of growing up.
Alongside the tightly written drama of Lucas and his family, Grady, author of the classic "Condor" series, evokes a heady mood and sense of place. From the Space Race and the first warnings of global climate change, to the brutal racism of segregation and the hope of a new generation to move us forward, The Smoke in Our Eyes is a fresh rending of rural noir that captures both an intimate story and the volitility of mid-century America.
James Grady's first novel Six Days Of The Condor became the classic Robert Redford movie Three Days Of The Condor and the current Max Irons TV series Condor. Grady has received Italy's Raymond Chandler Medal, France's Grand Prix Du Roman Noir and Japan's Baka-Misu literature award, two Regardie's magazine short story awards, and been a Mystery Writers of America Edgar finalist. He's published more than a dozen novels and three times that many short stories, been a muckraker journalist and a scriptwriter for film and television. In 2008, London's Daily Telegraph named Grady as one of "50 crime writers to read before you die." In 2015, The Washington Post compared his prose to George Orwell and Bob Dylan.
Grady will be in conversation with Louis Bayard. Bayard's acclaimed novels include The Pale Blue Eye, adapted into the global #1 Netflix release starring Christian Bale, Jackie & Me, ranked by the Washington Post as one of the top novels of 2022, the national bestseller Courting Mr. Lincoln, Roosevelt's Beast, The School of Night, The Black Tower, and Mr. Timothy, as well as the highly praised young-adult novel, Lucky Strikes. A New York Times Notable author, he has been nominated for both the Edgar and Dagger awards, and his story, “Banana Triangle Six,” was chosen for The Best American Mystery Stories. His reviews and articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and Salon. An instructor at George Washington University, he is the chair of the PEN/Faulkner Awards and was the author of the popular Downton Abbey recaps for the New York Times. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Sarah Scoles — Countdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons — at The Wharf
Nuclear weapons are, today, as important as they were during the Cold War, and some experts say we could be as close to a nuclear catastrophe now as we were at the height of that conflict. Despite that, conversations about these bombs generally often happen in past tense.
In Countdown, science journalist Sarah Scoles uncovers a different atomic reality: the nuclear age's present.
Drawing from years of on-the-ground reporting at the nation's nuclear weapons labs, Scoles interrogates the idea that having nuclear weapons keeps us safe, deterring attacks and preventing radioactive warfare. She deftly assesses the existing nuclear apparatus in the United States, taking readers beyond the news headlines and policy-speak to reveal the state of nuclear-weapons technology, as well as how people currently working within the U.S. nuclear weapons complex have come to think about these bombs and the idea that someone, someday, might use them.
Through a sharp, surprising, and undoubtedly urgent narrative, Scoles brings us out of the Cold War and into the twenty-first century, opening readers' eyes to the true nature of nuclear weapons and their caretakers while also giving us the context necessary to understand the consequences of their existence, for worse and for better, for now and for the future.
Sarah Scoles is a Colorado-based science journalist, a contributing writer at Popular Science, and a senior contributor at Undark. Her work has appeared in publications like the New York Times, Wired, Scientific American, and others. She is also the author of the books Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers, and Astronomical Mindfulness. Her forthcoming book is called Countdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons. Her articles have won the American Geophysical Union's David Perlman Award for Excellence in Science Writing (2021) and the American Astronomical Society Solar Physics Division's Popular Media Award (2019, 2020). Previously, she was an associate editor at Astronomy and a public education officer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
David Montero — The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations — at Conn Ave
In this timely, powerful, investigative history,The Stolen Wealth of Slavery, Emmy Award-nominated journalist David Montero follows the trail of the massive wealth amassed by Northern corporations throughout America's history of enslavement. It has long been maintained by many that the North wasn't complicit in the horrors of slavery. The truth, however, is that large Northern banks--including well-known institutions like Citibank, Bank of New York, and Bank of America--were critical to the financing of slavery; that they saw their fortunes rise dramatically from their involvement in the business of enslavement; and that white business leaders and their surrounding communities created enormous wealth from the enslavement and abuse of Black bodies.
The Stolen Wealth of Slavery grapples with facts that will be a revelation to many: Most white Southern enslavers were not rich--many were barely making ends meet--with Northern businesses benefitting the most from bondage-based profits. And some of the very Northerners who would be considered pro-Union during the Civil War were in fact anti-abolition, seeing the institution of slavery as being in their best financial interests, and only supporting the Union once they realized doing so would be good for business. It is a myth that the wealth generated from slavery vanished after the war. Rather, it helped finance the industrialization of the country, and became part of the bedrock of the growth of modern corporations, helping to transform America into a global economic behemoth.
In this remarkable book, Montero elegantly and meticulously details rampant Northern investment in slavery. He showcases exactly what was stolen, who stole it, and to whom it is owed, calling for corporate reparations as he details contemporary movements to hold companies accountable for past atrocities.
David Montero is a journalist and producer. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Harvard Business Review, and more. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. His first book was Kickback: Exposing the Global Corporate Bribery Network.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
ReShonda Tate — The Queen of Sugar Hill: A Novel of Hattie McDaniel - with Victoria Christopher Murray — at Union Market
It was supposed to be the highlight of her career, the pinnacle for which she'd worked all her life. And as Hattie McDaniel took the stage in 1940 to claim an honor that would make her the first African-American woman to win an Academy Award, she tearfully took her place in history. Between personal triumphs and tragedies, heartbreaking losses, and severe setbacks, this historic night of winning best supporting actress for her role as the sassy Mammy in the controversial movie Gone With the Wind was going to be life-changing. Or so she thought.
Months after winning the award, not only did the Oscar curse set in where Hattie couldn't find work, but she found herself thrust in the middle of two worlds--Black and White--and not being welcomed in either. Whites only saw her as Mammy and Blacks detested the demeaning portrayal. As the NAACP waged an all-out war against Hattie and actors like her, the emotionally conflicted actor found herself struggling daily.
Through it all, Hattie continued her fight to pave a path for other Negro actors, while focusing on war efforts, fighting housing discrimination, and navigating four failed marriages. Luckily, she had a core group of friends to help her out--from Clark Gable to Louise Beavers to Ruby Berkley Goodwin and Dorothy Dandridge.
The Queen of Sugar Hill brings to life the powerful story of one woman who was driven by many passions--ambition, love, sex, family, friendship, and equality. In re-creating Hattie's story, ReShonda Tate delivers an unforgettable novel of resilience, dedication, and determination--about what it takes to achieve your dreams--even when everything--and everyone--is against you.
As a national bestselling author and award-winning journalist, ReShonda Tate has the credentials, and the passion, to bring stories to life. A highly sought-after motivational speaker/poet, ReShonda is a three-time nominee and previous winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature. She has received a plethora of distinguished awards and honors for her journalism, fiction, and poetry writing skills, including an induction into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame and the Texas Literary Hall of Fame. Two of her novels have been made into television movies.
Tate will be in conversation with Victoria Christopher Murray. Victoria Christopher Murray is an acclaimed author with more than one million books in print. She has written more than twenty novels, including Stand Your Ground, an NAACP Image Award Winner for Outstanding Fiction and a Library Journal Best Book of the Year. She holds an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
George Pelecanos — Owning Up - with Louis Bayard — at Conn Ave
This event is in partnership with the Pen/Faulkner Foundation.
When the son of the Carusos is involved in a hold up, the family home comes under siege in the form of a no-knock warrant. Months after the cops destroyed their home, the Carusos struggle to return to normal. Elsewhere, two former inmates reunite by chance on the set of a TV production. Both have found their way on the straight and narrow path, that is, until one sees the potential for an easy grift. A teenage boy must step into the man he'd like to be as a hostage crisis grips his hometown. A woman adrift meets a man tied to her grandmother's past, an encounter that awakens her to a bloody history that undergirds the place she grew up.
Pelecanos' portraits are characterized by shades of grey, resisting the mold of heroes and villains, victims and perpetrators, good and evil. At once streetwise and full of heart, Owning Up grapples with random chance, the bind of consequence, and the forked paths a life can take.
George Pelecanos is the bestselling author of twenty-two novels and story collections set in and around Washington, D.C. He is also a producer and Emmy-nominated writer of HBO's The Wire, Treme, The Deuce and We Own This City. He lives in Maryland.
Pelecanos will be in conversation with Louis Bayard. Louis Bayard's acclaimed novels include The Pale Blue Eye, adapted into the global #1 Netflix release starring Christian Bale, Jackie & Me, ranked by the Washington Post as one of the top novels of 2022, the national bestseller Courting Mr. Lincoln, Roosevelt's Beast, The School of Night, The Black Tower, and Mr. Timothy, as well as the highly praised young-adult novel, Lucky Strikes. A New York Times Notable author, he has been nominated for both the Edgar and Dagger awards, and his story, “Banana Triangle Six,” was chosen for The Best American Mystery Stories. His reviews and articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and Salon. An instructor at George Washington University, he is the chair of the PEN/Faulkner Awards and was the author of the popular Downton Abbey recaps for the New York Times.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Jonathan Blitzer — Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis — at The Wharf
Everyone who makes the journey faces an impossible choice. Hundreds of thousands of people who arrive every year at the US-Mexico border travel far from their homes. An overwhelming share of them come from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, although many migrants come from farther away. Some are fleeing persecution, others crime or hunger. Very often it will not be their first attempt to cross. They may have already been deported from the United States, but it remains their only hope for safety and prosperity. Their homes have become uninhabitable. They will take their chances.
This vast and unremitting crisis did not spring up overnight. Indeed, as Blitzer dramatizes with forensic, unprecedented reporting, it is the result of decades of misguided policy and sweeping corruption. Brilliantly weaving the stories of Central Americans whose lives have been devastated by chronic political conflict and violence with those of American activists, government officials, and the politicians responsible for the country's tragically tangled immigration policy, Blitzer reveals the full, layered picture for the first time.
Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is an odyssey of struggle and resilience. With astonishing nuance and detail, Blitzer tells an epic story about the people whose lives ebb and flow across the border, and in doing so, he delves into the heart of American life itself. This vital and remarkable story has shaped the nation's turbulent politics and culture in countless ways--and will almost certainly determine its future.
Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He has won a National Award for Education Reporting as well as an Edward R. Murrow Award, and was a 2021 Emerson Fellow at New America. He lives with his family in New York City.