In SPQR, an instant classic from one of our foremost classicists, Mary Beard narrates the history of Rome while challenging the comfortable historical perspective that has existed for centuries. With precision and flair, the National Book Critics Circle finalist guides us through ancient brothels, bars, and back alleys to sift fact from fiction, myth and propaganda from historical record. Hear from Beard as she unpacks the unprecedented rise of a civilization that—even two thousand years later—s...
Sep 21, 2016•1 hr 9 min
What if the Underground Railroad were no mere metaphor, but an actual secret network of tracks and tunnels, conductors and steam locomotives beneath the Southern soil? In a spellbinding tour-de-force, prize-winning author Colson Whitehead’s new novel, The Underground Railroad, an Oprah’s 2016 Book Club selection, chronicles a young slave’s adventures through the antebellum South as she makes a desperate bid for freedom. Join us for a fascinating meditation on American history as Whitehead discus...
Sep 17, 2016•1 hr 7 min
Fresh off this summer’s Olympics in Rio, "renaissance runner" Alexi Pappas takes a break with ALOUD to discuss her far-reaching talents and interests. Beyond representing Greece’s Olympic team in the 10,000 meters race, Pappas writes poetry, essays and makes and stars in films, including a semi-autobiographical movie, Tracktown, which recently premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival. A celebrity in the Twitter-sphere—even her signature top bun has its own Twitter account—Pappas will team up w...
Sep 09, 2016
Greenland's ice sheet is now shedding ice so fast (five times faster than it did in the 1990s) that scientists have labeled Greenland's seasonal sea ice "a rotten ice regime." For 20 years, writer Gretel Ehrlich has traveled with Inuit hunters in Greenland, listening to their narratives and observing changes in their traditional hunting. This past spring, she went with some Inuit hunters to Paris with plans to speak at the climate talks, which were dashed when terrorists struck the city. In conv...
Jul 20, 2016•1 hr 8 min
Join us for a live broadcast (on KPFK 90.7 FM) dedicated to the voice of the author and civil rights activist James Baldwin. Brian DeShazor, host of From the Vault radio program, will air rare recordings of Baldwin from 1963-1968, including an oration called the Artist’s Struggle for Integrity, a reading from Giovanni’s Room; Baldwin’s fiery speech after the murder of four girls in Birmingham, Alabama; and his introduction of Dr. Martin Luther King (taped in the home of Marlon Brando) weeks befo...
Jul 15, 2016•1 hr 15 min
For twenty years, groundbreaking poets Eileen Myles (Chelsea Girls; I Must be Living Twice) and Maggie Nelson (National Book Critics Circle Award, The Argonauts) have been friends, mutual influences, and interlocutors on the experiences of living in a poetry and gender-inflected writing world. Myles’ latest work—a collection of old and new poems—refracts a radical world and a compelling life. Nelson’s genre-bending memoir, The Argonauts, calls for radical individual freedom and the value of care...
Jul 13, 2016•1 hr 15 min
In partnership with PEN Center USA, ALOUD presents the culminating event of PEN’s 2016 Emerging Voices Fellowship to mark the program’s 20th anniversary. Revisit this evening of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction with readings from the 2016 Fellows: Marnie Goodfriend, Jian Huang, Wendy Labinger, Natalie Lima, and Chelsea Sutton, featuring an introduction from this year’s Emerging Voices mentors: Carmiel Banasky, Claire Bidwell Smith, Patrick O’Neil, Mike Padilla, and Alicia Partnoy. The Emerging Vo...
Jul 08, 2016•1 hr 6 min
For three years, award-winning journalist Ben Ehrenreich has been traveling to and living in the West Bank, living with Palestinian families in its largest cities and smallest villages. Placing readers in the footsteps of ordinary Palestinians, Ehrenreich’s new book, The Way to the Spring, offers some of the most empathetic reporting ever to emerge from the turbulent region. With a keen eye for detail, he paints a vivid portrait of life in three Palestinian villages, interspersed with crash-cour...
Jun 30, 2016•1 hr 19 min
Like dreams, poetry and song enter our lives by way of a mystery—unrecognized and often uninvited. Both represent the speaking of the otherwise unspeakable: the place where real truth is unencumbered by fact, time is made elastic, and narrative emerges from the abstract to tell us something of who we are. Listen in for a special evening of music and conversation with two leading voices as songwriters and authors Rosanne Cash and Joe Henry, both multi-GRAMMY Award winners, reflect on the transcen...
Jun 21, 2016•1 hr 15 min
Hailed as "an inspiration" by writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing, traces 300 years of history and family lineage through a sweeping account of the many descendants of two half-sisters born in 18th century Ghana. From the beginnings of slavery to the Harlem Renaissance to 21st century California, the novel captures with stunning immediacy how the memory of captivity was inscribed on the soul of a nation. Join as Gyasi takes the ALOUD stage for a discussion with comparativ...
Jun 10, 2016•1 hr 11 min
How does one become a writer? For acclaimed novelist Judith Freeman—born the sixth child of eight in a devout Mormon household, married at seventeen, and divorced at twenty-two with a young child—it was an unlikely path. In her arresting, lyrical memoir set in the patriarchal cloister of Utah in the 1950s and 1960s, she explores the circumstances and choices that informed her course through a thicket of profound difficulties towards becoming. Joined by L.A. native and novelist Michelle Huneven, ...
Jun 08, 2016•1 hr 9 min
Chef, food personality, bestselling author of Fresh Off the Boat, and inspiration behind the hit television show of the same name, Eddie Huang made his ALOUD debut with a brash new memoir about love, meaning, and returning to your ancestral homeland. Double Cup Love takes readers on a cultural romp from Williamsburg dive bars to the skies of Mongolia, from Michelin-starred restaurants to street-side soup peddlers in Chengdu. Listen as Fresh Off the Boat star Constance Wu—who plays Eddie’s unforg...
Jun 03, 2016•1 hr 16 min
Like writing, cities are all about process, the back-and-forth between our aspirations and our abilities; we walk to discover them and to discover ourselves. In this dialogue, moderated by Los Angeles native Louise Steinman, Vivian Gornick and David L. Ulin investigate the role of the city as both literary and psychic landscape. For Gornick, who was born and raised in the Bronx and is the author of the new memoir of self-discovery, The Odd Woman and the City, New York is the city that provokes. ...
May 27, 2016•1 hr 13 min
Visionary writer Maxine Hong Kingston has been writing about war and peace since her landmark 1976 book The Woman Warrior. Her lifelong efforts on this theme often touched on the Vietnam War, from China Men to The Fifth Book of Peace. These works influenced award-winning novelist and critic Viet Thanh Nguyen as he dealt with the war in both fiction (The Sympathizer) and scholarship (Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War). Both writers will share the ALOUD stage to discuss their own pe...
May 25, 2016•1 hr 11 min
New Yorker writer William Finnegan leads a counter life as an excessively compulsive surfer. In his deeply lyrical self-portrait Barbarian Days, Finnegan chronicles his lifelong adventures from a young man chasing waves all over the world to becoming a distinguished writer and war reporter. Part coming-of-age story, part thriller, part cultural study, Finnegan’s vivid memoir explores the gradual mastering of a little understood art. Join Finnegan as he returns to the Pacific coast to discuss his...
May 20, 2016•1 hr 12 min
From the Watts Towers in Los Angeles to the Forbidden City in Beijing, Geoff Dyer’s newest collection of essays, White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World, explores what defines place: where do we come from, what are we, where are we going? The elegant, witty, and always inquisitive Dyer returns to ALOUD to reflect on his unexpected findings with Jonathan Lethem—celebrated for his novels, essays, and short stories—to illuminate the questions we ask when we step outside ourselves.
May 18, 2016
Award-winning poet and rapper Kate Tempest’s electrifying debut novel takes us into the beating heart of London in this multi-generational tale of drugs, desire, and belonging. The Bricks That Built the Houses explores a cross-section of contemporary urban life with a powerful moral microscope, giving us intimate stories of ordinary lives, and questions how we live with and love one another. Heralded by critics and fans alike for her powerful performances, Tempest takes the ALOUD stage to presen...
May 11, 2016•1 hr 12 min
Our third annual gathering unites students from five Southland graduate writing programs—CalArts, Otis College, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, and USC—to share recent work and tune our ears to the future of language. What are the ideas, forms, questions, syntaxes, images, and narratives of our immediate future? Who better as our compass in the wilds of the now than emerging writers?
May 03, 2016•1 hr 10 min
Juan Felipe Herrera grew up the son of Mexican immigrants in the migrant fields of California, and became the first Latino Poet Laureate of the United States. Exuberant and socially engaged, reflective and healing, wildly inventive and unpredictable, the award-winning poet will discuss his life’s work as it ranges from Aztlan to Paris, San Bernardino to Florida and back; from Larry King and Oprah, to the Janis Joplin days in the City by the Bay. Join us for a brimming, wide-open evening as Herre...
Apr 21, 2016•1 hr 24 min
Best-selling author, prize-winning historian, and Mother Jones co-founder Adam Hochschild offers a sweeping new history of the Spanish Civil War. Spain In Our Hearts is a nuanced international tale of idealism and heartbreaking suffering told through a dozen characters, including Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, who reveal the full tragedy and importance of the war. Hochschild returns to ALOUD to explore the complicated conflict that would galvanize Americans in their pursuit of democracy acr...
Apr 15, 2016•1 hr 14 min
Through the etymology of words, the OED exhibits the shape-shifting nature of language across time, reflecting how it bends to the task of describing our evolving human experience. But is all change good? What is the role of the dictionary in reporting, recording, and refereeing language variation and change?Linguist, political commentator and author of The Power of Babel and Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, John McWhorter talks with genre-busting author of House of Leaves Mark Z. Danielewski abo...
Apr 12, 2016•1 hr 19 min
The best-selling author of the National Book Critics Circle Award-Winner How to Live, a spirited account of twentieth century intellectual movements and revolutionary thinkers, delivers a timely new take on the lives of influential philosophers Sartre, De Beauvoir, Camus, and others. At The Existentialist Café journeys to 1930s Paris to explore a passionate cast of philosophers, playwrights, anthropologists, convicts, and revolutionaries who would spark a rebellious wave of postwar liberation mo...
Apr 07, 2016•1 hr 10 min
A New York Times bestseller and award-winning sensation, Helen Macdonald’s story of adopting and raising one of nature’s most vicious predators has soared into the hearts of millions of readers worldwide. Following the sudden death of her father, Macdonald battled with a fierce and feral goshawk to stave off her own depression. With ALOUD’s Louise Steinman, author of the far-reaching memoir about her father’s past, The Souvenir, Macdonald will discuss her transcendent account of human versus nat...
Apr 05, 2016•1 hr 12 min
As mass incarceration has reached record levels, professor, journalist, and visionary founder of the Prison to College Pipeline (P2CP), Baz Dreisinger has traveled behind bars in nine countries to rethink the state of justice in a global context. Her eye-opening new book, Incarceration Nations, offers a first-person odyssey through the modern prison systems of the world and gives voices to the millions silenced behind bars. Join Dreisinger as she discusses her timely work and urges for a massive...
Mar 24, 2016•1 hr 22 min
In a potentially historic election year for women, Ellen R. Malcolm, the pioneering founder of the three-million-member EMILY’s List and one of the most influential players in today’s political landscape, tells the dramatic inside story of the rise of women in elected office in her new book, When Women Win. Malcolm will share the ALOUD stage with Ann Friedman, journalist and co-host of the popular podcast Call Your Girlfriend, to discuss the heartbreaking losses and unprecedented victories of so...
Mar 18, 2016•1 hr 13 min
The OED represents arguably the first example of global crowd-sourcing and documents a language rich in loanwords from other cultures. At the same time, it has been considered emblematic of the British Empire’s colonial enterprise. Writer Jamaica Kincaid and linguist/author Sarah Ogilvie Words of the World: a Global History of the OED, discuss the complexities of this relationship. Presented as part of the Library Foundation’s project, Hollywood is a Verb: Los Angeles Tackles the Oxford English ...
Mar 16, 2016•1 hr 8 min
Ten years after the passing of Los Angeles’ own Octavia E. Butler–one of America’s best science fiction writers and one of the few African-American women in the field—ALOUD celebrates Butler’s legacy. Navigating the dystopic L.A. that Butler often described in her short stories and novels, this panel will explore connections between Butler’s peers and colleagues, the generation of writers and scholars who follow, and how Butler’s futuristic work resonates today.Part of Radio Imagination, artists...
Mar 11, 2016•1 hr 27 min
One of the most talked-about books of last year (nominated for the Man Booker Prize and The National Book Award), A Little Life is a profoundly bold epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century. Yanagihara follows the tragic and transcendent lives of four men—an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—who meet as college roommates and move to New York to spend the next three decades adrift, buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. Join Yanagihara for an intimate look at this mast...
Feb 24, 2016•1 hr 9 min
Artist Rachel Sussman has traveled around the world to photograph organisms—trees, lichens, bacteria—that are 2,000 or more years old. Confronting lives that extend so much longer than human lifespans challenges us to rethink the context of our human communities and the more-than-human environments into which we are embedded. What does it mean to take a picture of a 4,000-year-old tree at a fraction of a second? How has human intervention in nature given rise to a new geological age? Sussman, a ...
Feb 18, 2016•1 hr 19 min
Betancourt, the extraordinary Colombian French politician and activist, whose New York Times bestselling memoir chronicled her six and a half year captivity in the Colombian jungle by the FARC, offers a stunning debut novel about freedom and fate. Set against the backdrop of Argentina’s Dirty War and infused with magical realism, The Blue Line is a breathtaking love story and deeply felt portrait of a woman coming of age as her country falls deeper and deeper into chaos. Hear from Betancourt abo...
Feb 10, 2016•1 hr 12 min
