Acclaimed poet and Pulitzer Prize finalist Elizabeth Alexander, who composed and delivered the 2009 inauguration poem for President Obama, offers a deeply felt meditation on the blessings of family, art and community following the death of her husband in her memoir, The Light of the World. Poet Kevin Young, author of ten books of poetry, winner of the Lenore Marshall Award and a finalist for the National Book Award, gathers twenty years of highlights from his extraordinary career in his new comp...
Feb 05, 2016•1 hr 28 min
Allen Ginsberg spoke of "the voice in the burning bush," that illuminates as in a fire, yet never destroys even as it burns. Luis Rodriguez, L.A. Poet Laureate; Michael Meade, author, storyteller, and mythologist; and John Densmore, musician and author, have all been at the forefront of sparking social and cultural change, seeking to push the boundaries of their disciplines in order to open greater possibility for human connectivity and healing. In a world of turmoil and destruction, how can we ...
Jan 21, 2016•1 hr 16 min
Brian Seibert, a dance critic for The New York Times, offers an authoritative account of the great American art of tap dancing in his new book, What the Eye Hears. Seibert’s entertaining history illuminates tap’s complex origins—from the jig and clog influences brought from Africa by slaves, to its growth as a cousin to jazz in the vaudeville circuits, to its ubiquity on Broadway and in Hollywood, and finally its post-World War II decline and more recent reinvention. Seibert, born and raised in ...
Jan 15, 2016•59 min
A poisoned apple and a monkey’s paw with the power to change fate; a girl whose extraordinarily long hair causes catastrophe; a man with one human arm and one swan’s wing; and a house deep in the forest, constructed of gumdrops and gingerbread, vanilla frosting and boiled sugar. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours transforms the mythic figures of our childhood in his newest work, A Wild Swan and Other Tales. Cunningham discusses bringing to life these never-before-told moments of belo...
Dec 03, 2015•1 hr 3 min
The acclaimed author and passionate explorer of subjects from the Oxford English Dictionary to earthquakes to the Atlantic Ocean, offers an enthralling new biography of the Pacific Ocean. In his latest journey, Winchester travels from the Bering Strait to Cape Horn, the Yangtze River to the Panama Canal, and to the many small islands and archipelagos that lie in between. From the dying coral reefs to climate change to the military rise of China, Winchester explores our relationship to this impos...
Nov 11, 2015•1 hr 3 min
The panic began in 1692, when a minister’s daughter began to scream and convulse. It ended less than a year later, but not before 19 men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) and Cleopatra unpacks the fantastical story of the Salem Witch Trials in her latest seminal work, The Witches. Aside from suffrage, the Salem Witch Trials represent the only moment in the shaping of the future republic when women play...
Nov 05, 2015•1 hr 1 min
In a new memoir, the award-winning novelist, poet, and beloved author of The House on Mango Street, shares over three decades of true stories, essays, talks, and poems to offer a richly illustrated compilation of her storied life and career. Opening doors onto the Chicago neighborhoods where she grew up, her abode in Mexico haunted by her ancestors, a Greek white-washed island, a borrowed guest room, her purple house in San Antonio, and more, Cisneros sheds light on the real and imagined places ...
Oct 29, 2015•1 hr 14 min
In a revelatory testament of what it means to be black in America today, this timely new memoir solidifies Coates as one of today’s most important writers on the subject of race. Composed as letters to his teenage son, Coates bears witness to his own experiences as a young black man while moving between emotionally charged reportage of the recent shootings of unarmed black men by police. Coates—a national correspondent for The Atlantic, which published his landmark 2014 essay, "The Case for Repa...
Oct 27, 2015•1 hr 18 min
Roberta Kaplan, the renowned litigator who recently won the defining United States v. Windsor case to defeat the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), takes us behind the scenes of this gripping legal journey in her new book, Then Comes Marriage. Award-winning activist and scholar Lillian Faderman’s latest book, The Gay Revolution, begins in the 1950s, when the law classified gays and lesbians as criminals, then moves to the present to offer a sweeping account of the modern struggle for gay, lesbian, ...
Oct 20, 2015•1 hr 17 min
Award-winning Egyptian American feminist writer and commentator Mona Eltahawy is no stranger to controversy. Through her articles in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and more, she has fought for the autonomy, security, and dignity of Muslim women, drawing widespread supporters and detractors. Now, in her first book, she offers an illuminating and incendiary manifesto on the repressive forces—political, cultural, and religious—that reduce millions of women to second-class citizens. Hear f...
Oct 09, 2015•1 hr 15 min
What does it mean to devote yourself to helping others? Larissa MacFarquhar, a staff writer for The New Yorker, follows the joys and defeats of people living lives of extreme ethical commitment in her new book, Strangers Drowning. Jessica Jackley, co-founder of the revolutionary micro-lending site Kiva, in her book, Clay Water Brick, explores the triumphs and difficulties of using entrepreneurship to change the world. Sharing inspiring—and sometimes unsettling—stories of do-gooders from around t...
Oct 02, 2015•1 hr 18 min
The award-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia delivers an exhilarating new novel about the creative partnership of marriage, and the yoke joining love, art, and power. Framed in Greek mythology and told from the opposing perspectives of husband and wife, Fates and Furies digs beneath the surface of a “good” marriage and vividly explores the duplicitous nature of a loving, yet surprisingly complicated relationship over the course of 24 years. One of...
Oct 01, 2015•1 hr 12 min
Over the past three decades, the critically acclaimed and bestselling author of three previous memoirs, Mary Karr has elevated the art of the deeply personal genre to become one of the most influential memoirists working today. In her newest work, Karr pulls back the curtain on her craft. The rare, brilliant practitioner who is also a distinguished teacher, Karr breaks down key elements from her favorite memoirs and reflects on the challenges of transforming memories for the page. Reserve your s...
Sep 25, 2015•1 hr 12 min
In the wake of a historic summer of groundbreaking Supreme Court decisions, Justice Stephen Breyer returns to ALOUD to discuss the ever-evolving influences on America’s highest court. In his latest book, The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities, Justice Breyer considers the great legal challenges facing our increasingly globalized and interdependent world. From sweeping national security policy to the use of online sites like Airbnb for international commerce, judicial ...
Sep 22, 2015•1 hr 22 min
Returning to ALOUD after receiving the 2012 Los Angeles Public Library Literary Award for his distinguished commitment to libraries and literature, Rushdie shares his newest work of fiction. Inspired by the traditional "wonder tales" of the East and set in a strange near-future New York City, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights blends history, mythology, and a timeless love story. Satirical and bawdy, full of cunning and folly, kismet and karma, rapture and redemption, Rushdie’s novel...
Sep 11, 2015•1 hr 10 min
From Africa to the Americas, the south to the north, cities to suburbs, opera to jazz, gospel to be-bop, and "shadows to fire"—discover Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, Hughes’ response to the riots at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival. Emmy Award-winning composer Laura Karpman, originally commissioned by Carnegie Hall to create the first vocal performance of Hughes’ poem, created an orchestral composition with plural voices including Hughes’, projected images, and recorded selections drawn from a...
Jul 30, 2015•1 hr 12 min
Leslie Jamison’s critically acclaimed The Empathy Exams confronts our personal and cultural urgency to feel. In The Unspeakable, Los Angeles Times opinion columnist Meghan Daum defiantly pushes back against the false sentimentality and shrink-wrapped platitudes that surround so much of the contemporary American experience. With piercing insight and wit, hear from two of today’s most thought-provoking and intimately honest essayists grappling with the modern complexities of being human.
Jul 24, 2015•1 hr 14 min
The L.A. food scene is as trendy, tweeted, pop-upped, and profit-busting as it’s ever been, and yet more people are going hungry at a greater rate than perhaps any other moment in the city’s history. As the USDA has declared, Los Angeles is the nation’s “epicenter of hunger,” where the phrase “food insecurity”—lacking reliable access to nutritious and safe food—has become as much a part of the local vernacular for activists and organizers as sunshine and traffic. In a special collaboration with ...
Jul 15, 2015•1 hr 20 min
"Love, Los Angeles" is a letter in progress—a series of notes, fragments, reflections and odes—written by two native daughters navigating the quickly-changing landscape of contemporary Los Angeles. Through photographs and texts, journalist and essayist Lynell George and writer Marisela Norte have tunneled on foot from Boyle Heights to Venice and the Miracle Mile to Arcadia, crisscrossing time, place, dreams, and memory. Share in these in-the-moment observations of hope, grit, faith and longing a...
Jul 10, 2015•38 min
With all of its American idioms, virtues, and contradictions, what is it about Walt Whitman’s epic verse "Song of Myself" that so deeply resonates across other cultures and languages? In 2013, Christopher Merrill, the director of the International Writing Program at The University of Iowa, launched "Every Atom," a multimedia project to collectively translate the poem in 15 languages, working with fellow poets and translators Luis Alberto Ambroggio and Sholeh Wolpé. Join us for a spirited evening...
Jul 01, 2015•1 hr 11 min
Can a city’s history be told through restaurant menus? In a second installment of a special collaboration with the Library Foundation to rediscover the Los Angeles Public Library’s vast archive, USC professor Josh Kun uses the Library’s menu collection to explore the shaping of Los Angeles, from the city’s first restaurants in the 1850s up through the most recent food revolutions. Join him for a multimedia tour of the L.A. menu paired with a conversation on L.A. food past and present with chefs ...
Jun 15, 2015•1 hr 30 min
On this special evening, one of America’s most beloved storytellers, Judy Blume, will discuss her work—from young adult classics like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret to her new novel for adults, In the Unlikely Event. The story, inspired by a series of real-life plane crashes that occurred in the 1950s in Blume’s home town of Elizabeth, New Jersey, weaves together three generations of families, friends and strangers, whose lives are profoundly changed by a succession of disasters. This icon...
Jun 10, 2015•1 hr 13 min
The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet discusses her new memoir, a gorgeous kaleidoscope of self and family that explores the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, religion, and unbreakable bonds. With lyrical precision and tender intelligence, Smith delves into the life and death of her mother. Smith struggles to understand her mother’s steadfast Christian faith, ultimately discovering her own prayer-like solace in poetry. Lynell George, whose own body of work includes reflections about ...
May 29, 2015•1 hr 8 min
The masterful poet and essayist shares her latest two works—Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, a dazzling collection of essays on poetry, and The Beauty, her newest book of poems—for a close look at poetry’s power to expand our perception of the perimeters of existence. Join Hirshfield as she walks us through many wonderful poems, examining how they work by tuning our attention, renovating language, and unfastening the mind.
May 20, 2015•1 hr 23 min
Inspired by the author’s years living in Mexico and ten years of field research, this transporting, the visceral novel tells the story of young women in rural Guerrero who live in the shadows of the drug war. The poetic narrative of the heroine Lady disguised by her mother as a boy for protection from the vicious cartels—shows great resilience and resolve as a young woman caught in a real-life nightmare. This fictionalized work by award-winning author and the former President of PEN Mexico ensur...
May 15, 2015•59 min
Our second 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 the 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? Featuring Sydney Barile, Justin Evans, Amanda Foushee, Melissa Gutierrez, Michael Mitchell, Nicole Olweean, Niela O...
May 01, 2015•1 hr 10 min
Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics, has time and time again offered a singular voice of reason to diagnose America’s greatest economic challenges. In his provocative new book, the bestselling author makes an urgent case for Americans to solve inequality now. Veteran journalist Jim Newton engages Stiglitz in conversation, probing for answers to the greatest threat to American prosperity—the yawning gap between the rich and the poor.
Apr 28, 2015•1 hr 16 min
Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics, has time and time again offered a singular voice of reason to diagnose America’s greatest economic challenges. In his provocative new book, the bestselling author makes an urgent case for Americans to solve inequality now. Veteran journalist Jim Newton engages Stiglitz in conversation, probing for answers to the greatest threat to American prosperity—the yawning gap between the rich and the poor.
Apr 28, 2015•1 hr 16 min
Espíritu Rebelde: Letras de Poder y ProtestaAna Tijoux en conversación con la poeta y traductora Jen HoferPresentado en conjunto con la Asociación Filarmónica de Los ÁngelesAlzando su voz por los derechos de las mujeres, la reforma migratoria, el activismo ambiental y demás, la cantante nominada al GRAMMY, Ana Tijoux, ha transformado el escenario mundial con sus versos cargados de fuerza política. Las composiciones de Tijoux, sin límites geográficos o de género musical, reflejan las influencias ...
Apr 24, 2015•1 hr 27 min
The veteran journalist and critically acclaimed author of The Lemon Tree brings us another true story of hope in the Palestinian-Israeli impasse. His newest book, Children of the Stone, chronicles a young violist—Ramzi Hussein Aburedwan—who escapes a Palestinian refugee camp and later returns to fulfill his dream: establishing a music school with the help of Israeli musicians including Daniel Barenboim, director of the Berlin State Opera and La Scala. Join Tolan for a moving conversation about h...
Apr 22, 2015•1 hr 17 min
