In the wake of the pandemic, the George Floyd protests, and the country’s ongoing efforts to reconcile its racist past and address ongoing racial injustice, Black playwrights have pushed the boundaries of style and form, exploring absurdism, lyricism, and other genre-bending experiments to try to capture the strange blend of joy, fear, pain, and endurance that is being Black in America in 2022. Join us for a conversation between some of the boldest, most exciting young Black playwrights working ...
Sep 21, 2022•1 hr 15 min
La emergente superestrella literaria y activista de la positividad corporal se está ganando al mundo por su forma poco convencional de interpretar el amor y el cuerpo. Seguida por un dedicado club de fans en Instagram llamado Mango Mafia, Salgado es una poeta salvadoreña nacida en Los Ángeles y criada en Silver Lake y cuyos libros de poesía, Corazón y Tesoro, hablan de sus relaciones tumultuosas con la familia, su opinión sobre cómo su existencia es vista en un cuerpo gordo, y la realidad del am...
Jun 30, 2022•1 hr 3 min
Fans of best-selling author Tom Perrotta’s Election will remember the signature character Tracy Flick—Reese Witherspoon’s character from the classic movie adaptation. She is back, and, once again, the iconic protagonist is determined to take high school politics by storm. In classic Perrotta style, his new book Tracy Flick Can’t Win is a sharp, darkly comic, and pitch-perfect reflection on our current moment. Flick fans and newcomers alike will love this compelling novel chronicling the second a...
Jun 24, 2022•1 hr 9 min
Described as “Hilariously insightful and delightfully suspenseful,” Cult Classic, by acclaimed author Sloane Crosley, takes the reader on a journey of past love, memory, and through the philosophy of romance. One night in New York City’s Chinatown, a woman is at a work reunion dinner with former colleagues when she excuses herself to buy a pack of cigarettes. On her way back, she runs into a former boyfriend. And then another… And another. Nothing is quite what it seems as the city becomes awash...
Jun 17, 20220
In conjunction with the orchestra’s performance of John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1, a memorial to those he lost to AIDS at the height of the epidemic, the LA Phil welcomes Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993. Twenty years in the making, Schulman's Let the Record Show is the most comprehensive political history ever assembled of ACT UP and American AIDS activism. In just six years, ACT UP, New York, a broad and unlikely coalition of ac...
May 04, 2022•1 hr 1 min
From the daring Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist Jennifer Egan, this program will enter the world of The Candy House, her "sibling novel" to A Visit from the Goon Squad. In spellbinding interlocking narratives, Egan spins out the consequences of "Own Your Unconscious," a fictional foray into the idea of a technology that allows us access to every memory we’ve ever had, and to share these memories in exchange for access to the memories of others. Through the lives of multiple characters w...
Apr 27, 2022•1 hr 1 min
Since Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was adopted for television by creator Bruce Miller, the conversation about women in society has shifted. In some ways, women have made great strides to break that glass ceiling, and in other ways, the progress for American women has taken a retroactive turn that makes this show all the more relevant and telling of what the future could hold. This is juxtaposed against shows like VEEP, Shrill, and Killing Eve, that show how far a woman can go and the br...
Apr 14, 2022•48 min
Join MacArthur Fellow and USC Annenberg Professor Josh Kun with the series historians—the Autry associate curator Tyree Boyd-Pates, Pitzer professor Suyapa Portillo Villeda, and USC professor Natalia Molina—to discuss this new collaboration with KPCC & LAist that blends live music, live conversation, and archival research from the Los Angeles Public Library’s archives.
Mar 23, 2022•59 min
The bestselling and award-winning writer Alex Segura, the author of five Pete Fernandez Miami Mystery novels and the acclaimed Archie Meets Kiss storyline comics, offers a rollicking new literary mystery set in the world of comic books. Segura’s latest novel, Secret Identity, takes an look at the 1975 struggling comic book industry. The story follows Carmen Valdez, an assistant at Triumph Comics, which doesn’t have the creative zeal of Marvel nor the buttoned-up efficiency of DC. Carmen is close...
Mar 18, 2022•56 min
The New York Times bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran returns with a guide for our times, arming readers with a resistance reading list, including selections from James Baldwin to Zora Neale Hurston to Margaret Atwood. How can literature, through its free exchange, affect politics? Drawing on her experiences—from living in the Islamic Republic of Iran to immigrating to the United States—Nafisi seeks to answer this in her galvanizing guide to literature as resistance. Structured as a ...
Mar 09, 2022•56 min
What if leaving poverty means abandoning your family, and yourself? Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Andrea Elliott of The New York Times shares an unforgettable story of a girl whose indomitable spirit is tested by homelessness, poverty, and racism in an unequal America. Elliott’s latest work, Invisible Child, follows eight dramatic years in the life of a girl whose imagination is as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn shelter. Dasani was named after the bottled water that signaled Br...
Jan 20, 2022•1 hr 2 min
Food connects us to our past, to our family, our communities and to each other. As we reflect on the past year, we see how food has brought us strength in the face of adversity. Cooking and sharing a meal is an act of resilience--a promise to gather and share comfort, loss, and joy. Likewise cookbooks empower us to understand and pass on these rituals and recipes. In this conversation with three California-based cookbook authors, we share stories of how diverse food traditions are foundational t...
Dec 03, 2021•1 hr
In her stunning and timely new novel, Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage, and of a woman’s resiliency through her relentless errors. Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, the reader, and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store’s most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls’ Day, but she won’t leave the store. ...
Nov 17, 2021•1 hr 3 min
Historian and writer Jelani Cobb will present a collection of The New Yorker‘s groundbreaking writing on race in America, from stories of endurance and resilience to strength and pain—including work by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hilton Als, Zadie Smith, and more. This anthology from the pages of the New Yorker provides a bold and complex portrait of Black life in America, told through stories of private triumphs and national tragedies, political vision, and artistic inspirat...
Nov 10, 2021•57 min
A celebration of the latest installment of John Freeman’s acclaimed literary journal, featuring some of today’s top writers on the hope and pain of the ever-changing present. Writer and Editor Extraordinaire, John Freeman returns to ALOUD in celebration of the latest installment of his acclaimed literary journal, Freeman’s. This biannual publication explores the subject of change and our ultimate survival (our resilience!), featuring the work of writers Rick Bass, Lana Bastašić, and Lina Mounzer...
Oct 29, 2021•1 hr 8 min
Novelist and filmmaker Ruth Ozeki will discuss her brilliantly inventive new novel about loss, growing up, and the resiliency of our relationships to all things with author Aimee Bender. With its blend of sympathetic characters, a riveting plot, and vibrant engagement with everything from jazz to climate change, to our attachment to material possessions, The Book of Form and Emptiness is classic Ruth Ozeki—bold, wise, poignant, playful, humane and heartbreaking.
Oct 21, 2021•56 min
Writer and activist Yusef Salaam, a member of the Exonerated Five, will join ALOUD with his memoir Better, Not Bitter, whose story of resilience and strength is an inspiring call to action. Better Not Bitter is the first time that one of the now Exonerated Five is telling his individual story in his own words. Yusef writes his narrative: growing up Black in central Harlem in the 80s, being raised by a strong, fierce mother and grandmother, his years of incarceration, his reentry, and exoneration...
Oct 07, 2021•1 hr 5 min
To kick off our fall season and our theme of resilience, author Ian Manuel will return to ALOUD to discuss the power of poetry. ALOUD on Resilience: This coming year ALOUD will look at the theme of resilience. How do we manage to survive and blossom in the face of tragedy, controversy, and unrest? Where do we find strength? Our programs will look at individuals who have turned to writing to make sense of their situation, and it is through the written word that each of them has found clarity and ...
Sep 15, 2021•55 min
In this "much-needed dose of delight," Amy Solomon, a producer of the hit HBO shows Silicon Valley and Barry, shares from her new collection of never-before-seen humor pieces. Inspired by the groundbreaking book Titters: The First Collection of Humor by Women, a showcase of some of the leading female comedians of the 1970s like Gilda Radner, Candice Bergen, and Phyllis Diller, Solomon has curated essays, satire, short stories, poetry, cartoons, and artwork from more than 150 of the biggest femal...
Jul 30, 2021•1 hr 3 min
"Each of us finds our identity within the communities we call home," writes Terry Tempest Williams in Erosion, a galvanizing new collection of essays that navigates the emotional, geographical, and communal territories of home. Sizing up the assaults on America’s public lands and the erosion of our commitment to the open spaces of democracy, Williams fiercely examines the many forms of erosion we face—of democracy, science, compassion, and trust. From the gutting of sacred lands to Native People...
Jul 09, 2021•1 hr 3 min
One of the world's leading forest ecologists shares from her first book to bring us deeper into her intimate world of trees. In Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, Suzanne Simard traces her journey from growing up in a logging community in the rainforests of British Columbia to her incredible work as a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence. Illuminating how trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp, but are a complicated, interdependen...
Jun 23, 2021•55 min
The award-winning author Vendela Vida’s latest work, We Run the Tides, is a suspenseful and poignant story of female friendship, betrayal, and a mysterious disappearance set in the changing landscape of San Francisco. One day, while two teenage best friends are walking to school, they witness a horrible act—or do they? In Vida’s masterful portrait, the pre-tech boom San Francisco finds its mirror in the changing lives of the teenage girls at the center of this story of innocence lost, the pain o...
May 27, 2021•55 min
The Library Foundation welcomes the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat for a conversation about his latest masterful work. Daniel James Brown’s new World War II saga, Facing the Mountain, follows a special Japanese-American Army unit that overcame brutal odds in Europe. Brown’s unforgettable chronicle is a culmination of his extensive interviews with the families of the protagonists as well as deep archival research. This kaleidoscopic story uncovers the journey of four...
May 21, 2021•1 hr 2 min
Over the last half-century, the American short has changed dramatically. In a new anthology, the best and most representative contemporary authors are celebrated for their thrilling range of voice, form, and talent. Selected by John Freeman, the editor of his own literary annual of new writing and executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf, this collection brings forward some astonishing work to be regarded in a new light. With rarely anthologized science fiction, horror, and fantasy writers such as Ur...
May 12, 2021•55 min
“Ian is magic. His story is difficult and heartbreaking, but he takes us places we need to go to understand why we must do better,” writes Bryan Stevenson in the forward of Ian Manuel’s new memoir. At fourteen Manuel was sentenced to life without parole for a non-homicide crime. The United States is the only country in the world that sentences thirteen- and fourteen-year-old offenders, mostly youth of color, to life in prison without parole, regardless of the scientifically proven singularities ...
May 06, 2021•52 min
In a highly anticipated sequel to the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen returns with an exhilarating spy thriller that takes on the global aftermath of the Vietnam War. The Committed follows the Sympathizer, the conflicted double agent, as he seeks refuge in Paris in the 1980s. Both charmed and disturbed by the gritty Paris underworld, the Sympathizer struggles to assimilate into a dominant culture. Nguyen, who was born in Vietnam and raised in America, has long be...
Apr 13, 2021•57 min
As our fractured country moves forward after a year of social unrest and political division—how can we work towards inclusion, equity, and real change in our society? In celebration of Zero Discrimination Day, ALOUD is proud to welcome leading activists and academics for a discussion of the intersectional issues of gender, race, and disability rights. We’ll be joined by Jasmine Harris, Professor of Law and Martin Luther King, Jr. Hall Research Scholar at the University of California—Davis. An ex...
Mar 02, 2021•1 hr 3 min
In her forties, with two children, a spouse, a dog, a mortgage, and a full-time job as a tenured law professor at Georgetown University, Rosa Brooks decided to become a cop. Despite the extreme personal and professional risks, the liberal academic and journalist served as a reserve police officer between 2016-2020 with the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department in order to better understand the usually closed world of policing. In her new book Tangled Up in Blue, Brooks chronicles her ...
Feb 19, 2021•1 hr
In a final call to action from a dearly missed champion of democracy, Elijah Cummings’ new posthumously published memoir offers an inspiring lesson of how we can do better in this country. Born and raised in Baltimore, Cummings was the first of his family to attend college. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa and then law school, he began his career of public service in the Maryland House of Delegates. He became the first African-American in Maryland history to be named Speaker Pro Tem before being ...
Feb 10, 2021•56 min
The first step towards change, writes journalist and activist Paola Ramos, is for us to recognize who we are. In an empowering new work of reportage, Ramos embarks on a cross-country journey to find the communities of people defining the controversial term, "Latinx." Many voices—Afrolatino, Indigenous, Muslim, queer, and undocumented, living in large cities and small towns—have been chronically overlooked in how the diverse population of almost sixty million Latinos in the U.S. has been represen...
Feb 04, 2021•1 hr
