ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library

With a brilliant blend of environmental and natural history, Dan Flores’ Coyote America traces the five-million-year-long biological story of an animal that has become the "wolf" in our backyards. The journey of the coyote to the American West and beyond isn’t just the story of an animal’s survival—it is one of the great epics of our time. Illuminating this legendary creature, Flores will be joined on stage for a conversation with playwright and chronicler of urban wildlife Melissa Cooper, who will also perform an excerpt from her play, New York City Coyote Existential.

Young children often seem especially creative and imaginative. But can we prove that scientifically? And what is it about children’s minds and brains that makes them so imaginative? Alison Gopnik, pioneering developmental psychologist and philosopher and author of the new book, The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children, discusses her cutting-edge scientific research into how children learn and how thinking like a child can make adults more creative too.

In what author C. Nicole Mason calls an "insider’s story," Born Bright follows the journey of her own childhood in Los Angeles—an improbable path from episodic homelessness, hunger, and living in poverty—to becoming a leading voice on public policies impacting women and communities of color and low-income families. With grace, insight, and first-hand experience, Mason sheds light on the systematic structures that render an escape from poverty nearly impossible. Joined by Ms. Magazine’s Education Director and Editor Karon Jolna, they will discuss a range of issues from poverty to the future of feminism and the ability of storytelling to accelerate social and political change.

Peter Sellars, the renowned avant-garde theater director, and Ayanna Thompson, a prominent Shakespeare scholar, will discuss the ways Shakespeare remains relevant in our contemporary American world. From expressions of black rage to the challenges facing systems of justice, they hope to illustrate how Shakespeare’s plays provide rich texts through which the most pressing problems in our world can be debated and solutions become, perhaps, imaginable.

Based on years of research and in-depth interviews with prosecutors, investigators, and diplomats—authors Alexa Koenig, Victor Peskin and Eric Stover examine the global effort to capture the world’s most wanted fugitives in their seminal book, Hiding in Plain Sight. The authors trace the evolution of international justice and how to hold accountable mass murderers like Adolf Eichmann, Saddam Hussein, Ratko Mladic, Joseph Kony, and Osama bin Laden. The authors will also discuss the United States’ increasing reliance on military force to capture—or more often simply to kill—suspected terrorists, with little or no judicial scrutiny.

Writer-performer Barry Yourgrau is a clutterbug—perhaps even a hoarder. In his hilarious and poignant memoir Mess: One Man’s Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act, he unpacks the psychology and culture of hoarding, clutter, and collecting, presenting a compelling look at a mysterious compulsion. Confronted by his exasperated girlfriend, Yourgrau embarked on a wide-ranging project to clean up his chaotic New York apartment and life. Known for his books of magical absurd stories, including "Wearing Dad’s Head", "Haunted Traveller", and "The Sadness of Sex", in whose film version he starred, Yourgrau will join magical realist writer Aimee Bender to ponder the power of objects and memories, and the pain of letting go.

Writers, musicians, and cultural critics gather to pay tribute and explore the forty-year career of Prince. Drawing on original work, music clips and the emerging field of Prince Studies, cultural workers will consider the impact of Prince on literary culture and beyond.

Leading philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith dons a wet suit and journeys into the depths of consciousness in his latest book Other Minds. Combining science and philosophy with first-hand accounts of the remarkable intelligence of the octopus, Godfrey-Smith explores how primitive organisms bobbing in the ocean began sending signals to each other and how these early forms of communication gave rise to the advanced nervous systems that permit cephalopods to change colors and human beings to speak. Follow along as Godfrey-Smith shares from his underwater adventures and sheds new light on the octopus brain, the human brain, and the evolution of consciousness.

In his new book, How to Survive a Plague, David France—the creator of the Oscar-nominated seminal documentary of the same name—offers a definitive history of the battle to halt the AIDS epidemic. Joined by Dr. Mark H. Katz, a physician activist on the frontlines of the affected HIV community of Southern California, and Tony Valenzuela, a longtime community activist and writer whose work has focused on LGBT civil rights, sexual liberation, and gay men’s health, France shares powerful, heroic stories of the gay activists who refused to die without a fight.

In 1989, fresh from the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother’s home in Oakland, California, to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon’s grandfather shared stories the younger man had never heard before. From the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany and the heyday of the space program, Moonglow collapses an era into a single life and a lifetime into a single week. Hear from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author as he discusses his latest literary masterpiece—a novel of truth and lies, family legends, and existential adventure.