ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library

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 today, discussing the craft and business of theatre, the state of Black thought, and how to capture a world that seems constantly in flux.

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 amor y desamor que ella ha experimentado. Siempre tomando en cuenta su don en la escritura, ahora es conocida internacionalmente por su poesía y su activismo de positividad corporal. Acompáñanos para esta conversación en ALOUD donde Salgado y la activista y educadora Gloria Lucas discutirán la interseccionalidad de la positividad corporal y la feminidad como latinas que viven en Los Ángeles y que ofrecen apoyo implacable a las comunidades que comparten. Emerging literary superstar and body positivity activist Yesika Salgado is taking the world by storm with her unconventional take on love and the body. Followed by a devoted fanbase on Instagram called the Mango Mafia, Salgado is a Los Angeles-born Salvadorian poet who was raised in Silver Lake and whose books of poetry, Corazón and Tesoro, speak to her tumultuous relationships with family, her take on how her existence is seen in a fat body and the reality of love and heartbreak that she has experienced. Always having insight into her writing gift, she is now internationally known for her poetry and her body positivity activism. Join us for this conversation at ALOUD as Salgado and feminist activist and educator Gloria Lucas discuss the intersectionality of body positivity and womanhood as L.A.-based Latinas who have unrelenting support for their shared communities.

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 act of one of the most memorable characters of our time. For this ALOUD program, Tom Perrotta and film producer Albert Berger, who has produced many films and television series based on Perrotta’s novels, including Election, Little Children, and The Leftovers for HBO, will talk about the depth of Perrotta’s characters and why they translate so well from the page to the screen.

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 with ghosts of heartbreak. Is it possible to have a happy ending in an age when the past is ever at your fingertips and sanity is for sale? Join Sloane Crosley and famed actress and director Judy Greer on the ALOUD stage as they discuss Crosley’s second novel and her cunning way of spinning a wry literary fantasy that is equal parts page-turner and poignant portrayal of alienation.

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 activists from all races, genders, sexualities, and backgrounds, changed the world. Armed with rancor, desperation, intelligence, and creativity, it took on the AIDS crisis with an indefatigable, ingenious, and multifaceted attack on the corporations, institutions, governments, and individuals who stood in the way of AIDS treatment for all. Join Schulman, one of the most revered queer writers and thinkers of her generation, for a combined reading and conversation about how a group of desperate outcasts changed America forever, and in the process created a livable future for generations of people across the world.

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 whose paths intersect over several decades, this intellectually dazzling story is also extraordinarily moving, a testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for real connection, love, family, privacy and redemption. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of narrative styles—from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter and a chapter of tweets. If Goon Squad was organized like a concept album, The Candy House incorporates Electronic Dance Music’s more disjunctive approach. Join us as the two extraordinary literary voices of Jennifer Egan and Danzy Senna walk us through The Candy House and its bold, brilliant imagining of a world that is moments away.

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 breakthrough women are making in leadership, from the boardroom to the White House. The fight for women's rights, from the wage gap to body autonomy and access to healthcare are currently facing unexpected highs and lows. Join ALOUD for a conversation with executive producer and creator of The Handmaid’s Tale Bruce Miller and television critic of the Los Angeles Times’ Lorraine Ali on the role women have politically, culturally, and economically, and how that growth could be easily threatened.

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.

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 to fulfilling her dream of writing a superhero book when one of the Triumph writers enlists her help to create a new character, which they call "The Lethal Lynx," Triumph's first female hero. But her colleague is acting strangely and asking to keep her involvement a secret. And then he’s found dead, with all of their scripts turned into the publisher without her name. Carmen is desperate to untangle a web of secrets and hold on to her dreams. Join Segura as he discusses this wildly entertaining mystery with Steph Cha, author of the Juniper Song mystery series and Your House Will Pay, winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Mystery/Thriller.

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 series of letters to her father, Nafisi explores the most probing questions of our time through the works of Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, James Baldwin, Margaret Atwood, and more. Read Dangerously crafts an argument for why, in a genuine democracy, we must engage with the enemy and how literature can be a vehicle for doing so.