ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library

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 Brooklyn’s gentrification and the shared aspirations of a divided city. As Dasani comes of age, the homeless crisis in New York City has exploded, and she must guide her siblings through a city riddled with hunger, violence, drug addiction, homelessness, and the monitoring of child protection services. Out on the street, Dasani becomes a fierce fighter to protect the ones she loves. When she finally escapes city life to enroll in a boarding school, she faces an impossible choice between staying back to help her family or moving away for a chance at a better future. Join ALOUD for a conversation about the power of resilience, the importance of family, and the cost of inequality as Elliott discusses this remarkable portrait of survival.

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 to our personal and collective histories and are emblematic of how we adapt to a changing world.

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. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading “with murderous attention,” must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.

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 inspiration. It reaches back across a century, with Rebecca West’s classic account of a 1947 lynching trial and James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind” (which later formed the basis of The Fire Next Time), and yet it also explores our current moment, from the classroom to the prison cell and the upheavals of what Jelani Cobb calls “the American Spring.” Bringing together reporting, profiles, memoirs, and criticism from writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Elizabeth Alexander, Hilton Als, Vinson Cunningham, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Malcolm Gladwell, Jamaica Kincaid, Kelefa Sanneh, Doreen St. Félix, and others, the collection offers startling insights about this country’s relationship with race. The Matter of Black Lives reveals the weight of a singular history and challenges us to envision the future anew.

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. The Covid-19 pandemic forced many of us to reimagine our homes, work, and relationships, and adapt to a new way of life–one with far fewer possibilities for interaction. And yet, in this period of intense isolation, we’ve faced dilemmas which are nearly universal. How to love, care for aging parents, find a home, attend to a planet in flux, and fight for justice. This vast range of experiences is captured by our greatest storytellers, essayists, and poets, in the new issue of Freeman’s: Change.

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.

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. Yusef connects these stories to lessons and principles he learned that gave him the power to survive through the worst of life’s experiences. He inspires readers to accept their own path and to understand their own sense of purpose. With his intimate personal insights, Yusef unpacks the systems built and designed for profit and the oppression of Black and Brown people. He inspires readers to channel their fury into action and, through the spiritual, to turn that anger and trauma into a constructive force that lives alongside accountability and mobilizes change.

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 resilience in the face of adversity.

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 female comedians today. Notes from the Bathroom Line highlights the work of women continuing to smash the comedy glass ceiling in this long male-dominated field. Get ready to laugh out loud at ALOUD as Solomon is joined by contributors to the book, including performances by Karen Chee and Emily V. Gordon. Chee is a Brooklyn-based comedian, writer, and actor with Late Night with Seth Meyers and High Maintenance. Gordon, who started out as a masters-level couples and family therapist before a career as a writer and producer, often collaborates with her husband, Kumail Nanjiani. Listen in as these comedians prove there are no limits to how funny, bad-ass, and revolutionary women can—and continue—to be.

"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 Peoples of the American Southwest to the undermining of the Endangered Species Act, Williams testifies about the harsh reality of the climate crisis and how our earth—our home—is being torn apart. One of today’s most important writers and conservationists, Williams is the award-winning author of The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks; Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; and When Women Were Birds. Discussing her new essays, Williams blazes a way forward through dispiriting times to arrive at new truths about the beauty of human nature.