ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library

Waldman-- a \"Cat 4 hurricane of unchained imagination, curiosity, and invention, political rage and erotic elation.\"-draws on animal lore, animal encounters, dreams, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and Buddhist ritual in her new investigative hybrid-poem exploring the nuances of inter-species communication and compassion

Surveying the global scene, a preeminent scholar of religion launches a revolution in the way we understand-and confront-radical Islam.

Join us for this exuberant annual reading with emerging Los Angeles-area poets.

Magically blending sarcasm and gravity, America's favorite surrealist poet and NPR commentator offers an impractical handbook for practical living in our posthuman world.

Smiley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and author of Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, talks about how novels work and why we like them.

Three members of the final judging panel for the Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards, read from their own prize-winning work.

Wangari Muta Maathai is the founder of the Green Belt Movement, which, through networks of rural women, has planted over 30 million trees across Kenya since 1977. In 2002, she was elected to Kenya's Parliament in the first free elections in a generation, and in 2003 was appointed Assistant Minister for Environment, Natural Resources, and Wildlife. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate of 2004, she is the author of Unbowed: A Memoir, and speaks to organizations around the world. Her newest book, The Challenge for Africa addresses the intricacies of African issues, such as the lack of technological developments, the absence of fair international trade, population pressures and enduring hunger, and the dearth of genuine political and economic leadership. Maathai stresses the need for Africans to invent and implement their own solutions, rather than relying on foreign aid and Western visions of change, and calls for a revolution in leadership on both a political and individual level.

Buergenthal, currently the American judge at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, arrived at Auschwitz at age ten, and was soon separated from his mother and then his father. In this inspiring memoir, he reminds us of the resilience of the human spirit.

Nigerian music, Mexican farce, John Updike, Lou Reed. Polish puppeteers, Belgian Butoh, Irish bards? what goes into the making of a season of groundbreaking performing arts at REDCAT and UCLA Live?

An award-winning investigative reporter exposes the global war on women's reproductive rights and its disastrous and unreported consequences for the future of global development.