Inauguration of Jacqueline Woodson as the Ambassador for Young People's Lit

The Library of Congress in collaboration with the Children's Book Council and Every Child a Reader inaugurated Jacqueline Woodson as the new National Ambassador for Young People's Literature.

Speaker Biography: Carla Hayden is the 14th Librarian of Congress.

Speaker Biography: Gene Yang was the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature from 2016 to 2017.

Speaker Biography: Carl Lennertz is the executive director of the Children's Book Council.

Speaker Biography: Jacqueline Woodson is the new National Ambassador for Young People's Literature from 2018 to 2019.

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Ben Okri discusses political poetry on National Poetry Day (with Waterstones)
[Note: The description below is taken from the Youtube channel of Waterstones, which interviewed Ben Okri] “Rise Like Lions is an anthology of political poetry compiled by Ben Okri. With a sweeping range from Basho to Bob Marley this is poetry that inspires, informs and rings true from generation to generation. For National Poetry Day, we asked Ben to tell us more about the hallmarks of political poetry, whether it can effect change and why poetry is enjoying a resurgence of late”.
TimesTalks: Emma Thompson and Ian McEwan
Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review, moderates a conversation with two of Britain’s most beloved and iconic voices — Academy Award- and Golden Globe-winning actor and screenwriter Emma Thompson, and best-selling, award-winning author, Ian McEwan. Thompson stars in the upcoming film “The Children Act,” adapted by McEwan from his own novel about a British High Court judge who, in the midst of a marital crisis, must rule on a life-changing legal case concerning the survival of a teenage boy. Join Thompson and McEwan for a riveting conversation about challenging our belief systems, forging profound connections, and getting to the core of what constitutes right and wrong.
Michael Eric Dyson introduces What Truth Sound Like
New York Times bestseller, Georgetown University sociology professor, and one of America's premier public intellectuals, Michael Eric Dyson, joins us for a discussion of his new book, What Truth Sounds Like.

In 1963 Attorney General Robert Kennedy sought out James Baldwin to explain the rage that threatened to engulf black America. Baldwin brought along some friends, including playwright Lorraine Hansberry, psychologist Kenneth Clark, and activist Jerome Smith. It was Smith's relentless, unfiltered fury that set Kennedy on his heels. Kennedy walked away from the nearly 3-hour meeting angry that the black folk assembled didn't understand politics and weren't as easy to talk to as Martin Luther King. But his anger quickly gave way to empathy, especially for Smith. He set about changing policy, the meeting having transformed his thinking in fundamental ways.
Bethany McLean | Saudi America
The technology of fracking in shale rock — particularly in the Permian Basin in Texas — has transformed America into the world's top producer of both oil and natural gas. The U.S. is expected to be "energy independent" and a "net exporter" in less than a decade, a move that will upend global politics, destabilize Saudi Arabia, crush Russia's chokehold over Europe, and finally bolster American power again.

Or Will it?

Investigative journalist and bestselling author Bethany McLean digs deep into the cycles of boom and bust that has plagued the American oil industry for the past decade, from the financial wizardry and mysterious death of fracking pioneer Aubrey McClendon, to the speculators who are betting on America's ascendance and the collapse of OPEC in the great game of geopolitics. McLean finds that fracking is a business built on attracting ever-more gigantic amounts of capital investment, while promises of huge returns have often not borne out. Overeagerness in partaking in a boom can lead to all types of problems and just as she did with the Enron story, in Saudi America McLean points out the reality and the risks of the inflated promises of the fracking boom.
Richard Powers: The Waterstones Interview
‘This book is about taking the non-human seriously. It’s about realising that we are not alone on this earth and the rest of creation is not there simply to be a resource to us.’ Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018, The Overstory by Richard Powers is an intricate novel about and indeed structured very much like a tree. We decided to sit beneath the canopy of one to discuss why a closer appreciation of trees might just change your life for the better. Contains a stiff breeze at times!
In Conversation: Sophie Mackintosh | The Water Cure
Watch Sophie Mackinstosh discuss her debut novel 'The Water Cure' which has been longlisted for the Man Booker prize 2018, at Waterstones in Covent Garden. Sophie does a reading for us followed by a talk about how she came to write this extraordinary novel and the creative process behind it.

Hypnotic, dreamlike and compulsive, a blazing literary debut for fans of Hot Milk, The Girls andThe Vegetarian

'Immensely assured, calmly devastating. This is a gem of a novel and I was bowled over by it' - Katherine Angel, author of Unmastered

'Eerie, electric, beautiful. It rushes you through to the end on a tide of tension and closely held panic. I loved this book' - Daisy Johnson, author of Fen

'Creepy and delightful - it has a pinch of Shirley Jackson, a dash of chlorine, and an essence all of its own' - Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of Harmless Like You

Imagine a world very close to our own: where women are not safe in their bodies, where desperate measures are required to raise a daughter. This is the story of Grace, Lia and Sky, kept apart from the world for their own good and taught the terrible things that every woman must learn about love. And it is the story of the men who come to find them - three strangers washed up by the sea, their gazes hungry and insistent, trailing desire and destruction in their wake.

The Water Cure is a fever dream, a blazing vision of suffering, sisterhood and transformation.

'Devastating. A work of cool, claustrophobic beauty' Eli Goldstone, author of Strange Heart Beating

'Otherworldly, brutal and poetic: a feminist fable set by the sea, a utopia gone awry, a female Lord of the Flies. It transported me, savaged me, filled me with hope and fear. It felt like a book I'd been waiting to read for a long time' Emma Jane Unsworth, author of Animals
Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II
Liza Mundy recently published "Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II." Using the Veterans History Project collections, she was able to gather background information and research context. Mundy will give a talk on the book and the process she went through to conduct her research at the Library of Congress.
Anand Giridharadas with Joy-Ann Reid: Winners Take All | Author Talks
NYPL Author Talks | Recorded live at the New York Public Library, Celeste Auditorium, on September 5, 2018.

An award-winning journalist travels to the inner sanctums of the new gilded age to chronicle the global elites who are setting out to remake the fight for equality and social justice in their own images. Around the planet some of the world’s richest and most powerful citizens lead passionate campaigns to solve the manifold social and political problems that divide the haves and the have nots. Anand Giridharadas, journalist and winner of the Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award, asks whether those who have profited from “our highly inequitable status quo” are the best candidates to narrow the divides that have benefited them the most. When are their solutions democratic and universal, and when do they reflect and support the biases that introduced the inequity in the first place?
Why Big Problems Lead to Better Book Characters Full Panel | New York Comic-Con
A race against time to save the world, a quest to Camelot, zombies, trips to space and alien encounters – the possibilities are endless, and the personal growth is exponential when you step out of your comfort zone. Featuring authors Max Brallier, Judd Winick, Soman Chainani, Ben Hatke, Ethan Aldridge, and Erik Forrest Jackson.
Lynne Thompson - Poetry.LA Interview
Lynne Thompson is the author of the poetry collections "Start with a Small Guitar" (What Books Press, 2013) and "Beg No Pardon" (Perugia Press, 2007) winner of a Perugia Press First Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award. She also received a 2015 Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles (C.O.L.A.). Her poems have appeared in many journals including "Poetry," "Ploughshares," "Salamander," "Prairie Schooner," "Rattle," "African American Review," "Crab Creek Review," "Poetry Internationa"l and several anthologies including, "Nasty Women Poets: An Anthology of Subversive Verse" (Lost Horse Press, 2017). A former practicing attorney, Thompson lives in Los Angeles and is the reviews and essays editor for the literary journal, "Spillway." The interview is part of a series hosted by L.A. poet Mariano Zaro, available at www.Poetry.LA
Lift Us Up: The Battle for Educational Justice in America
As Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh objects to being held accountable for his behavior in high school, we look at the criminalization of black and brown students that has led to what is known as the school-to-prison pipeline. We speak with a roundtable of community activists engaged in the fight to save schools and push for alternatives to punishment and privatization. Their voices are highlighted in a new book titled “Lift Us Up, Don’t Push Us Out! Voices from the Front Lines of the Educational Justice Movement.” In Chicago, we speak with Jitu Brown, the national director of the Journey for Justice. In Washington, D.C., we speak with Zakiya Sankara-Jabar, the co-founder of Racial Justice NOW! and field organizer for the Dignity in Schools Campaign. And in New York City, we speak with high school teacher and restorative justice coordinator E.M. Eisen-Markowitz and Mark Warren, co-author of “Lift Us Up, Don’t Push Us Out!”
Rachel Giese | Appel Salon
"Could a similar feminist critique that had been applied to gender norms for girls, could we bring that to boys?"—Rachel Giese

Rachel Giese, Todd Minerson and Garvia Bailey in conversation on Giese's new book Boys, and the current state of masculinity.
Monica Hesse | American Fire
Journalist Monica Hesse and writer Maris Kreizman discuss Hesse’s new book “American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land,” now in paperback.

The arsons started on a cold November midnight and didn’t stop for months. Night after night, the people of Accomack County waited to see which building would burn down next, regarding each other at first with compassion, and later suspicion. Vigilante groups sprang up, patrolling the rural Virginia coast with cameras and camouflage. Volunteer firefighters slept at their stations. The arsonist seemed to target abandoned buildings, but local police were stretched too thin to surveil them all. Accomack was desolate. There were hundreds of abandoned buildings, and by the dozen they were burning.

The culprit, and the path that led to these crimes, is a story of twenty-first century America. Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse first drove down to the reeling county to cover a hearing for Charlie Smith, a struggling mechanic who upon his capture had promptly pleaded guilty to sixty-seven counts of arson. But as Charlie’s confession unspooled, it got deeper and weirder. He wasn’t lighting fires alone; his crimes were galvanized by a surprising love story. Over a year of investigating, Hesse uncovered the motives of Charlie and his accomplice, girlfriend Tonya Bundick, a woman of steel-like strength and an inscrutable past. Theirs was a love built on impossibly tight budgets and simple pleasures. They were each other’s inspiration and escape…until they weren’t.

Though it’s hard to believe today, one hundred years ago Accomack was the richest rural county in the nation. Slowly it’s been drained of its industry and agriculture, as well as its wealth and population. In an already remote region, limited employment options offer little in the way of opportunity. A mesmerizing and crucial panorama with nationwide implications, American Fire asks what happens when a community gets left behind. Hesse brings to life the Eastern Shore and its inhabitants, battling a punishing economy and increasingly terrified by a string of fires they could not explain. The result evokes the soul of rural America, a land half gutted before the fires even began.

Maris Kreizman is a writer and critic and the author of the book “Slaughterhouse 90210.”
Mohsin Hamid | False Starts | Granta Magazine
Mohsin Hamid on the benefits of a starting a novel for the fourth time, why writing is like digging a well, and the Douglas Adams school of authorship.
“How Fascism Works”: Jason Stanley On Trump, Bolsonaro and the Rise of Fascism
In his new book “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them,” Yale professor Jason Stanley warns about the dangers of normalizing fascist politics, writing, “What normalization does is transform the morally extraordinary into the ordinary. It makes us able to tolerate what was once intolerable by making it seem as if this is the way things have always been.” We speak with Jason Stanley in New York.

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Inauguration of Jacqueline Woodson as the Ambassador for Young People's Lit

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