Library of America presents LOA LIVE

Walt Whitman’s outrage at American politics and politicians was surpassed only by his passionate faith in democracy’s future. Both his anger and his hope fire his visionary prose writings on democracy, gathered for the first time in a new Library of America paperback edited by acclaimed political commentator and literary critic David Bromwich. Join Bromwich, Mark Edmundson (author of Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy) and Karen Karbiener (The Modern Scholar: Walt Whitman and the Birth of Modern American Poetry) for an exploration of our essential poet of democracy and his prophetic vision for the country that speaks directly to our present moment.

John Quincy Adams was the great visionary of America’s post-founding era, a writer and orator of consummate skill who reframed the origins and principles of the republic for a new generation. It’s fitting then that as the nation approaches the 250th anniversary of independence, that Adams should be the focus of renewed attention. One new book in particular caught our eye at Library of America: America’s Founding Son: John Quincy Adams, from President to Political Maverick by Bob Crawford (Zando 2026). Crawford is perhaps best known as the bassist for the acclaimed folk-rock band The Avett Brothers, out of Concord, North Carolina. But he is also the host of not one but two popular podcasts: American History Hotline, on iHeart Radio, and The Road to Now, on SiriusXM’s POTUS channel. With all this going on, we’re very grateful that he could make time to sit down with LOA associate publisher Brian McCarthy for a free-ranging conversation about all things Adams.

May 5, 2026—In March 1880, an extraordinary American traveled to Washington, DC, to testify before a Senate committee investigating the exodus of formerly enslaved people from the Southern states. Vividly describing the nightmarish violence and exploitation inflicted by “the very men who held us slaves,” the Louisiana freedman Henry Adams spoke of Black resistance to terrorism and disenfranchisement, articulating hope for a future where Black people might “make themselves a name and a nation.” Join Pulitzer Prize winner Steven Hahn and acclaimed historian Kidada E. Williams for a conversation about a revelatory text, recently published in full for the first time by Library of America, that speaks to the fragility of democracy and the bravery of those who fought for freedom in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Tuesday, April 7, 2026—Confronting disenfranchisement, legal segregation, and terrorist violence in the aftermath of the Civil War, Black Americans challenged white supremacy in word and deed in a prolonged struggle to create a better, more just nation. Join Tyina L. Steptoe, editor of the new two-volume LOA edition of writings from the Jim Crow era, and historians Keisha N. Blain and Manisha Sinha for a conversation about courageous voices and revelatory firsthand documents that bring this crucial period to life and speak powerfully to the present. Hosted by Max Rudin

Thursday, March 12—Inaugurating a series of programs to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, authors and scholars Michael Gorra, Wendy S. Walters, and Brenda Wineapple discuss three classic short stories, each written within fifty years of the American Revolution, that imaginatively explore the meaning of that founding moment: Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” William Austin’s “Peter Rugg, The Missing Man,” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” Drawing on the recently published two-volume anthology The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century and Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tales and Sketches join us for an evening that will illuminate the surprising connections between the birth of our country and the dawning of our literature in ways that continue to resonate.

February 24—Following a screening of the documentary Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry during the weekend of Feb. 20–22, 2026, filmmaker Laura Dunn and Mary Berry, executive director of The Berry Center, joined Library of America for an online Q&A focused on the film and its subject: author, poet, farmer, and activist Wendell Berry and his home in Henry County, KY. Hosted by Ben Lasman, online content and community manager for Library of America.

Wednesday, February 18—Called “the greatest American diary of the nineteenth century,” the journal of the patrician New York City lawyer George Templeton Strong stands as a remarkable documentary record of the Civil War and a captivating literary accomplishment in its own right. Unfolding like an epic historical novel, Strong’s precise and colorful account plunges readers into the midst of an unprecedented national crisis like nothing else in American letters. Join historian Brenda Wineapple and Geoff Wisner, editor of the just-published Library of America edition of Strong’s Civil War Diaries, for a discussion of this extraordinary work, long out of print and now updated with never-before-published entries transcribed from the original manuscript at The New York Historical. Max Rudin is President & Publisher of Library of America.

Wednesday, December 17—“The best play I’ve seen this season,” says New York Magazine’s Sara Holdren about Liberation, Bess Wohl’s moving exploration of the women’s movement through the story of an Ohio consciousness-raising group in the early 1970s and a daughter who yearns to understand her mother’s life and her own.To discuss this timely play and the movement’s powerful literary roots, Wohl joins memoirist Honor Moore, co-editor of Library of America’s Women’s Liberation! Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution and Still Can, for a conversation about freedom, feminism, and visions for a better future, then and now.LOA LIVE programs are made possible by contributions from friends like you, and we encourage you to consider making a donation to support future presentations. Max Rudin is President & Publisher of Library of America.

December 2—Groundbreaking critic and revered scholar Helen Vendler could “second-guess the sixth sense of the poem,” wrote Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney. For Vendler, who died last year, the language and form of a poem can reveal its writer’s deepest thoughts and feelings—an empathic approach that found full expression in her last essays, collected in the new Library of America special publication Inhabit the Poem. To celebrate these career-crowning pieces, four acclaimed poets, scholars, and former students of Vendler’s gather to reflect on her remarkable achievement: Harvard professor and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Stephanie Burt, celebrated poet-critic Dan Chiasson, Vendler’s literary executor Christopher Spaide, and essayist Kamran Javadizadeh, Professor of English at Villanova. Join us for a lively evening of personal remembrances and insights into the great critic’s assessments of poets from Walt Whitman to Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson to Ocean Vuong.

Monday, November 24—Like a signal from a distant star, Octavia E. Butler’s luminous fiction jumps galactic distances to relay searing, often surprising revelations about the universe we inhabit and the planet we call home. In Lilith’s Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy, just published by Library of America, three classics of Afrofuturist speculative fiction from the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award winner confront urgent questions about technology, hybridity, and the future of humankind. To explore these prophetic masterworks and their inimitable creator, LOA LIVE presents two preeminent scholars and writers in conversation: Imani Perry, National Book Award winner and editor of the LOA Xenogenesis edition, and Tananarive Due, World Fantasy Award–winning novelist and a close friend of Butler’s, about whom she once wrote: “Sister, we got cities burning, they were telling her. And how dare she retreat into this world. But actually, she was showing us an even bigger world, something that we couldn't even wrap our minds around.”

Wednesday, September 10—Two centuries on, Alexis de Tocqueville’s brilliant Democracy in America remains the most prescient account of the virtues, and potential dangers, of our politics and culture. How do Tocqueville’s insights illuminate current events and political trends, both at home and abroad? Join four distinguished scholars for a lively debate on the continued resonance of this enduring masterpiece: Yale professor Joanne Freeman (acclaimed author of The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War), Pulitzer Prize–winning NYU historian Steven Hahn (Illiberal America: A History), Harvard’s James T. Kloppenberg (Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought), and Olivier Zunz, Commonweath Professor at the University of Virginia and editor of the definitive LOA edition of Democracy in America, featuring Arthur Goldhammer’s celebrated translation.

Thursday, May 8—Eighty years ago the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany closed the curtain on six years of total war in Europe, a conflict that tested the courage and forever changed the lives of five young Americans who survived to write astonishing personal narratives of their experiences, from the frontlines of the Battle of the Bulge to the navigator’s seat of a B-17 bomber. To mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day, West Point professor Elizabeth D. Samet, editor of World War II Memoirs: The European Theater, joins National Book Award–winning author and Marine veteran Phil Klay for a conversation about these classics of modern war literature: remarkable memoirs that capture the immediacy of history in the making and the impact of wartime on combatants and noncombatants alike. The views expressed in this program do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

Thursday, April 17—Sylvia Plath’s bold and incandescent poems have struck a deep chord with generations of readers. A visionary writer who scaled astonishing literary heights in her short life, Plath may best be understood, says acclaimed classicist and Plath devotee Sarah Ruden, as a modern mythmaker: an artist who, at the peak of her powers, transcends autobiography to give us poems that describe the shape of our shared experience. Ruden joins LOA LIVE for a conversation inspired by her book I Am the Arrow: The Life & Art of Sylvia Plath in Six Poems, published this April by Library of America, with Pulitzer-winning poet Diane Seuss and pre-eminent Plath scholars Heather Clark and Amanda Golden.

Tuesday, March 11—“The rise of totalitarian governments,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “is the central event of our world.” In her masterpiece, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt linked the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, seeing them as twin manifestations of a terrifying new political system that sought absolute control over all aspects of life. How does this book, which probed the psychology and pathology of the twentieth century, take on new relevance in today’s political landscape? Join celebrated scholars David Bromwich, Seyla Benhabib, Roger Berkowitz, and Thomas Wild, editor of LOA’s new expanded and annotated edition of Arendt’s great work, for a riveting conversation about the causes, means, and ends of totalitarian regimes and the difficult, sometimes excruciating choices faced by those who live under them.

Thursday, November 14—Grief, Joan Didion wrote, “turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” In two luminous memoirs, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, collected in the capstone volume of Library of America’s Didion edition, she relates the twin tragedies of her husband and daughter’s deaths with stunning precision, poignancy, and power—a late flowering of her genius that won her millions of new readers. Join Honor Moore and volume editor David L. Ulin—two acclaimed authors who have confronted grief in their own writing—for a free, virtual LOA LIVE program exploring Didion’s achingly beautiful accounts of bereavement and the ways literature can illuminate the search for meaning and consolation in the face of great loss. LOA LIVE programs are made possible by contributions from friends like you, and we encourage you to consider making a donation to support future presentations. Visit loa.org/loalive to donate.

Tuesday, May 21—Published in 1961, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer announced a major new voice in American fiction. In this lush, New Orleans–based novel, the forty-four-year-old doctor-turned-writer set out to explore what he called “the strange spiritual malady of the modern age.” What he gave us, says writer Paul Elie, editor of a new LOA edition of Percy’s novels, is “the first work of what we call contemporary American fiction, the earliest novel to render a set of circumstances and an outlook that still feel recognizably ours.” Join Elie, senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, and New York Times best-selling novelist Ayana Mathis (The Twelve Tribes of Hattie) for a conversation about faith, fiction, and the novel that established Percy as a peerless examiner of American alienation and redemption. We thank our promotional partners: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers and SoLit. -- LOA LIVE programs are made possible by contributions from friends like you, and we encourage you to consider making a donation to support future presentations. Visit ⁠loa.org/loalive⁠ to donate.

Monday, April 15—Why does the poet Robert Frost continue to beguile and intrigue readers 150 years after his birth? What is it about the four-time Pulitzer winner’s poems—deceptively simple evocations of landscape, work, village life, and love suffused with remarkable power, subtlety, and complexity—that makes them so quintessentially American? Join former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith and Jay Parini, poet, biographer, and author of the just published Robert Frost: Sixteen Poems to Learn by Heart, for a special National Poetry Month conversation about the beauty , wisdom, and hidden depths of three beloved Frost poems that evoke different seasons and their moods: “Putting in the Seed,” “After Apple-Picking,” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” We thank our promotional partners: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers, the Boutell-Day Poetry Center at Smith College, and the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. -- Donate to support LOA LIVE programs: loa.org/loalive.

Wednesday, March 6—Brash, opinionated, funny, and an indefatigable champion of the vulnerable over the rich and well-connected, Jimmy Breslin brought heart and knockout prose to every column and book he wrote. From peerless coverage of the assassinations of JFK and Malcolm X to the plight of immigrants, the Mafia, and the AIDS crisis, Breslin’s instinct for a story’s untold, personal dimensions gives his writing enduring vitality and emotional power. Join New York Times columnist Dan Barry, editor of the just-published LOA edition of Breslin’s essential writings, MSNBC’s Mike Barnicle, and NYT bestselling author Mike Lupica for a lively conversation and memorable stories about the larger-than-life New Yorker who raised deadline journalism to literary art. We thank our promotional partners: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers, Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, and Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. -- LOA LIVE programs are made possible by contributions from friends like you, and we encourage you to consider making a donation to support future presentations. Visit loa.org/loalive to donate.

Tuesday, February 6—The story told and retold about America’s founding often excludes the Black communities that existed during the Revolution and the early republic. Black Writers of the Founding Era, a new volume from Library of America, changes that. Inspired by the struggle for independence, Black Americans made bold, insightful contributions to debates about the meaning of the Revolution and the future of the new nation. Join James G. Basker, President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed for an eye-opening conversation about a vibrant and little-known aspect of American life and writing during a crucial formative period. -- LOA LIVE programs are made possible by contributions from friends like you, and we encourage you to consider making a donation to support future presentations. Visit loa.org/loalive to donate.

Wednesday, January 17, 2024—Don DeLillo is “our most necessary writer,” says his longtime editor Gerald Howard, one whose “intuitions and sentences have led him deeper into previously uncharted regions of our psyche than any other contemporary novelist.” Isn’t it time the Swedish Academy took notice? To kick off a new year of LOA LIVE, Howard joins Mark Osteen, editor of the LOA DeLillo edition, for a freewheeling conversation about the towering legacy—and still insufficiently acknowledged genius—of the author of White Noise, Libra, and Underworld, modern masterpieces that explore, with humor and an unassailable eye for the absurd, the dreams, dangers, and delusions of modern American life.

Tuesday, December 5, 2023—To cap LOA LIVE’s fall season, a killer lineup of panelists explores classic crime fiction of the 1960s, from Donald Westlake-writing-as-Richard Stark’s taut smash-and-grab heist novel The Score to Patricia Highsmith’s eerie meta-thriller The Tremor of Forgery. Join Geoffrey O’Brien, editor of Crime Novels of the 1960s, along with noir maven Sarah Weinman (The Real Lolita), cultural critic Gene Seymour, and poet David Lehman (The Mysterious Romance of Murder) for an arresting dive into nine astonishingly inventive novels that pulse with the energies of a turbulent, transformative decade. -- LOA LIVE programs are made possible by contributions from friends like you, and we encourage you to consider making a donation to support future presentations. Visit loa.org/loalive to donate. -- We thank our promotional partners: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers; the Crime Writers Association; and Film Noir Foundation.

Wednesday, November 8—The expatriate literary scene in Paris that flourished around Richard Wright and James Baldwin produced brilliant writing, intellectual ferment, and bitter rivalries—all of it, and much else from that turbulent time, thrillingly explored in John A. Williams’s explosive 1967 novel, The Man Who Cried I Am, a lost classic newly published in paperback by LOA.   Merve Emre (The Personality Brokers), Adam Bradley (The Anthology of Rap; One Day It’ll All Make Sense), and William Maxwell (F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature) join LOA LIVE to explore this panoramic novel of Black American life in the era of segregation, civil rights, and paranoiac Cold War politics—Bradley enlists it in “the new Black canon”—and what it can tell us about the anxious world Williams moved in and our own politically unsettled moment. Library of America president and publisher Max Rudin moderates. -- LOA LIVE programs are made possible by contributions from friends like you, and we encourage you to consider making a donation to support future presentations. Visit loa.org/loalive to donate.

Wednesday, October 25—For more than sixty years, in such works as Funnyhouse of a Negro and Ohio State Murders, Adrienne Kennedy has bewitched audiences with plays that transform stages into dreamscapes, actors into ghosts, and personal history into myth. One of only five living writers in the Library of America series, Kennedy “never [takes] a straight path from one event to another if a more beautiful route is available,” says actor Natalie Portman. Join Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Margo Jefferson, Obie-winning playwright and screenwriter Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and Yale professor Marc Robinson, editor of the new Library of America edition of Kennedy’s collected writings, for a conversation about one of the American theater’s most haunting and irreducible voices.

Thursday, September 21—In the hundred years since The Great Gatsby was published, American society and culture have been utterly transformed. Why then do readers and writers continue to turn to this luminous novel of money, class, 1920s glamour, and reckless love to find the elusive key to the meaning of America? What is the secret of its astonishing staying power? To kick off the Fall 2023 season of LOA LIVE, join Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Wesley Morris (The New York Times) and National Book Award finalist Min Jin Lee (Pachinko) for a conversation with LOA Fitzgerald editor James L. W. West III. What do the immortal figures of Nick Carraway, Daisy and Tom Buchanan, Jordan Baker, and Jay Gatsby have to tell us about what changes and what remains the same in the American experience?

Wednesday, July 19—In The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451, and other visionary works melding science fiction, horror, fantasy, and high literature, Ray Bradbury electrified readers and inspired generations of genre-bending younger writers. Acclaimed authors Connie Willis and Kelly Link join LOA Bradbury editor Jonathan R. Eller and SF expert Gary K. Wolfe for a conversation about this American original’s towering legacy. “Ray Bradbury never cared about the science, only about the people, which was why the stories worked so well.”—Neil Gaiman

Wednesday, June 21—Best-selling author Kate Bolick joins LOA LIVE to discuss one of the most gifted American writers of the mid–twentieth century. Nancy Hale, winner of ten O. Henry Awards and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, explored women and children’s inner lives in luminous and deeply felt work far ahead of its time. Two new LOA paperbacks restore these lost classics: Where the Light Falls: Selected Stories of Nancy Hale and the best-selling 1942 novel The Prodigal Women, whose uncompromising portrayal of women’s shifting roles, open sexuality, and ambivalence toward motherhood pries open what Bolick in her introduction calls “the gap between what liberation looks like, and what it actually is.” Kate Bolick is the best-selling author of Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, and coauthor of March Sisters: On Life, Death, and Little Women. She teaches writing at Yale University.

Wednesday, May 17—Charles Portis’s novels and stories, with their deadpan style, unforgettable characters, and rollicking plots of pursuit, obsession, absurdity, and intrigue, have a passionate following among readers and fellow writers. “His fiction,” Roy Blount, Jr., has said, “is the funniest I know.” To celebrate publication of LOA’s long-awaited collected edition of the author of True Grit, join Blount, Roz Chast, Ian Frazier, Mary Roach, Paul Theroux, Ed Park, Calvin Trillin, and Jay Jennings for an all-star tribute to the novelist whose work has been called “one of the great pure pleasures—both visceral and cerebral—available in modern American literature.”

Thursday, April 20—An unparalleled master of the short story, Bernard Malamud ranks among America’s greatest mythmakers and illuminators of the human heart, blending humor and truth in works that, to quote Saul Bellow, “discovered a sort of communicative genius in the impoverished, harsh jargon of immigrant New York.” To mark publication of the third and final volume of LOA’s Malamud edition, join biographer and editor Philip Davis and acclaimed writers Tobias Wolff and Nicole Krauss for a master class in “The Magic Barrel,” one of Malamud’s most brilliant and beloved tales.

Wednesday, March 15, 2023—From Pulp Era pioneers to the radical innovators of the 1960s and ’70s, visionary women writers have been a transformative force in American science fiction. For Women’s History Month, acclaimed SF authors Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Pamela Sargent, and Sheree Renée Thomas join Lisa Yaszek, editor of LOA’s The Future Is Female!, for a conversation about the writers who smashed the genre’s gender barrier to create worlds and works that remain revolutionary. We thank our promotional partners: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, Dottir Press, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association.

Wednesday, February 15, 2023—Frederick Douglass’s first recorded speech, “I Have Come to Tell You Something About Slavery,” inaugurated a five-decade career as the fiery, eloquent champion of abolition and emancipation, equal rights and human dignity. Join David W. Blight, Douglass’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer and editor of a revelatory new LOA collection, for an exploration of the genius of an extraordinary man who escaped slavery to become one of the greatest orators and writers in American history. We thank our promotional partners: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers and Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

Wednesday, January 18, 2023—One of the most popular works ever written about the Civil War, Bruce Catton’s Army of the Potomac Trilogy is a masterpiece of historical storytelling and a groundbreaking work of scholarship. Join distinguished historians Gary W. Gallagher, editor of LOA’s new one-volume edition, and Harold Holzer for a conversation about how Catton’s democratic focus on the experiences of soldiers—in the heat of battle and in the quieter moments of everyday army life—transformed Civil War history and still enthralls. We thank our promotional partners: Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW), American Historical Association (AHA), National Council for History Education (NCHE), and University of Virginia.

November 14, 2022—Is the all-American Jack Kerouac best understood as an immigrant writer? Join LOA Kerouac editor Todd Tietchen (University of Massachusetts, Lowell) and Kerouac scholar and translator Jean-Christophe Cloutier (University of Pennsylvania) for a centenary conversation about Kerouac’s French-Canadian roots and their connections with his legendary masterpieces, with readings by actor Bill Heck (The Old Man, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs). We thank our promotional partners: ALTA: Journal of Alta California, ALSCW (Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers), University of Massachusetts–Lowell, University of Pennsylvania.

October 20, 2022—Fifty years ago, the 20th-century’s foremost political philosopher wrote two seminal essays on questions that have new urgency today: Why do politicians lie? What is the relationship between political lies and self-delusion? And how much organized deceit can a democracy endure before it ceases to function? Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, Emerita, Yale University; Senior Research Fellow and Professor Adjunct of Law, Columbia University, Roger Berkowitz, Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, and David Bromwich, Sterling Professor of English at Yale University discuss the brilliance and relevance of Arendt’s essays, newly brought together in Hannah Arendt: On Lying and Politics, with an introduction by Professor Bromwich We thank our promotional partners: ALSCW (Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers), the American Historical Association, the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, the Hannah Arendt Center, and the National Council for History Education.

September 14, 2022—Oscar Hijuelos’s rich and radiant novels bring the Cuban American immigrant experience into the heart of American literature. To celebrate Library of America’s publication of The Mambo Kings & Other Novels, LOA Live convened a starry array of writers and musicians, many of them the Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s personal friends, for an hour of readings, reminiscences, and more. Featuring appearances by:Laurie Anderson • Junot Díaz • Laura Alonso-Gallo • Mary Gordon • Lori Carlson-Hijuelos • Arturo O’Farrill • Gay Talese We thank our promotional partners: ALSCW (Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers), Hispanecdotes, and CasaCuba at Florida International University.

July 20, 2022—A starry tribute to Pulitzer Prize-winning poet laureate of deep ecology Gary Snyder commemorates the publication of his Collected Poems in the Library of America series. Governor Jerry Brown, actor Peter Coyote, novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, poets Wang Ping and Robert Hass, and other guests join Library of America for nearly ninety minutes of poetry and personal anecdotes. The program concludes with a special appearance by Gary Snyder. We thank our promotional partners: Alta Journal; the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW); the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College; the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts (NEOMFA) at Youngstown State University; the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University.

June 29, 2022 — Since 1964 Fiddler on the Roof, one of the most popular Broadway musicals of all time, has also captivated audiences in new forms: in Norman Jewison’s brilliant film adaptation, “the most powerful movie musical ever made” (Pauline Kael); and, most recently, in an acclaimed Yiddish translation paradoxically hailed as “authentic” and “definitive.” Why is Fiddler so beloved, and what is the secret of its enduring appeal? Join LOA for a live conversation on this touchstone of American culture featuring Rosalind Harris, who played Tzeitel on Broadway and in the 1971 film; Steven Skybell, who played Tevye in the 2019 Yiddish production; and Michael Sragow, co-writer and co-producer of the new documentary Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen. Laurence Maslon, editor of Library of America’s collection American Musicals, moderates. We thank our promotional partners: American Masters/PBS; the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW); Encores! Series at New York City Center; Marlene Meyerson JCC of Manhattan; Museum at Eldridge Street; the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene; NYU/Skirball Center; Kino Lorber; Shotwell Media; Yiddish Book Center; YIVO Institute for Jewish Research; 92Y.

June 1, 2022—In The Heart of American Poetry, his revelatory new book from Library of America, Edward Hirsch offers deeply personal readings of forty essential American poems we thought we knew. Hirsch joins LOA Live to discuss how these poems have sustained his own life and how they might uplift our diverse but divided nation. We thank our promotional partner: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW).

May 18, 2022—Beginning with her stunning 1976 memoir The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston has forged a profound, richly imagined, and genre-defying narrative of the American experience from her vantage point as the daughter of Chinese immigrants. To mark publication of the new Library of America edition, Kingston joins Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, editor of the volume and her former student, for an intimate conversation about her life and work. We thank our promotional partners: Asia Society New York; the Asian American Arts Alliance; Asian American Writers Workshop; the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW); Bamboo Ridge Press; International Women’s Writing Guild; Singapore Unbound; University of Southern California English Department; the Writers Guild Foundation; Yu and Me Books.

May 3, 2022—Thornton Wilder’s 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning play about the town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, is one of the most-produced classics in the American repertory. How is it that this quintessentially American masterpiece continues to resonate so profoundly in places where both “our” and “town” mean radically different things? We join Tappan Wilder, Thornton Wilder’s nephew and literary executor; director Michel Hausmann, creator of Miami’s acclaimed trilingual production in Spanish, Haitian Creole, and English; and the Sorbonne’s Julie Vatain-Corfdir, translator and director of a French production, for a conversation about the twenty-first-century global rediscovery of Wilder’s greatest play. We thank our promotional partners: The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW); the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library; Concord Theatricals; Miami New Drama; NYU/Skirball Center; the Thornton Wilder Estate; the Writers Guild Foundation.

March 16, 2022 — A new Library of America volume presents three powerful firsthand accounts of WWII by veterans of the Pacific War who lived to tell their stories: E. B. Sledge, Samuel Hynes, and Alvin Kernan. Volume editor Elizabeth D. Samet, professor of English at West Point, joins historian Richard B. Frank to discuss what makes these memoirs classics of the modern literature of war. (The views Elizabeth D. Samet expresses in this program do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.) We thank our promotional partners: The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW); Henry Sledge and the What’s the Scuttlebutt podcast; the United States Air Force Academy; Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum; the National Council for History Education (NCHE).

February 24, 2022—Octavia E. Butler’s 1979 novel Kindred, a time-travel thriller that transports its heroine from Southern California in the 1970s to a plantation in antebellum Maryland, is widely acknowledged as a visionary masterwork. Obie-winning playwright and screenwriter Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (An Octoroon, HBO’s Watchmen) discusses the process and the challenges of adapting the novel into an eight-episode TV series. We thank our promotional partners: The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW); the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research; NYU Skirball Center; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

January 25, 2022—Producer and director Robert Weide (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth) became obsessed with Kurt Vonnegut’s books in high school and began a correspondence with the author that stretched into a twenty-five-year friendship. Weide joins LOA Live to discuss his new documentary Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time, which chronicles their relationship and the filmmaking process as it explores why Vonnegut’s generation-defining work is fresher and more relevant than ever. We thank our promotional partners: The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW), DOC NYC, the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, the Kurt Vonnegut Society, and the Writers Guild Foundation. Click here find out how you can watch Robert Weide’s Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time.

December 15, 2021—Acclaimed bestselling SF and fantasy writer Connie Willis, editor of the just-released Library of America anthology American Christmas Stories, joins LOA Live for a merrily unconventional yuletide conversation about the uniquely American literature inspired by this most magical time of the year. With Jamaican-born speculative novelist Nalo Hopkinson, whose story caps the collection, and historian Penne Restad (Christmas in America: A History). We thank our promotional partners: The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW); Locus magazine; Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America; Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside; the University of Texas at Austin; the Writers Guild Foundation.

November 22, 2021—Before her landmark book Silent Spring catalyzed the modern environmental movement, Rachel Carson was internationally celebrated as a “poet of the sea” for a trilogy of prescient books about the world’s oceans—their beauty, fragility, and immense consequence for life on earth. Writer, biologist, and activist Sandra Steingraber, editor of a new LOA edition, joins us for an online talk and Q&A about these lyrical and deeply personal classics of American science and nature writing. “To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.”—Rachel Carson We thank our promotional partners: 350.org; Breast Cancer Action; Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency; Jodi Solomon Speakers Bureau; the Maritime Aquarium; Mongabay; the Rachel Carson Council; the Society of Environmental Journalists; Terrain magazine.

October 28, 2021—In a remarkable ten-year career cut short by death from tuberculosis at twenty-eight, Stephen Crane ushered American literature into the twentieth century. Novelist, poet, and screenwriter Paul Auster, author of the riveting new Crane biography Burning Boy, joins Library of America for a conversation about the singular life story and even more singular genius behind the stories, stark, haunting poems, and indelible The Red Badge of Courage. We thank our promotional partners: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers; the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center; and PEN America; and the Stephen Crane Society.

October 6, 2021 — Winner of the National Book Award, the Newbery Medal, and a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, Virginia Hamilton (1934–2002) wove Black folktales and narratives of African American life and history into a body of work that forever changed American children’s writing and made her its most honored writer. Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden joins award-winning children’s book author and memoirist Jacqueline Woodson (Brown Girl Dreaming) for a conversation about Hamilton’s life and wildly inventive novels, newly collected in a Library of America volume edited by Hamilton biographer Julie K. Rubini. We thank our promotional partners: The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers; Bolinga Black Cultural Resources Center @ Wright State University; the Library of Congress; Ohio Humanities; the Toledo Lucas County Public Library; Yellow Springs Community Foundation.

July 14, 2021—Elizabeth Spencer’s The Light in the Piazza is an exceptionally beautiful and memorable work in the literature of Americans abroad — in this case in Florence, aglow in summer light, shadowed by a family secret. Her 1960 novella inspired in turn a great twenty-first century American musical, the Tony Award-winning adaptation by acclaimed composer Adam Guettel and playwright Craig Lucas. To honor Spencer’s centenary and the new Library of America collection of her novels and stories, Guettel joins New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author Adam Gopnik for a conversation about reimagining Spencer’s dark comic masterpiece for the musical stage. Elena Shaddow, who played the lead role of Clara in the show’s national tour, performs, accompanied by Broadway conductor/pianist/music director Andrew Resnick. Presented in partnership with the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers; Centenary College; the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi; Concord Theatricals; MasterVoices; the Mississippi Humanities Council; the New York Festival of Song; and the NYU/Skirball Center.

June 17, 2021—Like their counterparts in English Romantic poetry and elsewhere, American poets and writers have been fascinated by birds, compelled by their beauty, their strangeness, their mysterious, fleeting presence. From the colonial period to the present they have sought to evoke the ways birds enchant us, connect us with nature’s wonder, fragility, and sometimes savagery, and offer moments of transcendence. In this LOA Live discussion, Olivia Gentile (Life List), poet Sidney Wade, wildlife biologist and author J. Drew Lanham, and Andrew Rubenfeld, co-editor of the Library of America anthology American Birds: A Literary Companion, explore the mystery and magic of birds and the imaginative flights they’ve inspired. Presented in partnership with Alachua County Audubon, the Aldo Leopold Foundation, ALSCW, the American Ornithological Society, BirdWatching Magazine, Orion Magazine, Subtropics Magazine, and the University of Florida.

May 19, 2021 — An iconic voice in contemporary American writing, Joan Didion through her novels and literary nonfiction reimagined the way stories are told. In the process, this “articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time,” in Joyce Carol Oates’ words, has become an inescapable influence on writers who have followed her. Award-winning essayist and poet David L. Ulin, editor of the Library of America Joan Didion edition, leads a conversation exploring Didion’s importance, vital relevance, and crucial legacy with novelist and essayist Laila Lalami (winner of the American Book Award for her 2014 novel The Moor’s Account) and novelist Steph Cha, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the California Book Award. Special guests: Obie Award-winning actress Mia Barron (The White Album) and actor Griffin Dunne, Didion’s nephew and director of the 2017 documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold. Presented in partnership with the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers; Alta Journal; Dottir Press; PEN; University of California, Riverside; University of Southern California; Women’s Review of Books; the Writers Guild Foundation.

April 22, 2021—Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Edward O. Wilson has transformed our sense of the natural world and humanity’s place in it. In a time of climate crisis and shrinking biodiversity, his lyrical, thought-provoking, and increasingly prophetic work inspires wonder and reverence for our fragile natural world. Renowned nature and science writer David Quammen, editor of the new LOA collection Edward O. Wilson: Biophilia, The Diversity of Life, Naturalist, joins award-winning environmental journalist Bill Finch and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Wilson biographer Richard Rhodes for an Earth Day exploration of Wilson’s legacy as naturalist, writer, and thinker. Graham Townsley contributes a clip from the 2015 film E. O. Wilson: Of Ants and Men, for which he wrote the screenplay. Introductory remarks by Dr. Paula J. Ehrlich, President, E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. Additional promotional partners: Alabama Public TV; Alabama River Diversity Network; Cincinnati Zoo; Entomological Society of America; E. O. Wilson Biophilia Center at the Nokuse Plantation; Harvard University Alumni Office; Harvard University Department of Organismic & Evolutionary Biology; Museum of Comparative Zoology; Orion Quarterly; University of Alabama Museums; Yale Environment 360