ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library Los Angeles Public Library

Join us for a conversation with one of our country’s most prominent rabbis, Rabbi Sharon Brous of IKAR, discussing her new book, The Amen Effect, which explores what it will take, in a time of loneliness and isolation, social rupture and alienation, to rebuild our society.  Rabbi Brous was in conversation with celebrated Los Angeles-based activist and founder of Homeboy Industries, Father Gregory Boyle.

In 2019, Cristina Rivera Garza traveled from her home in Texas to Mexico City in search of an old unresolved criminal file. "My name is Cristina Rivera Garza," she wrote in her request to the attorney general, "and I am writing to you as a relative of Liliana Rivera, who was murdered on July 16, 1990." Knowing there is only a slim chance of recovering the file, Cristina is inspired by feminist movements across the world and enraged by the global epidemic of femicide and embarks on a path toward justice. This is her account and the outcome of an amazing journey. Rivera Garza will be in conversation with Latin Grammy-nominated musician, songwriter, recording artist, and activist Ceci Bastida.

This program is in partnership with the LA Phil’s Pan American Music Initiative and the new ballet called Revolución diamantina, reflecting on the Glitter Revolution in Mexico City, composed by artistic curator Gabriela Ortiz, inspired by Cristina Rivera Garza.

ALOUD welcomes two-time Poet Laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize–winner Tracy K. Smith with her remarkable book To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul. In 2020, heartsick from consistent assaults on Black life, Tracy K. Smith found herself soul-searching and digging into the historical archive for help navigating the "din of human division and strife." Bearing witness to the terms of freedom afforded her as a Black woman, a mother, and an educator in the twenty-first century, Smith etches a portrait of where we find ourselves four hundred years into the American experiment.

Smith was in conversation with poet, essayist, and Morgan Parker.

Renowned art conservator Rosa Lowinger reveals in her beautiful memoir Dwell Time a journey of her difficult childhood in Miami growing up among people whose losses in the Cuban revolution, and earlier by the decimation of family in the Holocaust, clouded all family life. Through Lowinger’s relentless clear-eyed efforts to be the best practitioner possible, while squarely facing her fraught personal and work relationships, she comes to terms with her identity as Cuban and Jewish, American and Latinx.
Lowinger was in conversation with L.A. Times’s art and design columnist Carolina A. Miranda.

Award-winning journalist Santi Elijah Holley brings us a long overdue look at the Shakur family, who, for over fifty years, have inspired generations of activists, scholars, and music fans. An Amerikan Family is the history of the fight for Black liberation in the United States, as experienced by the Shakurs. From Assata Shakur, the popular author and thinker living for three decades in Cuban exile, to the late, great rapper Tupac to roots in the Black Panther movement and beyond, the Shakurs have been at the forefront of fighting for racial justice in the United States.

Holley was in conversation with American academic, civic leader, and founder of the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter, Dr. Melina Abdullah.

From former White House aide to President Obama and Harvard graduate Alejandra Campoverdi comes a riveting, unflinching memoir on navigating social mobility as a first gen Latina. She offers a broad examination of the unacknowledged emotional tolls of being a trailblazer. Join us as we follow Campoverdi’s journey from being a child of welfare to becoming a candidate for U.S. Congress. Part memoir, part manifesto, First Gen is a story of generational inheritance, aspiration, and belonging–a poignant journey to "reclaim the parts of ourselves we sacrificed in order to survive."Campoverdi was in conversation with author and l columnist with Jean Guerrero.