Free Library Podcast

Free Library of Philadelphia
  • 4.2 (115)
  • Society & Culture
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The Free Library Podcast is an easy way to participate in the author events and lectures that take place at the Parkway Central Library. Visit Author Events to find upcoming events.

  1. 1d ago

    Andy Beshear | Go and Do Likewise

    The Author Events Series presents Andy Beshear | Go and Do Likewise In Conversation with Michael Smerconish SOLD OUT Join Governor Andy Beshear for a hopeful conversation about reclaiming faith as a force for good instead of harm and healing a divided nation through our shared values. Centered around his new book, GO AND DO LIKEWISE: How We Heal a Broken Country, Governor Beshear will share stories of healing, justice, forgiveness, welcoming, and moral clarity. In GO AND DO LIKEWISE, Governor Beshear shares what his own faith has meant to him, how it has informed his family and his public life-and serves as a rebuke to how faith has been hijacked, profaned, misused, and corrupted by Donald Trump and other public figures. By regrounding faith in compassion and kindness, Beshear believes we can start to heal as a country. Whether you support organized religion or simply believe in the golden rule, this evening is a powerful reminder of the values that can truly unite us.  Governor Andy Beshear is a born-and-raised Kentuckian. Before he was elected Governor in 2019, Andy served as the state's Attorney General since 2015, working as a lawyer on behalf of the government for the people of Kentucky. Andy and his wife, Britainy, have two children, Will and Lila, and dog Winnie. His family attends Beargrass Christian Church, where both Andy and Britainy serve as deacons. He is a graduate of Vanderbilt with a bachelor's in political science and anthropology and holds a Juris Doctorate from the University of Virginia law school. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Every ticket that includes a book comes with a pre-signed copy of GO AND DO LIKEWISE, published by St. Martins Press Pre-signed copies of GO AND DO LIKEWISE will be available for purchase at the event. All tickets are non-refundable.   (recorded 9/23/2026)

  2. 1d ago

    Emily Wilson | Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea

    The Author Events Series presents Emily Wilson | Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea In Conversation with Merve Emre SOLD OUT In this sharp and often entertaining tour through antiquity, Emily Wilson--whose renditions of Homer's Odyssey and Iliad have captured a generation's imagination--explores the complicated terrain of reading and writing about the ancient past. Drawing on twenty years of scholarship and teaching, Wilson explores the difficult choices that translators must make, the pleasures of finding new solutions to old problems, and the inevitable frustrations of never fully capturing what is in the original work. Across chapters that range from the politics of Helen of Troy to the obscenities of Aristophanes, from Roman imitation of Greek models to contemporary debates over "foreignizing" and "domesticizing" styles, Wilson examines how modern norms of gender, sexuality, violence, humor, and power complicate our readings of ancient works, and how translation always risks denaturing what is unique and strange about the ancient world. Brilliant, erudite, and yet accessible to readers with no classical background, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea is at once an introduction to the wonders of Greek and Roman literature, a manifesto for the value of translation in a rapidly changing world, and an invitation to encounter ancient cultures anew.  Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been named a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a MacArthur Fellow. In addition to Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, she has also published translations of Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca. She lives in Philadelphia. Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. Her books include Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, The Personality Brokers (selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, The Economist, NPR, and The Spectator), The Ferrante Letters (winner of the 2021 PROSE award for literature), and The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway. She has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 9/22/2026)

  3. 1d ago

    Kevin Powell | A Poem for Evangeline & Other Songs

    The Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation presents a night of words and conversation with Kevin Powell With this, his 17th book and his 4th poetry collection, Kevin Powell further cements his legacy as one of the most celebrated political, cultural, literary, and hip-hop voices in America. A Poem for Evangeline, And Other Songs, is a series of tender and skillfully constructed love letters to his wife, yes. But it is also a sensitive and sacred poetic manifesto for humanity, for America. Be it hate or violence in all forms, mental health, family, history, childhood traumas, the meaning of manhood, or his profound longing for peace, Powell channels forebears like Lucille Clifton, like Federico García Lorca, like the purple cadences and skylight hues of our kinfolk. The result is a poetry book for our times, yes, but also for the times not yet imagined. Kevin Powell is one of the most celebrated political, cultural, literary, and hip-hop voices in America. He is a GRAMMY-nominated poet, a human and civil rights activist, a journalist, a filmmaker, a former two-time candidate for the United States Congress in New York City, and a public speaker who has been to all 50 American states and 5 of the world's 7 continents. Kevin is also the author of 17 books, including A Poem for Evangeline, And Other Songs, his newest collection of poetry; and The Kevin Powell Reader, which represents 30plus years of his life work as a writer, public speaker, and social justice advocate. Kevin's upcoming book will be a biography of Tupac Shakur, who he interviewed several times while a senior writer for Quincy Jones' Vibe magazine. Kevin is currently a WEBBY Award-winning opinion columnist for Newsweek magazine and regular Sirius XM radio guest host. Kevin's writings have also appeared in a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Ebony, Essence, NPR, The Guardian, Complex, and HuffPost. Kevin's new documentary film, When We Free The World, is a deep dive about healthy manhood versus toxic manhood, through the lens and lives of five generations of Black males. A native of Jersey City, New Jersey, Kevin is a proud and long-time resident of Brooklyn, New York. You can reach him via email: kevin@kevinpowell.net, or follow him on all social media platforms by typing poet Kevin Powell Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Recorded on September 17, 2026 The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees. Follow us on social media: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authorevents/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/flpauthorevents/ (recorded 9/17/2026)

  4. Sep 24

    Erin Riley | The Mighty WMMR

    The Author Events Series presents Erin Riley | The Mighty WMMR In Conversation with John DeBella In the early 1980s, the scrappy radio station 93.3 WMMR was on the verge of a major takeover of the Philadelphia airwaves. Erin Riley, who had her finger on the pulse of new artists like Bon Jovi, whose music would define a generation, was hired as the station's Music Director in 1983. The Mighty WMMR is Riley's affectionate and nostalgic oral history of the station's early years, especially its 1980s heyday, covering everything from the pioneering influence of The Marconi Experiment and the success of The Morning Zoo to how WMMR broke artists like Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and local favorites The Hooters onto the national scene. Featuring anecdotes and memories by beloved on-air personalities including John DeBella, Pierre Robert, and Michael Tearson, Riley chronicles the memorable songs and musicians; concerts, contests, and clubs; and the live broadcasts that marked the height of an unforgettable era in Philadelphia radio. Riley breezily captures the station's impact on listeners, which made WMMR a perfect storm of the times, the culture, and the counterculture. The Mighty WMMR is a captivating look back at Philadelphia's rock history and the station that shaped a city and a generation. Erin Riley built a 40-year career in the music business, programming hit songs for major-market stations including KROQ-FM Los Angeles and WMMR-FM Philadelphia. She led the Philadelphia GRAMMY Chapter and founded Rock & Roll After School, where kids wrote and performed original songs. Riley is the author of A Dark Force: 20 Years with a Covert Narcissist. She lives in Philadelphia and serves as Music Supervisor for the hit series The Recording Artist. Accomplished radio personality and producer with nearly 48 years of experience in broadcasting, entertainment, and radio innovation, John DeBella was a Pioneer of the Morning Zoo format and instrumental in shaping the New Rock/Alternative radio format. Recognized nationally for delivering top-rated radio programming, fostering community engagement, and leading philanthropic initiatives. He is an inductee into the National Radio Hall of Fame.  Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 9/15/2026)

  5. Sep 18

    Jill Lepore | The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

    The Author Events Series presents Jill Lepore | The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State In Conversation with Tamala Edwards Meelya Gordon Endowed Lecture Montgomery Auditorium is now sold out. We have opened a rush line for anyone interested in purchasing Auditorium tickets at the door for $5. Please register for the rush line. Inspired by Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, which argued in 1951 that the machinery of modern life was reshaping the very fundamentals of human existence, Lepore, profoundly disturbed by the technology revolution and by the soulless inundation of artificial intelligence, unfurls a new history for our own twenty-first century. Building on an essay in The New Yorker in 2024, Lepore's clarion call traces our increasing dependence on and strangulation by data. Political campaigns, awash in an avalanche of fake bots, have been reduced to attention-mining algorithms, while multinational media corporations dictate public discourse, and the era of the liberal nation-state seems to be coming to a rapid end, replaced by billionaire technocrats reliant on autocracy and the tools of AI. With Orwellian overtones, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State demonstrates how technology has corroded global democracy, leading to the destruction of both human community and capacity for self-government, creating a new form of AI government, a digital citizen's assembly, where AI will recommend the course of action to humans in place of human-run legislatures. Especially sobering with this proliferation of "dizzying, ever-changing schemes, prophesies, and predictions" is that the Artificial State has come at the expense of the natural world, leading to catastrophic loss of wildlife habitat and biodiversity. Deliberately alarming, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, despite its abundance of dire facts, is not a funeral dirge; rather, it's an inspiring wake-up call, written in Lepore's typically elegiac prose, which demonstrates that nothing about the Artificial State was inevitable, for it is a "government without consent, even government without humans." It can, Lepore asserts, be dismantled. Other heinous systems, like feudalism, fascism, and slavery, have also been dismantled, but disassembly requires identifying the parts, tracing the sources. It requires telling a new history. This is the purpose of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.  Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University, professor of law at Harvard Law School, and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her many books include the New York Times bestsellers These Truths and We the People. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tamala Edwards joined 6abc in January of 2005. She is the weekday co-anchor of Action News Mornings from 4 a.m to 7 a.m. and is a regular co-host of Inside Story, conducting probing interviews with newsmakers like Governor Tom Corbett, Senator Bob Casey, Mayor Michael Nutter and others, as well as moderating many election debates. Prior to joining 6abc, Tamala Edwards was the anchor of ABC's World News Now, and World News This Morning. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 9/9/2026)

  6. Jun 24

    Geraldine Brooks | Memorial Days

    The Author Events Series presents Geraldine Brooks | Memorial Days  In Conversation with Tamala Edwards Barbara Gohn Day Memorial Lecture A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey towards peace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Horse. Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz – just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy – collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk. After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha's Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at the beach. But all of this ended abruptly when, on Memorial Day 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf. Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the various ways in which cultures grieve and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony's death. A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls that exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life. Geraldine Brooks is the author of six novels, including Horse, People of the Book, Year of Wonders, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning March. She has also written acclaimed works of nonfiction, including Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages and have sold millions of copies around the world. Born and raised in Australia, Brooks divides her time between Sydney and Martha's Vineyard. Tamala Edwards joined 6abc in January of 2005. She is the weekday co-anchor of Action News Mornings from 4 a.m to 7 a.m. and is a regular co-host of Inside Story, conducting probing interviews with newsmakers like Governor Tom Corbett, Senator Bob Casey, Mayor Michael Nutter and others, as well as moderating many election debates. Prior to joining 6abc, Tamala Edwards was the anchor of ABC's World News Now, and World News This Morning. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 4/30/2026)

  7. Jun 24

    Ben Crump | Worse Than A Lie

    The Author Events Series presents Ben Crump | Worse Than A Lie First 100 people to arrive onsite receive a free copy of the book. It's the night of November 4, 2008. America's first Black president has just been elected. And fifty-three-year-old Hollis Montrose-a Black ex–police officer from the suburbs of Chicago-has become the latest victim of a brutal attack. As the result of a traffic stop gone wrong, Hollis is shot ten times in cold blood, by four white men who could have been his colleagues back in his police days. Beau Lee Cooper was born serious, as if on an urgent mission with little time to waste. Raised in the tumultuous world of 1970s Texas, he always dreamed of becoming a lawyer and fighting for what's right, ever since he was a little boy reading To Kill a Mockingbird. And now, ten years into running his own law firm with his best friend and partner in crime, Nelson ''Nellie'' Rivers, and his suave right-hand-man, Brent ''Cape'' Capers, he feels he's finally making a difference. When Beau Lee learns about Hollis's situation, he's determined to help. Miraculously, Hollis survives the encounter, but the Chicago police department has already spun the narrative in its favor, and Hollis is given a wrongful prison sentence with an unreasonable bail. What really happened that night the car was pulled over? Was it random or was Hollis targeted? Beau Lee knows he's treading in dangerous waters, and finding evidence of the truth will be his biggest challenge yet, but with troubling powers at play, one innocent man's life hangs in the balance. Named to the TIME100 list of the 100 most influential people in 2021 and The NNPA Top Black Newsmaker of the 21st Century in 2026, Attorney Ben Crump is known as "Black America's Attorney General" and has established himself as one of the nation's foremost lawyers and advocates for social justice. He has represented families in the most high-profile cases in the country, including Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tyre Nichols, and Henrietta Lacks in a landmark medical reparations case. Crump is co-founder of DreamFi, a financial empowerment platform, and author of Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People and debut novel Worse Than a Lie. As founder of Ben Crump Law, he continues fighting for justice nationwide. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 3/10/2026)

  8. Jun 24

    Amitav Ghosh | Ghost-Eye

    The Author Events Series presents Amitav Ghosh | Ghost-Eye In Conversation with Brooke O'Harra Past and present collide in a novel about a girl who might just be a "case of the reincarnation type." Varsha Gupta wants fish for lunch. Her family is shocked; the three-year-old has never tasted fish in her life. The Guptas are strict vegetarians and don't allow it inside their Calcutta mansion. But Varsha claims she can remember another life, in a mud house by a river where she caught and cooked fish with a different mother. Perplexed, the Guptas turn to Dr. Shoma Bose, a psychologist who has been investigating what are known as "cases of the reincarnation type" for years. But her understanding of the world is changed forever by Varsha's revelations. Half a century later, Varsha's case file catches the attention of a group of environmental activists, and Shoma's nephew Dinu is drawn inexorably into their plans. As Dinu finds himself caught up in the search for Varsha, buried memories of his own past begin to surface. Traveling between late 1960s Calcutta and present-day Brooklyn, Amitav Ghosh's Ghost-Eye is an urgent and expansive novel from one of our greatest living storytellers, about family, fate, and our fragile planet. Amitav Ghosh is the author of the bestselling Ibis Trilogy, composed of Sea of Poppies (short-listed for the Man Booker Prize), River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire. His other novels include The Circle of Reason, which won the Prix Médicis étranger, and The Glass Palace. He is also the author of many works of nonfiction, including The Great Derangement, The Nutmeg's Curse, and Smoke and Ashes. In 2018, Ghosh became the first English-language writer to win the Jnanpith Award, India's highest literary honor. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Brooke O'Harra (she/her) is a professional director, artist and writer. Brooke and Amitav collaborated with musician Ali Sethi in May 2022 to stage a musical performance of Ghosh's book Jungle Nama. Brooke O'Harra is a queer autuer theater director who often works in collaboration with poets, writers, composer and musicians. O'Harra's current projects include the upcoming performance of Be Holding, to be performed at 59th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh 2026. O'Harra (director) co-created the project with poet Ross Gay, composer Tyshawn Sorey, and the new ensemble Yarn/Wire.  She is also commissioned to develop an original performance work with the museum docents for the 59th Carnegie International. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 6/16/2026)

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4.2
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About

The Free Library Podcast is an easy way to participate in the author events and lectures that take place at the Parkway Central Library. Visit Author Events to find upcoming events.

Information

  • Creator
    Free Library of Philadelphia
  • Years Active
    2007 - 2026
  • Episodes
    300
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 1990 - 2026 Free Library of Philadelphia
  • Show Website
    Free Library Podcast

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