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Juan Felipe Herrera grew up the son of Mexican immigrants in the migrant fields of California, and became the first Latino Poet Laureate of the United States. Exuberant and socially engaged, reflective and healing, wildly inventive and unpredictable, the award-winning poet will discuss his life’s…

Best-selling author, prize-winning historian, and Mother Jones co-founder Adam Hochschild offers a sweeping new history of the Spanish Civil War. Spain In Our Hearts is a nuanced international tale of idealism and heartbreaking suffering told through a dozen characters, including Ernest Hemingway…

Through the etymology of words, the OED exhibits the shape-shifting nature of language across time, reflecting how it bends to the task of describing our evolving human experience. But is all change good? What is the role of the dictionary in reporting, recording, and refereeing language variation…

The best-selling author of the National Book Critics Circle Award-Winner How to Live, a spirited account of twentieth century intellectual movements and revolutionary thinkers, delivers a timely new take on the lives of influential philosophers Sartre, De Beauvoir, Camus, and others. At The…

A New York Times bestseller and award-winning sensation, Helen Macdonald’s story of adopting and raising one of nature’s most vicious predators has soared into the hearts of millions of readers worldwide. Following the sudden death of her father, Macdonald battled with a fierce and feral goshawk to…

As mass incarceration has reached record levels, professor, journalist, and visionary founder of the Prison to College Pipeline (P2CP), Baz Dreisinger has traveled behind bars in nine countries to rethink the state of justice in a global context. Her eye-opening new book, Incarceration Nations…

In a potentially historic election year for women, Ellen R. Malcolm, the pioneering founder of the three-million-member EMILY’s List and one of the most influential players in today’s political landscape, tells the dramatic inside story of the rise of women in elected office in her new book, When…

The OED represents arguably the first example of global crowd-sourcing and documents a language rich in loanwords from other cultures. At the same time, it has been considered emblematic of the British Empire’s colonial enterprise. Writer Jamaica Kincaid and linguist/author Sarah Ogilvie Words of…

Ten years after the passing of Los Angeles’ own Octavia E. Butler–one of America’s best science fiction writers and one of the few African-American women in the field—ALOUD celebrates Butler’s legacy. Navigating the dystopic L.A. that Butler often described in her short stories and novels, this…

One of the most talked-about books of last year (nominated for the Man Booker Prize and The National Book Award), A Little Life is a profoundly bold epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century. Yanagihara follows the tragic and transcendent lives of four men—an architect, painter…

Artist Rachel Sussman has traveled around the world to photograph organisms—trees, lichens, bacteria—that are 2,000 or more years old. Confronting lives that extend so much longer than human lifespans challenges us to rethink the context of our human communities and the more-than-human environments…

Betancourt, the extraordinary Colombian French politician and activist, whose New York Times bestselling memoir chronicled her six and a half year captivity in the Colombian jungle by the FARC, offers a stunning debut novel about freedom and fate. Set against the backdrop of Argentina’s Dirty War…

Acclaimed poet and Pulitzer Prize finalist Elizabeth Alexander, who composed and delivered the 2009 inauguration poem for President Obama, offers a deeply felt meditation on the blessings of family, art and community following the death of her husband in her memoir, The Light of the World. Poet…