Events
| Name |
Organization |
Dates |
Location |
A Conversation with Anne Rice: The Wolf Gift
Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library February 14, 2012 Anne Rice gained notoriety and a vast cult readership for her Vampire Chronicles series, which the Washington Post called "unrelentingly erotic . . . unforgettable." The first and most popular book, Interview With the Vampire (1976) reinvented and refreshed the archetypal vampire myth, and was later made into a film starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. It was followed by The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned, which the San Francisco... |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library |
02/14/12 |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia |
Talk About It: How Fair is Fair Trade
Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library February 15, 2012 Join Numa St. Louis, Vice President of Haitian Professionals of Philadelphia, Darlene DeLaPaz of Ten Thousand Villages Center City, and Dr. Sharon Ravitch of the University of Pennsylvania for a discussion on whether or not fair trade policies improve the economic independence of farmers and artisans in Haiti and other developing nations. The discussion will be moderated by Tamara Walker, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.
This event is part of the... |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library |
02/15/12 |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia |
Art at Lunch - Clocks, Calendars, and Conversion Charts
Presented by Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) February 15, 2012 This talk explores how the first modern globalization wave around 1900 profoundly altered notions of time, space, and simultaneity. In 1884, Greenwich Mean Time was adopted as a new universal time standard. Clocks and watches became more affordable and proliferated among ordinary people and as a consequence, new understandings of personal time management, punctuality and time efficiency emerged. Vanessa Ogle, from the University of Pennsvlvania, traces these heated and controversial debates... |
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) |
02/15/12 |
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), Philadelphia |
A Conversation with Edmund White and Christopher Bram
Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library February 16, 2012 Called a literary lion of the gay world, Edmund White is best known for his autobiographical novels in which unabashed hedonism thrives, including A Boy's Own Story and The Beautiful Room is Empty. A chronicler of gay life since the 1970s, White helped define the nascent parameters of gay culture. He is the author of the novel Hotel de Dream, several essays and biographies—including Jean Genet's—and the 1980 travelogue States of Desire: Travels in Gay America, which crystallized... |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library |
02/16/12 |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia |
A Conversation with Jamal Joseph, Panther Baby: A Life of Rebellion and Reinvention
Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library February 21, 2012 As a teenager in the Bronx ghetto of the 1960s, Eddie Joseph was introduced to the tenets of the Black Panther Party just as it gained a national foothold. The cause swallowed him into one of the most emblematic criminal cases of the '60s. After his stint at Rikers, Eddie—now called Jamal—joined the Revolutionary Black Underground and eventually landed back in prison—where he founded a prison theater and earned two degrees. In his memoir, Panther Baby, he vividly recounts... |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library |
02/21/12 |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia |
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Fair Trade Coffee Fair
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Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library |
02/22/12 |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia |
Art at Lunch - Moe Brooker: Start to Finish
Presented by Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) February 22, 2012 Artist and PAFA faculty member Moe Brooker has been instructing young artists for almost forty years. Brooker’s philosophy of art-making includes the belief that process determines product, focusing specifically on how studio practices and choice of materials determines the types of images that an artist creates. This talk by Brooker, at the same time that an exhibition of his work is on view in PAFA’s Alumni Gallery, highlights his own process of creation and tracks the... |
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) |
02/22/12 |
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), Philadelphia |
A Conversation with David Isay, All There Is: Love Stories from StoryCorps
Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library February 23, 2012 As founder of StoryCorps, David Isay has dedicated his career to preserving an oral history of the United States. Modeled—in spirit and in scope—after the interviews of the 1930s Works Progress Administration, StoryCorps seeks out ordinary Americans—more than 60,000 so far—whose stories are preserved in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Isay has won numerous broadcasting honors, including multiple Peabody Awards and Guggenheim, MacArthur, and... |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library |
02/23/12 |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia |
A Conversation with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Life Upon These Shores
Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library February 28, 2012 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of numerous works of criticism, including The Signifying Monkey, winner of the American Book Award. As the writer and producer of the acclaimed PBS documentary African American Lives, Gates explored the histories of many prominent African Americans. Life Upon These Shores traces African American... |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library |
02/28/12 |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia |
Art at Lunch - Between Shores: Henry Ossawa Tanner and Transatlanticism
Presented by Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) February 29, 2012 Henry Ossawa Tanner lived a life between two shores of the Atlantic – America and France – and his navigation of these national boundaries deeply affected his art. Tanner pursued his prolific body of religious paintings solely during this time “in between,” never painting a religious scene on American soil, and in this talk, Jeff Richmond-Moll, a Lecturing Fellow at PAFA, discusses how a Transatlantic vision of space and a precedent of “betweenness” in... |
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) |
02/29/12 |
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), Philadelphia |
A Conversation with Ann Beattie, Mrs. Nixon and with Thomas Mallon, Watergate
Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library March 1, 2012 After publishing several stories in The New Yorker, Ann Beattie burst on the literary scene in 1976 with Chilly Scenes of Winter and promptly became the unofficial diarist of a generation, delivering "irony-laced reports from the front line of the baby boomers’ war with themselves" (Vanity Fair). With spare, whip-smart prose, Beattie portrayed the sorts of relationships—the results of divorce, sexual liberation, or youthful aimlessness—that were the norm for those... |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library |
03/01/12 |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia |
A Conversation with Jodi Picoult: Lone Wolf
Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library March 5, 2012 The queen of the book club, Jodi Picoult is known for her fictional page-turners that feature nuanced characters, pitch-perfect descriptions of suburbia—and the darkness it often conceals—and unfettered insight into the shape-shifting terrain of family relationships. Her stories plumb hot-button topics ranging from teenage suicide and stem cell research to date rape and school shootings. She is the author of 18 novels, including the #1 New York Times bestsellers House Rules,... |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library |
03/05/12 |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia |
Pen and Paintbrush Club: In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck
Presented by Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) March 7, 2012 Steinbeck’s socially engaged novel highlights the frustration of a community of fruit pickers and their resulting attempts to organize an ununionized strike in 1930s California. Paintings like Philip Evergood’s Mine Disaster and Alice Neel’s Investigations of Poverty at the Russell Sage Foundation will highlight artist interest in the plight of the working class at a volatile time in American history. |
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) |
03/07/12 |
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), Philadelphia |
A Conversation with Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander: New American Haggadah
Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library March 8, 2012 Jonathan Safran Foer became a certified literary wunderkind at the age of 25 with his debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated, which told the story of a young man's search across the obliterated Ukrainian landscape for the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. His New York Times bestseller, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, was called "an uplifting myth born of the sorrows of 9/11" (Boston Globe). Nathan Englander is the author of The Ministry of Special Cases and For... |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library |
03/08/12 |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia |
A Conversation with Alain de Botton: Religion for Atheists
Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library March 11, 2012 Alain de Botton's aphoristic first novel, On Love, was a winking dissertation on romantic love, published when he was just 23. It was followed by several books that explored a philosophy of everyday life, including The Architecture of Happiness and How Proust Can Change Your Life, which have achieved bestselling status in 30 countries. He also founded and helps to run The School of Life in London, dedicated to a new vision of education on how to live well. In Religion for Atheists, de Botton... |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library |
03/11/12 |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia |
A Conversation with George Dyson, Turning's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe
Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library March 13, 2012 In the 1940s and 1950s, a group of brilliant engineers led by John von Neumann gathered in Princeton, New Jersey with the joint goal of realizing Alan Turing's theoretical universal machine—a thought experiment that scientists use to understand the limits of mechanical computation. As a result of their fervent work, the crucial advancements that dominated 20th century technology emerged. In Turing's Cathedral, technology historian George Dyson recreates the scenes of focused... |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library |
03/13/12 |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia |
2012 Women's Way Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize
Presented by Women's Way at Moore College of Art & Design March 15, 2012 Awards program and discussion with author Rebecca Traister followed by celebration and book signing.
This event is free, thanks to the generosity of the Hamilton Family Foundation. |
Women's Way |
03/15/12 |
Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia |
A Conversation with Elaine Pagels: Revelations
Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library March 15, 2012 Elaine Pagels exploded the myth of the early Christian Church as a unified movement in her 1979 book The Gnostic Gospels, which won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, and was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best books of the 20th century. Known for her work in translating the Nag Hammadi Library, she joined the Princeton faculty in 1982, shortly after receiving a MacArthur Fellowship. Her other books include The Origin of Satan; New York... |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library |
03/15/12 |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia |
One Book, One Philadelphia 10th Anniversary Celebration
Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia at Four Seasons Hotel March 15, 2012 Enjoy a spectacular evening of food and entertainment as the Free Library is joined by former One Book authors to celebrate 10 years of One Book, One Philadelphia! The evening will also feature the world premiere of an original musical composition inspired by this year’s featured selection, written by Gabriella Smith of the Curtis Institute of Music. |
Free Library of Philadelphia |
03/15/12 |
Four Seasons Hotel, Philadelphia |
One Book, One Philadelphia Grand Finale with Edwidge Danticat, Author of Create Dangerously
Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library March 16, 2012 Featured author Edwidge Danticat will discuss the themes in the 2012 One Book, One Philadelphia selection, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. The evening will also feature an exciting musical performance by Haitian American composer and violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain, whose eclectic works have included commissions from Carnegie Hall and the Library of Congress as well as collaborations with artists ranging from Philip Glass to Lady Gaga. |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library |
03/16/12 |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia |
A Conversation with Claude Lanzmann, Author of The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir
Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library March 19, 2012 French filmmaker and journalist Claude Lanzmann achieved worldwide acclaim for his nine-and-a-half-hour cinematic epic Shoah. Unlike other films on the subject of the Holocaust, Shoah used only first-hand accounts from perpetrators and survivors of the death camps, as Lanzmann believed that any attempt to reproduce the history would be to relive the genocide. Born in Paris in 1925, Lanzmann survived the German occupation of France, fought with the French Resistance during World War... |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library |
03/19/12 |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia |
A Conversation with Jeanette Winterson, Author of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library March 20, 2012 Jeanette Winterson's 1985 book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a quasi-autobiographical novel about an adopted daughter's budding lesbian sexuality and relationship with her evangelical mother, won the Whitbread Prize for best first novel, and inspired a BAFTA award-winning BBC television adaptation. With "a reputation as a holy terror, a lesbian desperado and a literary genius” (Salon), Winterson is passionate about the transformative power of art.... |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library |
03/20/12 |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia |
A Conversation with Sarah Vowell, Author of Unfamiliar Fishes
Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library March 22, 2012 Cultural critic and public radio giant Sarah Vowell is a contributing editor for National Public Radio's This American Life and the author of The Partly Cloudy Patriot, Take the Cannoli, and Assassination Vacation. Known for her witty and irreverent exposés of the glorious conundrums of United States history, Vowell examines the far-reaches of Western intervention in our 50th state in her new book, Unfamiliar Fishes. With an eye not just to power but... |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library |
03/22/12 |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia |
A Conversation with Lionel Shriver and Heidi Julavits
Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library March 27, 2012 Lionel Shriver is the author of ten novels and the recipient of the 2005 Orange Prize for her acclaimed book We Need to Talk About Kevin, recently adapted into a major motion picture. With her gift for psychological portraiture and a knack for skewering timely social phenomena, Shriver's work is "tough, complicated, brilliant," according to The New Republic's Ruth Franklin. "Shriver isn’t the kind of writer who lets her themes bubble up opaquely; she seizes... |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library |
03/27/12 |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia |
A Conversation with Robert Kanigel, Author of On an Irish Island
Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library March 28, 2012 Robert Kanigel, author of The Man Who Knew Infinity, tells the story of Great Blasket Island—an island off the coast of Ireland that remained untouched by modern living well into the 20th century. With the Irish language rapidly vanishing from the mainland, Great Blasket, a beautiful, remote island of 150 residents, managed to preserve both a language and a way of life. When scholars and writers such as John Millington Synge began to visit, the island blossomed as the center of... |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library |
03/28/12 |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia |
A Conversation with Arlen Specter, Author of Life Among the Cannibals
Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library March 29, 2012 The longest-serving senator in Pennsylvania history, Senator Arlen Specter began his goodbye speech after 30 years in office by declaring: "This is not a farewell address but rather a closing argument." Referring to the internal ideological wrangling that forced him from the Republican Party in 2009—only to be defeated in a Democratic primary in 2010—Specter decried the gridlocked Senate in his farewell address, lamenting: "In some quarters, compromise has become a... |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library |
03/29/12 |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia |
A Conversation with Rosamond Bernier, Author of Some of My Lives
Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library April 3, 2012 Born in Philadelphia, 95-year-old Rosamond Bernier has tamed wild animals, flown her own plane, and befriended the likes of Henri Matisse, Leonard Bernstein, and Frida Kahlo. The first-ever European features editor for Vogue in post-war Paris, she co-founded the influential art magazine L’OEIL in 1955. Returning stateside in 1971, she embraced a new career as a lecturer and married the love of her life, New York Times art critic John Russell. Bernier's vivid... |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library |
04/03/12 |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia |
A Conversation with Anthony Shadid, Author of House of Stone
Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library April 4, 2012 A sharp-eyed chronicler of the human stories behind the news, Anthony Shadid is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner—for his 2004 Washington Post coverage of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, and his 2010 coverage of the United States' withdrawal from the country. Former Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post, he is the author of Night Draws Near, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. One of... |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library |
04/04/12 |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia |
An Evening with Philip Levine
Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library April 17, 2012 Known for his "big-hearted, Whitmanesque poems about working-class Detroit" (New York Times), Philip Levine was named Poet Laureate of the United States in 2011. Levine’s early poems, often written in narrow, seven-syllable lines, are gritty evocations of the lives of working people, inspired by his work as a factory laborer: "I believed that if I could understand my life—or at least the part my work played in it—I could embrace it with some degree of... |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library |
04/17/12 |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia |
A Conversation with Robert Polito on David Goodis
Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library April 19, 2012 2012 Philadelphia Book Festival
An editor, poet, and critic, Robert Polito is Director of Writing Programs at The New School and the author of National Book Critics Circle Award winner Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, which untangled Thompson the author from his trademark psychopathic characters and grim tales of failed lives. Polito's new book is a landmark volume that collects five great novels from the height of noir cult favorite noir David Goodis's career.... |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library |
04/19/12 |
Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia |
