ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library

The award-winning, beloved author of Pure Colour, Sheila Heti returns to ALOUD with her new thrilling confessional Alphabetical Diaries. Over ten years, Heti kept a record of her thoughts, then arranged the sentences from A to Z. Known for her experimental literary works—passionate and reflective, joyful and despairing—Heti masterfully structures her diary entries into a pastiche of unconventional structure that keeps the reader entirely engaged. Co-presented with Skylight Books.

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.

In her bestselling books, celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein documents the effects of branding, austerity, and climate profiteering on our societies and our souls. Using her own story of an antithetical doppelganger, she looks at what she refers to as the "Mirror World" of our destabilized present, full of doubles and confusion. This is just the beginning of her part comic memoir and part chilling reportage about the world we’re living in and a path beyond confusion and despair. Klein was in conversation with the Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author Cory Doctorow.

Join Tess Gunty to discuss her debut novel The Rabbit Hutch, the winner of this year’s National Book Award. In her darkly funny and remarkable novel, we’re introduced to a string of overlapping characters and plots mostly centered around La Lapinière, otherwise known as "The Rabbit Hutch," a run-down apartment building in Vacca Vale, Indiana. The novel unconventionally jumps among perspectives, mediums, and tenses, revealing the building's quirky residents. Gunty keeps the plot moving, creating a story that has you hooked from the first page until the surprising finale. The novel touches on so many important issues—loneliness, consumerism, community, and mental illness all with great subtly and intelligence.

"'Stories about empire,' Tobar writes, 'move us because they're echoes of the memories that reside deep in our collective consciousness.' Latinos, after all, are people' living with the hurt caused by war and politics, conquest and surrender, revolution and dictatorship.'" —The New York Times "Latino" is the most broadly defined major race in the United States. In Pulitzer-Prize-winner Héctor Tobar's new book, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of "Latino," Tobar recounts his personal experiences as the son of Guatemalan immigrants and the stories told to him by his Latinx students to offer a thoughtful reproach to racist ideas about Latino people. Our Migrant Souls decodes the meaning of "Latino" as a racial and ethnic identity in the modern United States and seeks to give voice to the angst and anger of young Latino people who have seen Latinidad transformed into hateful tropes about "illegals" and have faced insults, harassment, and division based on white insecurities and economic exploitation.

“This surprising look at the nature of primates has a lot to say about what it means to be human.”―Publishers Weekly Renowned primatologist and bestselling author Frans de Waal has spent thousands of hours observing apes and monkeys both in the wild and in captivity. In his new book (now out in paperback), Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, de Waal challenges widely held beliefs about masculinity and femininity and common assumptions about authority, leadership, cooperation, competition, filial bonds, sexual orientation, gender identity, and the limitations of the gender binary, exceptions to which are also found in other primates. With humor, clarity, and compassion, Different seeks to broaden the conversation about human gender dynamics by promoting an inclusive model that embraces differences.

Around the world, writers and journalists have been increasingly targeted for their work by waves of online harassment. From the missives of QAnon, to the rise of hate speech on Twitter, and the use of doxxing to weaponize an adversary’s personal information, our political context is building a perfect storm of harassment with ever-shifting targets. Join best-selling author Reza Aslan (An American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth) and Black List founder Franklin Leonard for a conversation on the polarized climate in the United States, amidst the movement for human rights in Iran, and around the world. Together, they will discuss how antagonism in online spaces within this fractious moment launches outwards into offline reality, and the insidious impact of harassment on writers, scholars, and creators. Moderated by author and journalist Jean Guerrero.

David Ambroz, best-selling author of A Place Called Home, shares his story of survival on the streets of New York City and later through violence in foster care, always with the goal of moving people from empathy to action. He lays out his ideas, informed through lived experience and policy expertise, to fix foster care, address homelessness, and build a more humane and compassionate nation.

In 2016, The Hidden Life of Trees began the conversation that trees can communicate with each other. Peter Wohlleben’s bestselling book changed the way we looked at ourselves and our environment. Now, after eight years, he follows up his groundbreaking work with The Power of Trees: How Ancient Forests Can Save Us, if We Let Them. This time, Wohlleben delves even further into the life of trees, describing how they pass knowledge to succeeding generations while also discussing their ability to survive climate change. The Power of Trees is a love letter to the forest and a passionate argument for protecting nature's boundless diversity, not only for the trees but also for us.

Bestselling author Cheryl Strayed takes the ALOUD stage to discuss the transformation of her popular book, Tiny Beautiful Things, to the television screen with show creator and executive producer Liz Tigelaar. Tiny Beautiful Things tells the story of Dear Sugar, a respected advice columnist whose own life is falling apart. Told in multiple timelines with intimacy and candor. Strayed is able to mine the beauty, struggle, and humor in her life to show us that we are not beyond rescue and that our stories are ultimately our salvation. The eight-part series starring Kathryn Hahn debuts on Hulu on April 7.