LFPL's At the Library Series

Join author Jermaine Fowler, host of the top-rated history podcast The Humanity Archive , for the launch of his new book of the same name. This sweeping survey of Black history challenges dominant perspectives and goes outside the textbooks to reveal America's hidden history.

In The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go, businessman and former U.S. Ambassador Matthew Barzun layers lessons from American history and business with insights from his career in tech, politics, and diplomacy to show how we can lead meaningful change in our companies, communities, and even our nation. Barzun served as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom during the Obama administration and is the current owner/publisher of Louisville Magazine.

Aging is a subject of concern to many that is often misunderstood. However, it presents a wonderful opportunity to make informed choices and live to our potential. Dr. Robert Friedland will help you learn the steps to take in your activities, diet, and mental outlook, in order to grasp that opportunity.

MARGO PRICE is a Nashville-based singer-songwriter.She has released three LPs, earned a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, performed on Saturday Night Live, and is the first female musician to sit on the board of Farm Aid.S.G. GOODMAN is a critically-acclaimed musician and Kentucky native. She was rightly coined an “untamed rock n roll truth-teller” by Rolling Stone.

Join us for a fun-filled evening where Andy Weir (The Martian, Artemis, Project Hail Mary) is interviewed by John Scalzi (Old Man's War, Redshirts). Sponsored by Carmichael's Bookstore and LFPL.

It’s a common rule of physical comedy. A successful fall on the keister requires that you know how a real pratfall looks. And feels. And who are more qualified to find laughs in the foibles of daily human behavior than those prone to such…foiblings, I guess? (This, by the way, means everyone on Earth is qualified.) Join actor/creator and physical comedy teacher Gregory Maupin for an evening of slapstick recognition that only by identifying patterns of Wrong can we even begin to identify what Right might look like.

We often think of science as the result of a gradual process of improvement. On this view, partially successful theories are replaced over time by ever more successful ones. In this class, I argue that deeply flawed theories – which even contemporaries immediately recognize as failures – can influence and encourage scientific investigation and thinking. Descartes’ hydrodynamic conception of neurophysiology provides a specific example of how it is possible to fail up in science.

This class discusses how our fear of failure ultimately impedes collective efforts in working towards establishing a racially equitable society. Many people find discussions about race to be extremely fraught and divisive, which is usually expressed as a fear of “saying the wrong thing”. This discomfort that arises when thinking and talking about racial inequity and injustice, I propose, arises from a collective social failure to be sensitive and attentive to racial privilege and oppression.

Angeline Boulley is a storyteller and proud Chippewa author who writes about her Ojibwe community in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. A former Director of the Office of Indian Education at the U.S. Department of Education, her debut Young Adult novel Firekeeper’s Daughter was an instant #1 New York Times Bestseller. The book was named one of the top 100 YA novels of all time by TIME Magazine and is currently being adapted into a Netflix miniseries by Higher Ground Productions.

To celebrate its 50th anniversary, Kentucky Humanities, in partnership with the Kentucky Tourism, Arts, and Heritage Cabinet and the Louisville Free Public Library, will host Louisville’s own musical group Linkin’ Bridge in conversation with inspirational speaker and humanities scholar Aminata Cairo. The group will discuss storytelling through song and the lessons we learn from each other’s stories in a world that is often fraught with division.

Join Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks (March) for a discussion of her latest novel, Horse, based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred Lexington.

#1 New York Times bestseller E. Lockhart (We Were Liars, Family of Liars) in conversation with Brooke Lauren Davis (After Dark with Roxie Clark, The Hollow Inside), brought to you by Carmichael’s Bookstore and LFPL.

Join Poet Laureate Crystal Wilkinson (Perfect Black) and historian Emily Bingham (My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song) as they read from and discuss their latest works, which offer fresh new perspectives on the Bluegrass state, past and present.

Join civil rights lawyer and University of Louisville law professor Dan Canon for a discussion of his new book Pleading Out – a blistering critique of America’s assembly-line approach to criminal justice through plea bargaining, and the permanent criminal class it creates.

Join several of the parents featured in the book A Celebration of Family: Stories of Parents with Disabilities as they share their experiences, the difficulties they may have encountered, and their family successes.

Affrilachian poet Bernard Clay narrates his West-Side Louisville upbringing and the complexities of Black Appalachian identity, reading from his debut collection of poems compiled from more than twenty years of work.

Co-authors Winfrey P. Blackburn, Jr. and R. Scott Gill discuss their latest book Gideon Shryock: His Life & Architecture. This program is presented in partnership with the Filson Historical Society.

Former U.S. Ambassador/peace mediator Carey Cavanaugh will discuss the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its effect on the future of the Eastern European region. Ambassador Carey Cavanaugh is professor of diplomacy and conflict resolution at the University of Kentucky and chairman of International Alert, a London-based independent peacebuilding organization.

United We Stood: Memories of 9/11 panel discussion: Moderator Melissa Swan and panelists recall their first-hand experiences during and following the attacks.

Dale Dougherty, a Louisville native, tech pioneer and a national leader of the Maker movement, talks about how that movement is opening up the world -- and bringing people together. He is the founder of MAKE Magazine and creator of Maker Faire.