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Kristin Chenoweth |
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For those of you who missed authors on the Bank of America Main Stage during the Festival, the podcasts are now available for your enjoyment! Click event or author names to listen.
John Quiñones | Heroes Among Us: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Choices
John Quiñones is a co-anchor of the ABC newsmagazine Primetime, a correspondent for 20/20, and the sole anchor of the popular Primetime limited series What Would You Do?, which uses hidden cameras to capture people's unscripted reactions to compelling ethical dilemmas. In a career spanning more than two decades, Quiñones has earned seven national Emmy Awards and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award's Grand Prize for International Reporting, among many other distinctions. In Heroes Among Us, which grew out of his work on What Would You Do?, Quiñones captures the courage and dignity of average American heroes.
Kristin Chenoweth | A Little Bit Wicked: Life, Love, and Faith in Stages
Interviewed by 6abc's Tamala Edwards
Tony Award-winning actress Kristin Chenoweth originated the role of Glinda the Good Witch in the hit Broadway musical Wicked and was nominated for an Emmy for Best Supporting Actress for her work with Pushing Daisies, ABC's Emmy and Golden Globe-nominated show. In addition, she has recorded three albums--A Lovely Way to Spend Christmas, Let Yourself Go, and As I Am--and sang for a sold-out crowd at Carnegie Hall. In A Little Bit Wicked, Chenoweth discusses the challenges she's faced balancing faith, family, private life, and her public persona.
Renegades: Radical African American Voices in the Arts
Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, and Sonia Sanchez
Moderated by Charles Fuller
Four revolutionary African American artists--including the controversial former New Jersey Poet Laureate Amiri Baraka (Home: Social Essays), award-winning poet Sonia Sanchez (Homegirls and Handgrenades), multiple Obie Award-winner Ed Bullins (The Hungered One), and Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist Charles Fuller--took the stage at the Free Library Festival to discuss the history and future of African American voices in the arts.
Joyce Carol Oates | Dear Husband,: Stories
Over the span of more than four decades, Joyce Carol Oates has produced an enormous body of work consisting of novels, short stories, criticism, plays, and poetry. Not a year has gone by since the mid-1960's in which she has not published at least one book. Among her many distinctions, she has received the National Book Award for them, the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award, and she was recently nominated for the Man Booker International Award. A collection of 14 character-driven short stories, "Dear Husband, like most of Oates' work, is vigorously dark, and it reminds us why we keep reading her in the first place: because we just can't turn away" (Elle).
First Person StorySlam: Philly vs. Chicago
This recording contains explicit content.
Slam-winning storytellers from First Person Arts in Philadelphia and Windy City Story Slam in Chicago took the stage to tell their true stories on the theme "Mortified." By cumulative score, Team Philadelphia, which included Angel Hogan, Katonya Mosley, Ryan T. Barlow, Amy Malissa and Rob Kogan, was declared the winner. The individual winner--and recipient of a "golden ticket" to the Grand Slam at the 2009 First Person Festival in November--was Chicago's Max Glaessner. You can read bios of all of the storytellers here and stream videos of the storytellers' Festival performances here.
Dara Torres | Age is Just a Number: Achieve Your Dreams at Any Stage in Your Life
The first American swimmer to compete in five Olympic Games, Dara Torres has set three world records and won 12 Olympic medals, including four gold medals. Returning to the Games for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Torres-at age 41-brought home three silver medals. In Age is Just a Number, Torres speaks frankly about diving back in for her comeback, being an older athlete in a younger athlete's game, working through pain, seizing the moment, and never giving up.
William D. Cohan | House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street
"Masterfully reported," according to the Los Angeles Times, William D. Cohan's House of Cards chronicles the shocking fall of Bear Stearns and the end of the Second Gilded Age on Wall Street, explaining how a combination of risky bets, corporate political infighting, lax government regulations, and awful decision-making wrought havoc on the world financial system. A former senior Wall Street investment banker, Cohan is the author of the bestseller The Last Tycoons, winner of the 2007 FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. His writing frequently appears in the Financial Times, Fortune, and the New York Times.
Jane Hamilton | Laura Rider's Masterpiece
Acclaimed novelist Jane Hamilton is the author of the PEN/Hemingway Award winner The Book of Ruth and the New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Map of the World, both of which selected for Oprah's Book Club. The Washington Post chose her novel When Madeline Was Young as a Best Book of 2006. In her new book, Laura Rider's Masterpiece, Le Divorce meets The Love Letter as Hamilton concocts a comedic tale of sex, manipulation, and delusions of grandeur in small town America.
Vicki Myron | Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World
On a freezing morning in 1988, Spencer Public Library director Vicki Myron discovered a tiny, bedraggled kitten abandoned in the library's night drop box. She adopted the cat and named him Dewey Readmore Books, and for 19 years, Dewey lived at the library and grew into a strutting, affable cat that brought smiles to patrons' faces. A #1 New York Times Best Seller, Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World is Myron's memoir of her loyal feline companion and how he became a beacon of hope for the struggling small town of Spencer, Iowa.
Festival event photographs courtesy of Katie Riggan
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On Saturday and Sunday, April 18 and 19, 2009, the Free Library hosted its third annual Free Library Festival. Drawing our largest crowd to date--estimated at 35,000!--the Festival presented more than 50 authors, performers, and programs, and 80 exhibitors at the Street Fair and Literary Marketplace. Thanks to our Festival Sponsors, the City of Philadelphia, and the Fairmount Park Commission, to the Free Library staff, and to our more than 200 dedicated Festival Volunteers for another fantastic fest! );)
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