Join us for online presentations featuring acclaimed literary critics, historians, and other scholars.
• Watch past programs
• Sign up for invitations to future online events and monthly LOA news
Please note: A complete listing of LOA’s Lift Every Voice events centered on African American poetry can be found at africanamericanpoetry.org.
UPCOMING EVENTS
Wednesday, December 16
6:00-7:00 pm ET
Peanuts at 70: Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy & the Gang, and The Meaning of Life
A conversation with Sarah Boxer, Jonathan Lethem, Clifford Thompson, and Chris Ware
Andrew Blauner, moderator
Join editor Andrew Blauner and four distinguished contributors to the LOA collection The Peanuts Papers: Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy & the Gang, and the Meaning of Life, for a seventieth anniversary conversation reflecting on the deeper truths of Schulz’s deceptively simple strip and its impact on their lives and art and on the broader culture.
REGISTER
PAST EVENTS
The Genius of Hemingway: Robert W. Trogdon, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein
(December 2, 2020)
The Nineteenth Amendment Turns 100: A New Look at the History of Women’s Suffrage, with Susan Ware and Stefanie Peters
(November 19, 2020; video not available)
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, with Ruth Franklin, Francine Prose, and John Guare
(October 29, 2020)
The Paranoid Style in American Politics: Revisiting Richard Hofstadter in the Time of Trump, with Sean Wilentz, Eric Foner, Arlie Hochschild, and Ira Katznelson
(October 13, 2020)
Reading James Baldwin Now: Eddie Glaude Jr., on “The White Man’s Guilt”
(September 23, 2020)
Thirteen Days: Abraham Lincoln and the Crisis of Presidential Succession, with Ted Widmer
(September 10, 2020)
August 26, 2020
It’s a New World, Golde: Classic American Musicals in the 21st Century
New productions are reassessing and updating great Golden Age Broadway musicals like Oklahoma!, South Pacific, and My Fair Lady to reflect contemporary aspirations for American society. Are these new interpretations departing from or reviving their original spirit and meaning? Join Laurence Maslon, NYU arts professor and editor of Library of America’s American Musicals; Tazewell Thompson, librettist (Blue) and director (Porgy and Bess); and Ted Chapin, president of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, for behind-the-scenes stories and conversation about the present and future of a great American art form.
Presented in partnership with the Hampton Library, Great Performances’ Broadway’s Best, NYU Skirball Center, the Kurt Weill Foundation, the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, The WNET Group’s ALL ARTS Channel, and BroadwayWorld.
August 6, 2020
The Fate of the Earth: Jonathan Schell and His Legacy
To mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day, renowned psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton and Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher of The Nation, discuss the writer and friend who put his remarkable literary gifts in the service of disarmament, nonviolence, international cooperation, and the irresistible power of democracy. Moderated by Martin J. Sherwin, editor of the new LOA collection Jonathan Schell: The Fate of the Earth, The Abolition, The Unconquerable World.
Presented in partnership with The Nation, Type Media Center, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), Friends of the Earth, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The New Press, Arms Control Association, and Global Zero.
July 28, 2020
Who Tells Your Story: Joanne B. Freeman on Hamilton and History
As Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton streams on Disney+, Joanne B. Freeman, Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University and editor of the Library of America edition of Hamilton’s writing (which helped to inspire Miranda), discusses the musical and what it tells us about how history is made and remade. (1 hr., 3 min.)
Presented in partnership with the National Council for History Education, the New-York Historical Society, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the American Historical Association, and the Museum of the American Revolution.
July 16, 2020
Reading James Baldwin Now: Darryl Pinckney on No Name in the Street
Novelist and cultural critic Darryl Pinckney offers a close reading of Baldwin’s beautiful, blistering memoir of the events that forged his consciousness of race and identity: growing up in Harlem, the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, his long residence in France, his fateful decision to return to the American South. (58: 17)
Presented in partnership with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers (ALSCW), the American Writers Museum, and the University of Houston.
Reading James Baldwin Now: Farah Jasmine Griffin on “Sonny’s Blues”
(June 25, 2020)
Harold Bloom and the American Canon from Emerson to Toni Morrison, with David Mikics
(June 16, 2020)
What Is American Conservatism?, with Andrew J. Bacevich and Sean Wilentz
(June 4, 2020)
