Our Fall 2014 schedule continues with these great upcoming Author Events: The Monday Poets series on the first Monday of every month beginning in October, groundbreaking television writer and producer Norman Lear, high profile biography writer Walter Isaacson, a sweet evening with Joy the Baker, vampire novel queen Anne Rice, Academy Award-winning actress Anjelica Huston, performer and artist extraordinaire Alan Cumming, and Richard McGuire, Charles Burns, & Chip Kidd holding court talking comics, storytelling, graphic design, and art!

View and listen to the Top 10 Author Event Podcasts Downloaded in September 2014.

	Cornel West and Tavis Smiley | The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto Recorded 4/27/2012 Listen to MP3 audio Educator and philosopher, Dr. Cornel West is one of America’s most provocative and gifted public intellectuals. Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University, he is the author of the contemporary classic, Race Matters, which changed the course of America’s dialogue on race, justice and democracy. The recipient of the American Book Award, his other books include the New York Times bestseller Democracy Matters and Hope on a Tightrope: Words and Wisdom. In 2009, Time magazine honored Tavis Smiley as one of “The World’s Most Influential People.” A human rights advocate who has served as a key broadcaster for two decades, Smiley is co-host with Dr. West for the Smiley and West show on Public Radio International. The author of 14 books, he founded SmileyBooks, a publishing house that features New York Times bestselling authors as well as exciting new voices. In the summer of 2011, West and Smiley embarked on an 18-city poverty tour to highlight the hardships of poor people. The Rich and the Rest of Us is their manifesto that coalesce their key ideas about re-thinking poor people’s possibilities and eradicating poverty.
	"The Best Day of My Life So Far..." Recorded 11/14/2010 Listen to MP3 audio What happens when Philadelphia seniors open up by sharing stories from their lives? On Seniors' Storytelling Day, be ready to smile, laugh and even cry as our city's seniors take the stage to read stories that they have written, and answer questions from the audience. Inspired by her friendship with her grandma, Benita Cooper launched The Best Day of My Life (So Far), a multimedia storytelling project to connect seniors with younger generations. Find out more about the project @ www.thebestdayofmylifesofar.blogspot.com and view a short video of a class in action: www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3ZAb8o0FAg
	Sherman Alexie | War Dances Recorded 10/28/2009 Listen to MP3 audio Praised for his unsentimental portrayals of contemporary life among Native Americans, Sherman Alexie writes stories and novels that are by turns hilarious and heartbreaking. His work has earned numerous awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award for his short story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and the National Book Award for his young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. War Dances is a collection of stories of ordinary men on the brink of extraordinary change. This recording contains explicit content.
	Jared Diamond | The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? Recorded 1/13/2013 Listen to MP3 audio A globally renowned scholar and recipient of a National Science Medal, Jared Diamond is the author of the bestselling book Guns, Germs and Steel, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. An ecologist and evolutionary biologist, Diamond is a professor of geography and physiology at UCLA and a founding member of the board of the Society of Conservation Biology. His other works include Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Why is Sex Fun?, and The Third Chimpanzee. Informed by his decades of fieldwork around the globe, as well as evidence from Inuit, Amazonian Indians, and Kalahari San people, The World Until Yesterday offers a comprehensive depiction of traditional human societies and the practices we can learn from them.
	Bill Bryson | A Short History of Nearly Everything Recorded 5/20/2003 Listen to MP3 audio Bill Bryson is the bestselling author of wiseacre travelogues A Walk in the Woods and I’m a Stranger Here Myself, as well as excursions into the English language including Mother Tongue and Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words. A Short History of Nearly Everything is an inviting exposition of some of the most difficult ideas designed.
	Ken Burns and Geoffrey C. Ward | The Roosevelts: An Intimate History Recorded 9/11/2014 Listen to MP3 audio “Not only the greatest documentarian of the day, but also the most influential filmmaker period” (The Baltimore Sun), Ken Burns has opened the doors of American history for millions of people. With an intimately personal yet grand style of storytelling, his films have resurrected the people and events both mythologized and lost to history. His documentaries include Baseball, Jazz, The Dustbowl, Brooklyn Bridge, and the landmark series The Civil War. His films have won 12 Emmy Awards and have twice been nominated for Oscars. A seven-part program that follows Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt for more than a century, Burns’s new series aired on PBS this fall. Geoffrey C. Ward, Burns’ longtime collaborator, is the principal writer of The Civil War, Jazz, Baseball, and 13 other of the director’s PBS documentaries. For his work he has won seven Emmy Awards.  Ward is also author of A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, winner of the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography, as well as more than a dozen other books whose themes range from East Indian culture to Mark Twain. Meelya Gordon Memorial Lecture In conversation with Tracey Matisak
	Chris Hedges | Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle Recorded 7/28/2009 Listen to MP3 audio In Empire of Illusion, Chris Hedges, author of the bestseller War is a Force that Give Us Meaning, contends there are two Americas: one, a literate world that can cope with complexity and separate illusion from truth; the other, retreating from reality into a world of false certainty and magic. Hedges navigates the “other” culture to expose an age of decline and self-delusion. A foreign correspondent for nearly two decades, Hedges was a member of the New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism.
	David Lynch | The Unified Field Recorded 9/11/2014 Listen to MP3 audio Internationally acclaimed as the director of films such as Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), Wild at Heart (1990), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006), as well as the groundbreaking TV series, Twin Peaks (1990), David Lynch has also continued to work as a visual artist throughout his much-admired career. The Unified Field, an exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where Lynch studied, features approximately 90 paintings, drawings, and prints from 1965 to the present—many of which have rarely been seen in public—as well as a section exploring his early work and its origins in Philadelphia. In conversation with PAFA Senior Curator and curator of the exhibition, Robert Cozzolino.
	Slavoj Zizek | Event: A Philosophical Journey Through A Concept Recorded 9/23/2014 Listen to MP3 audio “The most dangerous philosopher in the West” (The New Republic), Slovenian Slavoj Zizek is a towering figure in Marxist ideology, psychoanalysis, and social theory. The author of dozens of books and articles and the subject of a score of interviews and documentaries, his best known volumes in English include The Sublime Object of Ideology and First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. “The Elvis of cultural theory” (Chronicle of Higher Education), Zizek adopts a radical style in his newspaper op-eds and academic works, which has earned him an international following and relevancy. His new book asks fundamental questions about what is really happening when an event occurs, whether events are interconnected, and if we are really agents of our own fates.
	Maureen Corrigan | So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures Recorded 9/10/2014 Listen to MP3 audio “Immensely likable, eclectic, and dynamic” (Booklist), Maureen Corrigan brings intellectual rigor and an infectious enthusiasm to her literary reviews on NPR’s Fresh Air and the “Book World” section of The Washington Post. She is also the author of 2005’s Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading, a literary memoir about the books and authors that have shaped her life. Corrigan’s reviews have appeared in dozens of publications, including the New York Times, The Nation, and The Boston Globe. She also is currently the Critic-in-Residence at Georgetown University. So We Read On encourages readers to rediscover the greatness of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s enduring masterpiece, The Great Gatsby.

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