Celebrate the finalists in the 2022 Poetry Contest with the Enoch Pratt Free Library and Little Patuxent Review! The three finalists, Maryland's Poet Laureate, and LPR’s head editor read. Caitlin Wilson, the winner of the 2022 Poetry Contest, is a Maryland poet. She holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her writing has appeared in ENTROPY, filling Station, Iron Horse Literary Review, McNeese Review, RHINO, Rogue Agent, and Wildness. She was a 2021 Sewanee Writer’s Conference contributor and recipient of VCU’s 2021 and 2020 Graduate Poetry Awards, a 2019 AWP Intro Journals Projec ..read more

Join us for a reading by Lori Jakiela, who won the 2021 Wicked Woman Poetry Prize for her manuscript, How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?, and the contest judge, Nancy Naomi Carlson. Lori Jakiela is the author of the memoir Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe (2016), which received the 2016 Saroyan Prize from Stanford University. She is also the author of the memoirs Miss New York Has Everything, The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious, and Portrait of the Artist as a Bingo Worker, as well as the poetry collections Spot the Terrorist! and How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen? Her work has b ..read more

Poets Sylvia Dianne “Ladi Di” Beverly, Patrick Washington, Diane Wilbon Parks, and Hiram Larew with Cliff Bernier on harmonica present and discuss poems, music, and artwork about America’s history of slavery. This powerful, all-too-timely 60-minute program reimagines the voices and legacy of those enslaved at the historic Woodlawn Plantation Estate in Fairfax, VA. Sylvia Dianne Beverly is an internationally acclaimed poet, presenting poetry in London, England, at the Lewisham Theatre. A collection of her work is housed at George Washington University's Gelman Library. She is a member of A Spl ..read more

Celebrate the finalists in the 2021 Poetry Contest with the Enoch Pratt Free Library and Little Patuxent Review! The three finalists, another contributor to the summer issue, and LPR’s head editor read. Steven Hollies, the winner of the 2021 Poetry Contest, is a Rockville native living mostly inside his head, a 2019 graduate of Howard Community College, and a drop-out from many other times and places. He enjoys playing volleyball, guitar, hooky, jokes, games, with words, around, along, it cool, hard to get, with fire, and the fool. Read "Body/language," the poem that won the 2021 Poetry Conte ..read more

Leslie Gray Streeter is in conversation with Melanie Hood-Wilson about her book, Black Widow. Looking at widowhood through the prism of race, mixed marriage, and aging, Black Widow: A Sad-Funny Journey Through Grief for People Who Normally Avoid Books with Words Like "Journey" in the Title redefines the stages of grief, from coffin shopping to day-drinking, to being a grown-ass woman crying for your mommy, to breaking up and making up with God, to facing the fact that life goes on even after the death of the person you were supposed to live it with. While she stumbles toward an uncertain fut ..read more

Presented in partnership with the Reginald F. Lewis Museum. Annette Gordon-Reed is in conversation with Lawrence Jackson about her new book, On Juneteenth. In ON JUNETEENTH, Gordon-Reed combines her own scholarship with a personal and intimate reflection of an overlooked holiday that has suddenly taken on new significance in a post-George Floyd world. As Gordon-Reed writes, “It is staggering that there is no date commemorating the end of slavery in the United States.” Yet, Texas—the last state to free its slaves—has long acknowledged the moment on June 19, 1865, when US Major General Gordon G ..read more

Join us for a virtual reading by Virginia Crawford, E. Doyle-Gillespie, Meg Eden, Brian Gilmore, Joseph Harrison, Christine Higgins, and Michael Salcman, seven local poets with recent books. Virginia Crawford, author of questions for water (Apprentice House Press, 2021), is a long-time teaching artist with the Maryland State Arts Council. She has co-edited two anthologies: Poetry Baltimore, poems about a city and Voices Fly, An Anthology of Exercises and Poems from the Maryland State Arts Council Artist-in-Residence Program. She earned degrees in Creative Writing from Emerson College, Boston ..read more

Alec MacGillis is in conversation with Jesse J. Holland about his new book, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America . Alec MacGillis is a senior reporter at ProPublica. MacGillis previously reported for The New Republic, The Washington Post, and the Baltimore Sun. He won the 2016 Robin Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, the 2017 Polk Award for National Reporting, and the 2017 Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic, New York, Harper's, and New York Times Magazine, among other publications. A resident of Baltimore, MacGillis i ..read more

Presented in partnership with AARP Maryland. Justin Fenton is in conversation with Clarence Davis about his book, We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption. In this urgent book, award-winning investigative journalist Justin Fenton distills hundreds of interviews, thousands of court documents, and countless hours of video footage to present the definitive account of the entire scandal of the Gun Trace Task Force. The result is an astounding, riveting feat of reportage about a rogue police unit, the city they held hostage, and the ongoing struggle between American law e ..read more

Audrey Clare Farley is in conversation with Carrie Callaghan about her work and her newest book, The Unfit Heiress. For readers of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and The Phantom of Fifth Avenue, The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt is a page-turning drama of fortunes, eugenics and women's reproductive rights framed by the sordid court battle between Ann Cooper Hewitt and her socialite mother. Audrey Clare Farley is a writer, book reviewer, and historian of twentieth-century American fiction and culture. Having earned a PhD in English from ..read more