To celebrate these career-crowning pieces, four acclaimed poets, scholars, and former students of Vendler’s gather to reflect on her remarkable achievement: Harvard professor and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Stephanie Burt, celebrated poet-critic Dan Chiasson, Vendler’s literary executor Christopher Spaide, and essayist Kamran Javadizadeh, Professor of English at Villanova. Join us for a lively evening of personal remembrances and insights into the great critic’s assessments of poets from Walt Whitman to Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson to Ocean Vuong.

To explore these prophetic masterworks and their inimitable creator, LOA LIVE presents two preeminent scholars and writers in conversation: Imani Perry, National Book Award winner and editor of the LOA Xenogenesis edition, and Tananarive Due, World Fantasy Award–winning novelist and a close friend of Butler’s, about whom she once wrote: “Sister, we got cities burning, they were telling her. And how dare she retreat into this world. But actually, she was showing us an even bigger world, something that we couldn't even wrap our minds around.”

Join four distinguished scholars for a lively debate on the continued resonance of this enduring masterpiece: Yale professor Joanne Freeman (acclaimed author of The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War), Pulitzer Prize–winning NYU historian Steven Hahn (Illiberal America: A History), Harvard’s James T. Kloppenberg (Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought), and Olivier Zunz, Commonweath Professor at the University of Virginia and editor of the definitive LOA edition of Democracy in America, featuring Arthur Goldhammer’s celebrated translation.

To mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day, West Point professor Elizabeth D. Samet, editor of World War II Memoirs: The European Theater, joins National Book Award–winning author and Marine veteran Phil Klay for a conversation about these classics of modern war literature: remarkable memoirs that capture the immediacy of history in the making and the impact of wartime on combatants and noncombatants alike.

The views expressed in this program do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

Ruden joins LOA LIVE for a conversation inspired by her book I Am the Arrow: The Life & Art of Sylvia Plath in Six Poems, published this April by Library of America, with Pulitzer-winning poet Diane Seuss and pre-eminent Plath scholars Heather Clark and Amanda Golden.

Join celebrated scholars David Bromwich, Seyla Benhabib, Roger Berkowitz, and Thomas Wild, editor of LOA’s new expanded and annotated edition of Arendt’s great work, for a riveting conversation about the causes, means, and ends of totalitarian regimes and the difficult, sometimes excruciating choices faced by those who live under them.

Join Honor Moore and volume editor David L. Ulin—two acclaimed authors who have confronted grief in their own writing—for a free, virtual LOA LIVE program exploring Didion’s achingly beautiful accounts of bereavement and the ways literature can illuminate the search for meaning and consolation in the face of great loss.

LOA LIVE programs are made possible by contributions from friends like you, and we encourage you to consider making a donation to support future presentations. Visit loa.org/loalive to donate.

Join Elie, senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, and New York Times best-selling novelist Ayana Mathis (The Twelve Tribes of Hattie) for a conversation about faith, fiction, and the novel that established Percy as a peerless examiner of American alienation and redemption.

We thank our promotional partners: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers and SoLit.

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LOA LIVE programs are made possible by contributions from friends like you, and we encourage you to consider making a donation to support future presentations. Visit ⁠loa.org/loalive⁠ to donate.

Join former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith and Jay Parini, poet, biographer, and author of the just published Robert Frost: Sixteen Poems to Learn by Heart, for a special National Poetry Month conversation about the beauty , wisdom, and hidden depths of three beloved Frost poems that evoke different seasons and their moods: “Putting in the Seed,” “After Apple-Picking,” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

We thank our promotional partners: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers, the Boutell-Day Poetry Center at Smith College, and the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University.

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Donate to support LOA LIVE programs: loa.org/loalive.

Join New York Times columnist Dan Barry, editor of the just-published LOA edition of Breslin’s essential writings, MSNBC’s Mike Barnicle, and NYT bestselling author Mike Lupica for a lively conversation and memorable stories about the larger-than-life New Yorker who raised deadline journalism to literary art.

We thank our promotional partners: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers, Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, and Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin.

-- LOA LIVE programs are made possible by contributions from friends like you, and we encourage you to consider making a donation to support future presentations. Visit loa.org/loalive to donate.

Inspired by the struggle for independence, Black Americans made bold, insightful contributions to debates about the meaning of the Revolution and the future of the new nation. Join James G. Basker, President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed for an eye-opening conversation about a vibrant and little-known aspect of American life and writing during a crucial formative period.

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LOA LIVE programs are made possible by contributions from friends like you, and we encourage you to consider making a donation to support future presentations. Visit loa.org/loalive to donate.

To kick off a new year of LOA LIVE, Howard joins Mark Osteen, editor of the LOA DeLillo edition, for a freewheeling conversation about the towering legacy—and still insufficiently acknowledged genius—of the author of White Noise, Libra, and Underworld, modern masterpieces that explore, with humor and an unassailable eye for the absurd, the dreams, dangers, and delusions of modern American life.

Join Geoffrey O’Brien, editor of Crime Novels of the 1960s, along with noir maven Sarah Weinman (The Real Lolita), cultural critic Gene Seymour, and poet David Lehman (The Mysterious Romance of Murder) for an arresting dive into nine astonishingly inventive novels that pulse with the energies of a turbulent, transformative decade.

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LOA LIVE programs are made possible by contributions from friends like you, and we encourage you to consider making a donation to support future presentations. Visit loa.org/loalive to donate.

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We thank our promotional partners: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers; the Crime Writers Association; and Film Noir Foundation.

Merve Emre (The Personality Brokers), Adam Bradley (The Anthology of Rap; One Day It’ll All Make Sense), and William Maxwell (F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature) join LOA LIVE to explore this panoramic novel of Black American life in the era of segregation, civil rights, and paranoiac Cold War politics—Bradley enlists it in “the new Black canon”—and what it can tell us about the anxious world Williams moved in and our own politically unsettled moment. Library of America president and publisher Max Rudin moderates.

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LOA LIVE programs are made possible by contributions from friends like you, and we encourage you to consider making a donation to support future presentations. Visit loa.org/loalive to donate.

Join Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Margo Jefferson, Obie-winning playwright and screenwriter Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and Yale professor Marc Robinson, editor of the new Library of America edition of Kennedy’s collected writings, for a conversation about one of the American theater’s most haunting and irreducible voices.

To kick off the Fall 2023 season of LOA LIVE, join Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Wesley Morris (The New York Times) and National Book Award finalist Min Jin Lee (Pachinko) for a conversation with LOA Fitzgerald editor James L. W. West III. What do the immortal figures of Nick Carraway, Daisy and Tom Buchanan, Jordan Baker, and Jay Gatsby have to tell us about what changes and what remains the same in the American experience?

“Ray Bradbury never cared about the science, only about the people, which was why the stories worked so well.”—Neil Gaiman

We thank our promotional partners: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers and Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

We thank our promotional partners: Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW), American Historical Association (AHA), National Council for History Education (NCHE), and University of Virginia.

We thank our promotional partners: ALTA: Journal of Alta California, ALSCW (Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers), University of Massachusetts–Lowell, University of Pennsylvania.

Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, Emerita, Yale University; Senior Research Fellow and Professor Adjunct of Law, Columbia University, Roger Berkowitz, Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, and David Bromwich, Sterling Professor of English at Yale University discuss the brilliance and relevance of Arendt’s essays, newly brought together in Hannah Arendt: On Lying and Politics, with an introduction by Professor Bromwich

We thank our promotional partners: ALSCW (Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers), the American Historical Association, the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, the Hannah Arendt Center, and the National Council for History Education.

Featuring appearances by:
Laurie Anderson • Junot Díaz • Laura Alonso-Gallo • Mary Gordon • Lori Carlson-Hijuelos • Arturo O’Farrill • Gay Talese

We thank our promotional partners: ALSCW (Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers), Hispanecdotes, and CasaCuba at Florida International University.

We thank our promotional partners: Alta Journal; the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW); the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College; the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts (NEOMFA) at Youngstown State University; the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University.

Join LOA for a live conversation on this touchstone of American culture featuring Rosalind Harris, who played Tzeitel on Broadway and in the 1971 film; Steven Skybell, who played Tevye in the 2019 Yiddish production; and Michael Sragow, co-writer and co-producer of the new documentary Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen. Laurence Maslon, editor of Library of America’s collection American Musicals, moderates.

We thank our promotional partners: American Masters/PBS; the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW); Encores! Series at New York City Center; Marlene Meyerson JCC of Manhattan; Museum at Eldridge Street; the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene; NYU/Skirball Center; Kino Lorber; Shotwell Media; Yiddish Book Center; YIVO Institute for Jewish Research; 92Y.

We thank our promotional partner: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW).

We thank our promotional partners: Asia Society New York; the Asian American Arts Alliance; Asian American Writers Workshop; the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW); Bamboo Ridge Press; International Women’s Writing Guild; Singapore Unbound; University of Southern California English Department; the Writers Guild Foundation; Yu and Me Books.

We join Tappan Wilder, Thornton Wilder’s nephew and literary executor; director Michel Hausmann, creator of Miami’s acclaimed trilingual production in Spanish, Haitian Creole, and English; and the Sorbonne’s Julie Vatain-Corfdir, translator and director of a French production, for a conversation about the twenty-first-century global rediscovery of Wilder’s greatest play.

We thank our promotional partners: The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW); the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library; Concord Theatricals; Miami New Drama; NYU/Skirball Center; the Thornton Wilder Estate; the Writers Guild Foundation.

(The views Elizabeth D. Samet expresses in this program do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.)

We thank our promotional partners: The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW); Henry Sledge and the What’s the Scuttlebutt podcast; the United States Air Force Academy; Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum; the National Council for History Education (NCHE).

We thank our promotional partners: The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW); the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research; NYU Skirball Center; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

We thank our promotional partners: The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW), DOC NYC, the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, the Kurt Vonnegut Society, and the Writers Guild Foundation.

Click here find out how you can watch Robert Weide’s Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time.

We thank our promotional partners: The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW); Locus magazine; Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America; Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside; the University of Texas at Austin; the Writers Guild Foundation.

“To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.”—Rachel Carson

We thank our promotional partners: 350.org; Breast Cancer Action; Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency; Jodi Solomon Speakers Bureau; the Maritime Aquarium; Mongabay; the Rachel Carson Council; the Society of Environmental Journalists; Terrain magazine.

We thank our promotional partners: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers; the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center; and PEN America; and the Stephen Crane Society.

We thank our promotional partners: The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers; Bolinga Black Cultural Resources Center @ Wright State University; the Library of Congress; Ohio Humanities; the Toledo Lucas County Public Library; Yellow Springs Community Foundation.

July 14, 2021—Elizabeth Spencer’s The Light in the Piazza is an exceptionally beautiful and memorable work in the literature of Americans abroad — in this case in Florence, aglow in summer light, shadowed by a family secret. Her 1960 novella inspired in turn a great twenty-first century American musical, the Tony Award-winning adaptation by acclaimed composer Adam Guettel and playwright Craig Lucas. To honor Spencer’s centenary and the new Library of America collection of her novels and stories, Guettel joins New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author Adam Gopnik for a conversation about reimagining Spencer’s dark comic masterpiece for the musical stage. Elena Shaddow, who played the lead role of Clara in the show’s national tour, performs, accompanied by Broadway conductor/pianist/music director Andrew Resnick.

Presented in partnership with the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers; Centenary College; the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi; Concord Theatricals; MasterVoices; the Mississippi Humanities Council; the New York Festival of Song; and the NYU/Skirball Center.

In this LOA Live discussion, Olivia Gentile (Life List), poet Sidney Wade, wildlife biologist and author J. Drew Lanham, and Andrew Rubenfeld, co-editor of the Library of America anthology American Birds: A Literary Companion, explore the mystery and magic of birds and the imaginative flights they’ve inspired.

Presented in partnership with Alachua County Audubon, the Aldo Leopold Foundation, ALSCW, the American Ornithological Society, BirdWatching Magazine, Orion Magazine, Subtropics Magazine, and the University of Florida.

Award-winning essayist and poet David L. Ulin, editor of the Library of America Joan Didion edition, leads a conversation exploring Didion’s importance, vital relevance, and crucial legacy with novelist and essayist Laila Lalami (winner of the American Book Award for her 2014 novel The Moor’s Account) and novelist Steph Cha, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the California Book Award. Special guests: Obie Award-winning actress Mia Barron (The White Album) and actor Griffin Dunne, Didion’s nephew and director of the 2017 documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold.

Presented in partnership with the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers; Alta Journal; Dottir Press; PEN; University of California, Riverside; University of Southern California; Women’s Review of Books; the Writers Guild Foundation.

Renowned nature and science writer David Quammen, editor of the new LOA collection Edward O. Wilson: Biophilia, The Diversity of Life, Naturalist, joins award-winning environmental journalist Bill Finch and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Wilson biographer Richard Rhodes for an Earth Day exploration of Wilson’s legacy as naturalist, writer, and thinker. Graham Townsley contributes a clip from the 2015 film E. O. Wilson: Of Ants and Men, for which he wrote the screenplay. Introductory remarks by Dr. Paula J. Ehrlich, President, E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation.

Additional promotional partners: Alabama Public TV; Alabama River Diversity Network; Cincinnati Zoo; Entomological Society of America; E. O. Wilson Biophilia Center at the Nokuse Plantation; Harvard University Alumni Office; Harvard University Department of Organismic & Evolutionary Biology; Museum of Comparative Zoology; Orion Quarterly; University of Alabama Museums; Yale Environment 360

Richard Wright wrote The Man Who Lived Underground in the 1940s just after Native Son. He considered it his finest work—but American publishers wouldn’t touch it. It tells the story of Fred Daniels, a Black man framed by the police for a double murder. Brutally beaten until he confesses, Daniels escapes into the city’s sewer system, initiating an uncanny underworld journey into the dark heart of American life.

In this special LOA Live presentation, Malcolm Wright—who contributes an insightful afterword to the novel—discusses his lifelong fascination with his grandfather’s vision and its inescapable relevance to today. Joining him are his mother Julia Wright, the driving force behind this historic publication, and, from Wright’s hometown Jackson, Mississippi, acclaimed novelist and memoirist Kiese Laymon. Actor André Holland contributes two prerecorded readings from The Man Who Lived Underground.

Presented in partnership with the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, Harper Perennial, the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Studio Museum in Harlem

Presented in partnership with the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, Film Forum, Old Cowtown Museum, True West, Western Writers of America / Roundup Magazine, and the Writers Guild Foundation.

Featuring Women’s Liberation! anthology editors Alix Kates Shulman (Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen) and Honor Moore (Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury) with Barbara Smith (The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom), Margo Jefferson (Negroland: A Memoir), and Jennifer Baumgardner (editor, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future).

Presented in partnership with the Center for American Studies at Columbia University and the Center for Women’s History at the New-York Historical Society

Additional promotional partners: Women’s Review of Books, Dottir Press, Women’s March, Veteran Feminists of America

In the latest installment of the LOA Live series “Reading James Baldwin Now,” Literary Hub staff writer and Catapult Contributing Editor Gabrielle Bellot discusses why she believes Beale Street, which centers on an act of police misconduct but is also a Black love story, deserves to be read as Baldwin’s masterpiece—a major work that speaks directly to present-day concerns.

Presented in partnership with the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Brent Hayes Edwards, Director of the Schomburg Center’s Scholars-in-Residence Program and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, joins Rafia Zafar, Professor of English and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis and editor of Library of America’s two-volume collection of Harlem Renaissance novels, for a conversation about Hughes’s greatness and his centrality for American literature and the culture of the global African diaspora. The program also features readings of Hughes’s work by poets Kevin Young and Tyehimba Jess and bluesman Billy Branch.

Presented in partnership with the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers; the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research; Washington University in St. Louis; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and Columbia University

Presented in partnership with the Center for American Studies at Columbia University

Andrew Blauner, editor of the LOA anthology The Peanuts Papers: Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy & the Gang, and the Meaning of Life, joins four distinguished contributors to the collection 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.

Presented in partnership with Peanuts Worldwide and the Charles M. Schulz Museum

Presented in partnership with the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers and the Hemingway Society

Presented in partnership with the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers

Presented in partnership with the Center for American Studies at Columbia University and the American Historical Association

Presented in partnership with The Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers, and The New Republic

Presented in partnership with the American Historical Association, ALSCW, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the National Archives, and the National Council on History Education.

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.

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.

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.

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.