In this episode of Library Talks, multidisciplinary artist and theologian, Tricia Hersey joins Library Talks to discuss her latest book We Will Rest!: The Art of Escape. She is joined by Glory Edim, author of Well Read Black Girl. 

Tricia Hersey is the founder of The Nap Ministry. She is the global pioneer and originator of the “rest as resistance” and “rest as reparations” frameworks, and collaborates with communities all over the world to create sacred spaces. This talk was recorded as part of the Schomburg Centennial Festival.

In this episode of Library Talks, Author and editor Lauren O’Neill-Butler joins Library Talks to discuss her latest book, The War of Art: A History of Artists' Protest in America. 

The War of Art tells the history of artist-led activism and the global political and aesthetic debates of the 1960s to the present. In contrast to the financialized art market and celebrity artists, the book explores the power of collective effort — from protesting to philanthropy, and from wheat pasting to planting a field of wheat.

In this episode of Library Talks, Miriam Toews, the internationally bestselling author of Women Talking and Fight Night discusses writing about her own life in nonfiction for the first time.  

Miriam Toews had written nine books, but when the organizer of a literary festival prompted her to answer the question “Why do you write?” Toews found that every attempted response only proved that the question might not be possible to answer. Her new book, A Truce That Is Not Peace, is a memoir of the will to write and a surfacing of new layers of guilt, grief, and futility connected to her sister’s suicide. It explores the uneasy pact a writer makes with memory and the silences in her family she struggles to understand.

In this episode of Library Talks,  Research scientist Joshua Miele joins Library Talks to discuss his memoir Connecting Dots: A Blind Life. He is joined by Andrew Leland, author of the memoir The Country of the Blind.

Throughout his life, Miele has found increasingly inventive ways to succeed in a world built for the sighted, and to help others to do the same. At first reluctant to even think of himself as blind, he eventually embraced his blindness and became a committed advocate for disability and accessibility. Connecting Dots delivers a captivating first-person perspective on blindness and disability as incisive as it is entertaining. Joshua Miele’s story is one of one ordinary blind life with an indelible impact.