Thresholds: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson on the Future That’s Still Possible

Over forty years after The House on Mango Street came out, Sandra Cisneros is still hearing from readers about how her words healed them. In this episode, the award-winning writer shares the books that were her medicine growing up, and the prescription she has for all of us. Show notes:How many books have you read? Check out BPL’s full list of 250 books that influenced America. Then check out our booklist with all the titles Sandra mentioned in this episode.Watch parts of the opera version of The House on Mango Street, and learn more about the production from Glimmerglass.Read Sandra’s essay for The New York Times, “A Year Among My Fellow Banned Writers.”Listen to our interview with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.Want more interviews with authors on BPL’s 250 for 250 list? Check out the following interviews: Linda Sarsour, We Are Not Here to be Bystanders; Julia Alvarez, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents; Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory; Jacqueline Woodson, This Is the Rope; Jose Antonio Vargas, Dear America; Maia Kobabe, Gender Queer; Art Spiegelman, Maus; N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season; George M. Johnson, All Boys Aren’t Blue.

Linda Sarsour is a proud Brooklyn-born Palestinian-American activist, writer, and organizer. She’s spent her career building bridges between diverse groups of people, and working to make America a more equitable place. In this episode, she shares the stories that shaped her, and her vision for the next 250 years of American history.Show notes:How many books have you read? Check out BPL’s full list of 250 books that influenced America. Then check out our booklist with all the titles Linda mentioned in this episode.Check out Next250’s Declaration of Interdependence.Want more interviews with authors on BPL’s 250 for 250 list? Check out the following interviews: Julia Alvarez, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents; Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory; Jacqueline Woodson, This Is the Rope; Jose Antonio Vargas, Dear America; Maia Kobabe, Gender Queer; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States; Art Spiegelman, Maus; N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season; George M. Johnson, All Boys Aren’t Blue.

So many authors writing across languages and cultures point to Julia Alvarez’s debut novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, as one of their ancestors. In this episode, we hear from Alvarez about the importance of defending all kinds of stories—and why the American cannon needs to be exploded.Show notes:How many books have you read? Check out BPL’s full list of 250 books that influenced America. Then check out our booklist with all the titles Julia mentioned in this episode.Read an interview with Julia Alvarez about the banning of García Girls in Johnston County, NC.Want more interviews with authors on BPL’s 250 for 250 list? Check out the following interviews:  Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory; Jacqueline Woodson, This Is the Rope; Jose Antonio Vargas, Dear America; Maia Kobabe, Gender Queer; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States; Art Spiegelman, Maus; N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season; George M. Johnson, All Boys Aren’t Blue.

Celebrations of the nation’s 250th anniversary can feel like a party not everyone is invited to, especially for those whose immigration status is in limbo. In this episode, Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat talks about the impact of transnational migration has had on her writing, and the kind of party she wanted to throw for America’s 250th anniversary. (Hint: it has to do with books!)Show notes: How many books have you read? Check out BPL’s full list of 250 books that influenced America. Then check out our booklist with all the titles Edwidge mentioned in this episode.Want more interviews with authors on BPL’s 250 for 250 list? Check out the following interviews: Jacqueline Woodson, This Is the Rope; Jose Antonio Vargas, Dear America; Maia Kobabe, Gender Queer; Art Spiegelman, Maus; N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season; George M. Johnson, All Boys Aren’t Blue.

When award-winning author Jacqueline Woodson sat down to write her family’s story of the Great Migration, she wanted to make it accessible to all kinds of readers. So she wrote a children’s book called This Is the Rope. In this episode, Woodson talks about the importance of preserving the stories of our ancestors, and of course… her love of Brooklyn. Show notes:How many books have you read? Check out BPL’s full list of 250 books that influenced America. Then check out our booklist with all the titles Jacqueline mentioned in this episode.Learn more about Baldwin for the Arts, and listen to the Baldwin-Emerson Elders Project.Watch the rest of Jacqueline Woodson’s talk with Edwidge Danticat at BPL back in 2016.Want more interviews with authors on BPL’s 250 for 250 list? Check out the following interviews: Jose Antonio Vargas, Dear America; Maia Kobabe, Gender Queer; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States; Art Spiegelman, Maus; N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season; George M. Johnson, All Boys Aren’t Blue

Jose Antonio Vargas is a journalist, filmmaker, and author of the book Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen. He came to the US from the Philippines when he was twelve years old, and he didn’t discover he was undocumented until he was sixteen. We talk with him about his unique perspective on America and what it means to be a citizen.Show notes:How many books have you read? Check out BPL’s full list of 250 books that influenced America, then check out our booklist with all the titles Jose mentioned in this episode.Read the 2011 New York Times essay in which Jose came out as undocumented and learn more about his organization, Define American.Watch the rest of Angela Davis’s talk at BPL’s 2026 Kahn Humanities series. Want more interviews with authors on BPL’s 250 for 250 list? We talked to Maia Kobabe (author of Gender Queer), Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States), Art Spiegelman (author of Maus), N.K. Jemisin (author of The Fifth Season), and George M. Johnson (author of All Boys Aren’t Blue). 

Today we’re bringing you a really interesting episode from our friends at This Guy Sucked, a podcast hosted by historian and writer Claire Aubin about the worst people in history. Each episode, Claire sits down with an expert to pull back the scholarly curtain on a terrible person from their research. Because, as they say on the show, it’s never too late to have haters, and you can’t libel the dead.This particular episode is about the early 20th century filmmaker D. W. Griffith whose 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation” led to the resurgence of the KKK among other cultural repercussions we’re still feeling today. Africana studies scholar Kellie Carter Jackson joins the episode to tell us exactly why this guy sucked.If you like what you hear, you can listen to the rest – and dozens of other great episodes – by searching for “This Guy Sucked” wherever you find podcasts.GuestOur guest Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College and host of This Day from Radiotopia. Her book We Refuse is available here. Sensitive Themes & TopicsRacism and racial violence, slavery, sexual violenceCredits- Host & Executive Producer: Claire E Aubin. - Editor: Julia Schifini. - Music: Marshall Dean Williams- Multitude: multitude.productions

Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist, climate scientist and activist. Recently, she sat down with Jordan Kisner, of the Thresholds podcast, to talk about our climate future. You may have heard clips of their conversation in our last episode about Silent Spring. Today, we're playing the full interview as a partnership with Thresholds, a show about about the messiness, overlap, u-turns, revelations, and friction points in the lives and work of artists.If you like what you hear, head on over to thisisthresholds.com to find more great episodes and subscribe!

When Silent Spring came out in 1962, it was an instant best-seller and led to the establishment of the EPA, as well as the ban of harmful pesticides such as DDT. But Rachel Carson’s seminal work also shifted our way of thinking about nature. For the first time, the environment was not just something out there that could be tracked and measured, but something that lived inside all of us. You can read a transcript of this episode on our website, and visit learn more about the topics brought up in this episode.Check out our booklist with books recommended for this episode.This episode was a collaboration with the podcast Thresholds. You can listen to Jordan Kisener’s full interview with Ayana Elizabeth Johnson here. And check out Johnson’s new book, What If We Get It Right? Read Bob Musil’s book, Rachel Carson and Her Sisters, and learn more about the Rachel Carson Council. Read Rachel Frazin’s book, Poisoning the Well, which she co-wrote with Sharon Udasin.Watch Rachel Carson’s full speech to the National Women’s Democratic Club in 1962.

Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer who documents the extremes, from nightclubs to war zones. She’s also the author of several books, including Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun, a memoir of the Syrian War co-written with Marwan Hisham. We sat down with Crabapple to talk about the difference between words and images, making art in the world, and the power of cartoonists to disrupt fascism.You can read a transcript of this episode here. And check out the following links:Check out our booklist with books recommended for this episode.Read Molly Crabapple’s Drawing Blood, and you can pre-order her new book about the Jewish Labor Bund.See Molly’s drawings and articles about the Dallas Six and the NYC taxi driver strike. You can also read Molly’s interview with Art Spiegelman.Art Spiegelman’s comic collaboration with Joe Sacco was published in The New York Review of Books earlier this year. You can check out Sacco’s Palestine and his more recent War on Gaza from the library.