ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library

This third program in our AI series focused on the critical issue of inherent biases in AI technologies, especially as they are deployed in law enforcement, healthcare, government, and education. We took a look at how these biases manifest and their profound implications.

From generating new forms of artistic expression to transforming industry practices, artificial intelligence is redefining the boundaries of creativity. This event brought together creatives from diverse backgrounds and industry experts to discuss the opportunities and challenges presented by AI in the performing and fine arts.

Tommy Orange, the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of the breakout bestseller There There, returns to ALOUD with one of TIME Magazine’s most anticipated books of 2024, Wandering Stars, which traces the legacies of the Colorado Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of a family. Orange’s new novel is piercing in its poetry, sorrow, and rage and is a devastating indictment of America’s war on its own people. Orange was in conversation with Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota actor, writer, poet, visual artist, and comedian Bobby "Dues" Wilson.

Join us for the first of a special ALOUD series on AI, where we take a compelling look into the interaction between young people and AI systems, exploring subconscious perceptions and the significant effects of AI on youth mental health and development. ALOUD on Ideas is an ongoing series that will take a thematic look at subjects that are particularly relevant to our time. This season, ALOUD presents Navigating the AI Maze: Investigating Artificial Intelligence in Our Lives: A Three-Part Series curated by Avriel Epps, aimed at demystifying Artificial Intelligence, exploring its multifaceted impact on both society at large and our individual well-being.

Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, and the complex. The New York Times best-selling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams joins us in a program exclusive to ALOUD about her new memoir, Splinters, the riveting story of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage—an exploration of motherhood, art, and new love. Jamison was in conversation with award-winning author and professor Sarah Manguso.

The award-winning, beloved author of Pure Colour, Sheila Heti returns to ALOUD with her new thrilling confessional Alphabetical Diaries. Over ten years, Heti kept a record of her thoughts, then arranged the sentences from A to Z. Known for her experimental literary works—passionate and reflective, joyful and despairing—Heti masterfully structures her diary entries into a pastiche of unconventional structure that keeps the reader entirely engaged. Co-presented with Skylight Books.

Join us for a conversation with one of our country’s most prominent rabbis, Rabbi Sharon Brous of IKAR, discussing her new book, The Amen Effect, which explores what it will take, in a time of loneliness and isolation, social rupture and alienation, to rebuild our society.  Rabbi Brous was in conversation with celebrated Los Angeles-based activist and founder of Homeboy Industries, Father Gregory Boyle.

In 2019, Cristina Rivera Garza traveled from her home in Texas to Mexico City in search of an old unresolved criminal file. "My name is Cristina Rivera Garza," she wrote in her request to the attorney general, "and I am writing to you as a relative of Liliana Rivera, who was murdered on July 16, 1990." Knowing there is only a slim chance of recovering the file, Cristina is inspired by feminist movements across the world and enraged by the global epidemic of femicide and embarks on a path toward justice. This is her account and the outcome of an amazing journey. Rivera Garza will be in conversation with Latin Grammy-nominated musician, songwriter, recording artist, and activist Ceci Bastida. This program is in partnership with the LA Phil’s Pan American Music Initiative and the new ballet called Revolución diamantina, reflecting on the Glitter Revolution in Mexico City, composed by artistic curator Gabriela Ortiz, inspired by Cristina Rivera Garza.

ALOUD welcomes two-time Poet Laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize–winner Tracy K. Smith with her remarkable book To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul. In 2020, heartsick from consistent assaults on Black life, Tracy K. Smith found herself soul-searching and digging into the historical archive for help navigating the "din of human division and strife." Bearing witness to the terms of freedom afforded her as a Black woman, a mother, and an educator in the twenty-first century, Smith etches a portrait of where we find ourselves four hundred years into the American experiment. Smith was in conversation with poet, essayist, and Morgan Parker.

Renowned art conservator Rosa Lowinger reveals in her beautiful memoir Dwell Time a journey of her difficult childhood in Miami growing up among people whose losses in the Cuban revolution, and earlier by the decimation of family in the Holocaust, clouded all family life. Through Lowinger’s relentless clear-eyed efforts to be the best practitioner possible, while squarely facing her fraught personal and work relationships, she comes to terms with her identity as Cuban and Jewish, American and Latinx. Lowinger was in conversation with L.A. Times’s art and design columnist Carolina A. Miranda.