New York Public Library - Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

Join The Bronx is Reading at Bronx Library Center for a session of Authors & Writers Out Loud, featuring Rio Cortez and Jeannine A. Cook, moderated by Saraciea J. Fennel.

Megha Majumdar comes to the Library for a live conversation about her new novel, A Guardian and a Thief

Scholar and documentary film producer Howard Husock sits down with fellow researcher Nicholas Dagen Bloom to discuss how housing policy has failed the people it was designed to help, and how we can fix it, as explored in Husock's latest book The Projects: A New History of Public Housing. As the US struggles to provide affordable housing, millions of Americans live in deteriorating public housing projects, enduring the mistakes of past housing policy. In The Projects, Howard A. Husock explains how we got here, detailing the tragic rise and fall of public housing and the pitfalls of other subsidy programs. He takes us inside a progressive movement led by a group of New York City philanthropists, politicians, and business magnates who first championed public housing as a solution to urban blight. From First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to the controversial city planner Robert Moses, many well-known historical figures made a convincing case for affordable housing in America. Despite the movement’s lofty ideals, the creation of the Projects led to the destruction of low-income communities across the country. From the Hill District in Pittsburgh to Black Bottom in Detroit, predominantly Black neighborhoods were judged only by the quality of their housing. Husock looks beyond these neighborhoods’ physical conditions to their uncounted riches, from local artists like August Wilson to vital community institutions. As he shares residents’ stories, he honors what they crafted through their own plans, rather than those of city planners. Husock traces the history of public housing to contemporary debates on the government’s role in the housing market. Through interviews with residents, he reveals how public housing transformed the lives of Americans and the physical faces of cities and towns. He ultimately critiques "repair and reform" efforts, making policy recommendations that address the core failings of public housing for the people it was once designed to help. Mapping out a better path for policy-makers, he lays a new foundation for upward mobility in America. ABOUT THE SPEAKERS Howard A. Husock is Senior Fellow in Domestic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of many books, including America’s Trillion-Dollar Housing Policy Mistake: The Failure of American Housing Policy, The Poor Side of Town: And Why We Need It, Who Killed Civil Society? The Rise of Big Government and Decline of Bourgeois Norms, and Philanthropy Under Fire. Husock has received many awards for his work as a documentary film producer, including the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, a National News and Documentary Emmy Award, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting award. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Wall Street Journal, and many other leading publications. Nicholas Dagen Bloom is a Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College. His research analyzes long-term planning outcomes in essential urban systems such as subsidized housing and mass transportation. He is the author of Suburban Alchemy, Merchant of Illusion, Public Housing That Worked , The Metropolitan Airport , and How States Shaped Postwar America. He is co-editor of four edited collections, including the prize-winning Public Housing Myths and Affordable Housing in New York. His most recent book, The Great American Transit Disaster, has been widely featured and discussed. Professor Bloom has been quoted extensively in media outlets on housing, transit, and other topics, including CityLab, WNYC, The New York Times, CNN, and The Washington Post. As a co-curator of housing exhibitions at Hunter College, the Skyscraper Museum, and the National Public Housing Museum, he has highlighted overlooked dimensions of community life. He has taught urban affairs courses to thousands of students in previous positions at NYIT, NYU, and

Paper engineer and graphic designer Kelli Anderson reveals the technologies and philosophies that have shaped letterforms as captured in her immersive pop-up book Alphabet in Motion, in this interactive evening also featuring curator Camilo Otero. Ever wonder how we ended up with so many different styles of letters? Open any text editor, email client or design app and you will immediately be bombarded with a buffet of typographic choices. Serif or sans serif? Display or text? Classical or contemporary? Formal or casual? Featuring 17 stunning interactive pop-ups, this ABC pop-up book explains―as well as demonstrates―the technologies and philosophies that have shaped letterforms through the ages. Readers will learn about '60s psychedelic type by projecting light through a phototypesetting pop-up; how screen technology shaped letterforms by turning on and off anti-aliasing; or the aesthetics of typographic modularity by reconfiguring the puzzle pieces of Josef Albers' Kombinations-Schrift. Type history is often technical and always visual. It is therefore challenging to fully explain in text or in diagrams alone. The book's interactive features provide a sensory inroad for curious general readers to grasp how typography has transformed through history (and how lettering can convey a point of view or philosophical stance). A 128-page companion essay section includes an essay further contextualizing each pop-up. Alphabet in Motion puts the reader's hands, eyes and minds in touch with the meanings behind the typography that surrounds us in our homes, on our screens and on our streets. If you look carefully, you can see the history of the world―from the Bronze Age to the Information Age―in the microcosm of type. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kelli Anderson is a graphic designer, paper engineer, educator and author who uses design magic to connect people with the hidden talents of everyday things. Her previous publications include This Book Is a Camera (MoMA, 2015)―which transforms into a working camera―and This Book Is a Planetarium (Chronicle, 2017)―which houses paper devices (including a planetarium) and has sold more than 100,000 copies.

A mind-bending, revisionist gothic horror story about the fabled summer Mary Shelley began work on Frankenstein, as told by her Indian housemaid, Mehrunissa “Mehr” Begum. For fans of Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Isabel Cañas, and Kathe Koja. “Strange how one can find they are an interruption in another person’s story . . .” Summer 1816: London is a hostile place for the newly disembarked Mehrunissa Begum, who’s come to deliver her brother’s letter of inheritance before returning to her comfortable life in Lucknow, India. Only, she can’t find her brother anywhere and has no money for the return trip. With nowhere else to go, Mehr finds refuge in a boardinghouse for Indian maids. If she can’t find her brother, she reasons, she will get a job and start saving. Mehr is soon hired at the English estate of Mary and Percy Shelley, young artists of burgeoning fame who are on the run from secrets of their own. Mary is brooding and quiet, but takes a curious liking to her new maid, asking her to accompany the Shelleys and her stepsister, Claire—as well as the eccentric Lord Byron and his physician, John Polidori—to Lake Geneva for the summer. Almost immediately, Mehr notices strange, ghostly events at the villa. The walls breathe, portraits shift, and phantoms appear like unbidden guests who refuse to leave. The weather is fierce and foreboding, showing no signs of softening its relentless pall. And as Mary Shelley begins work on what will become her earth-shattering literary phenomenon, Mehr finds herself trapped in the villa as the rest of its inhabitants descend into madness. ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS Leila Siddiqui was born in Chicago, raised in Texas, and now lives in New York with her husband. She is also a digital marketing strategist in publishing. When she’s not writing, she spends her time worshipping her three very floofy cats, experimenting with vegan recipes from Instagram, and crocheting fun new projects. Her debut YA novel, House of Glass Hearts, was published in 2021. Shelly Romero (she/her) is a Honduran-American Associate Agent at Azantian Literary Agency. She began her publishing career at Scholastic and was a freelance editor prior to agenting. Outside of work, she loves watching movies and immediately logging them on her Letterboxd, playing board games (usually with a horror spin), and attending concerts whenever she can. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she currently resides in New York City.

Join professor and author Cat Dawson to explore the shifting role of monuments in our culture, from those that have been recently toppled, to novel investigations of the form by a new generation of artists interested in how symbolic structures can be made and what stories they can tell. For centuries, monuments have telegraphed the values and origin myths of dominant culture in public space and on massive scale. They have signaled both who is part of a culture and who is not, often overlooking histories that complicate the stories they tell. Yet in the last 50 years in the United States, the role of monuments has changed significantly. Numerous historical monuments have been removed or toppled, bringing to the fore a long-repressed conversation about the relationship between the monumental landscape and national identity. In Monumental, Cat Dawson takes up the social, political, and art historical causes and ramifications of this important shift. Examining the conditions that have led to and define this new era, Dawson reveals that these interventions are as indebted to the monumental tradition as they are to representational strategies that grew out of twentieth-century social justice efforts, from the Civil Rights movement to queer organizing during the AIDS crisis. Since 2014, a new generation of artists has established a groundbreaking role for monuments, calling into question the very notion of what a monument is through novel investigations of how symbolic structures can be made and what stories they can tell. This book tells the important story of that sea change. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Cat Dawson works at the intersection of art history and feminist, queer, and trans studies. They are currently Visiting Assistant Professor in Art History and the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Smith College and University Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.