Free talks held at public libraries around Vermont on the first Wednesday of the month, October through May.
Please note that talks flagged as Digital Event or Hybrid Event may require advance registration.
April 5
National Book Award finalist Kekla Magoon discusses her award-winning nonfiction book, Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party’s Promise to the People. The Vermont author also considers the importance of reading as a tool for social change, and our individual and collective power to transform our communities.
April 5
Jolivette Anderson-Douoning shares the lived experience of Mrs. Goldleana, whose story illuminates the role Black women played as laborers in the Louisiana cotton and timber industries—and in their own families—in the 1940s and 50s. She also highlights geographical differences in Black migration: some left the South while others remained.
April 5
Poet Keiselim (Keysi) Montás discusses how to read the traditional Japanese poetic form of haiku, illustrated with works from his haiku collection, Like Water.
April 5
For 100 years—from the 1850s to the 1950s—Vermont was the most Republican state in the nation. But today it is the most Democratic. Journalist Chris Graff considers some factors behind the switch from “red to blue,” including interstate highways, the arrival of IBM in Vermont, and the reapportionment of the Vermont House.
April 5
Author and Middlebury professor Gloria Estela Gonzalez Zenteno discusses her new novel Arribada, about a woman pushed to confront her role in environmental and social injustice, and a well-to-do family’s realization that their comfortable position rests on crimes against the natural world, their town, and their loved ones.
April 5
Celebrated cartoonist Alison Bechdel discusses her work as an illustrator and memoirist, including her most recent book, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, a graphic memoir about her lifelong love affair with exercise that won the 2021 Vermont Book Award.
April 6
Selected by President Obama as the fifth inaugural poet in US history, Richard Blanco is the first Latino, immigrant, and gay person to serve in such a role. Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents and raised in Miami, the negotiation of cultural identity characterizes his four collections of poetry.
April 7
In this free live-streamed presentation for Vermont middle and high school students, poet Richard Blanco reads from and discusses his work.
Selected by President Obama as the fifth inaugural poet in US history, Blanco is the first Latino, immigrant, and gay person to serve in such a role. Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents and raised in Miami, the negotiation of cultural identity characterizes his four collections of poetry.
April 12
Middlebury College professor Kemi Fuentes-George traces the development of pan-African political theory in the early 20th century and discusses how Afro Caribbean “rebel music” helped these ideas challenge established assumptions about nonwhite people and global relations.
April 12
Disability, as part of the human condition, has always been with us. But considering disability to be negative is a new concept, shaped by recent history. Professor of philosophy, author, and disability activist Patrick Standen unravels the complicated, fascinating, and controversial history of the concept of disability.
Poet Sarah Audsley joined us at the Taconic Mountains Ramble State Park for Words in the Woods.
Humanities Camps are filled with reading and writing projects, field trips, and outdoor activities.
We won a 2020 Schwartz Prize for best public humanities programming in the U.S. for Vermont Reads 2019: “March: Book One.”
We supported Historic New England’s “More than a Market” project that explored the experiences of new Americans through food markets.
Our free public events help bring the power of the humanities to communities across Vermont.
