Join us for 3rd Friday on September 18 at 6 PM, for a fun, FREE special literary program, celebrating the book launch of Penn State Professor Shara McCallum’s latest collection of poetry, BEHOLD. McCallum will be in conversation with author/poet and editor Carey Salerno, Executive Director and Publisher of Alice James Books.

This event is part of our America’s 250th Literary Celebrations series.

Born of the poet’s longstanding love of painting, BEHOLD is a bold new collection about what it means to be seen in art—and in the larger world.

BEHOLD meditates on colonization, race, and the body’s place in the world, reflecting Shara McCallum’s intentions to closely observe works of art outside the tradition of the “masters”—terminology that is especially fraught when considering work by Caribbean, Black, and women artists. By eschewing observation to engage with questions of how we interact with art, and what art reflects back to the individual viewer, BEHOLD represents a subjective response to art and identity from one of contemporary poetry’s most celebrated voices.

About the Author:

From Jamaica and born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, Shara McCallum is the author of seven books of poetry, published in the US & UK, including Behold, forthcoming in 2026. Awards for her work include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Musgrave Medal, NEA Fellowship, Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for No Ruined Stone, OCM Bocas Caribbean Poetry Prize for Madwoman, Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for The Water Between Us, among others. McCallum teaches at Penn State University and from 2021-22 served as the Penn State Laureate. 

About the Interviewer:

Carey Salerno serves as the executive director & publisher of Alice James Books where she has been dedicated to broadening the spectrum of the American poetic voice since 2008. She is the author of The Hungriest Stars (2025), Tributary (2021), Shelter (2009), and a co-editor of Lit From Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books (2013). She is the recipient of a 2025 Pushcart Prize and a 2025 Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Arts Council. Salerno serves as co-chair for LitNet: The Literary Network and teaches publishing arts and poetry writing for the University of Maine.

She is a frequent guest of writing programs, conferences, and festivals where she conducts editorial consultations and delivers talks on publishing arts, editing, poetry, manuscript compilation, and other topics. You may find her essays, poems–and articles and interviews regarding her literary and publishing work–in print and online, including in NPR, Poets & Writers, and American Poetry Review.

Celebrating SCHOOL FOR WOODLAND CREATURES, the third book in the series OUR FRIEND HEDGEHOG. Join us for a free Book Party, Storytime, and Signing in July.

Saturday, July 18th at 10am

It’s the first day of school for Hedgehog and her forest friends in this cozy classroom caper about overcoming doubts and letting your light shine, with full-color art on every page from a beloved Caldecott Honor winner, Lauren Castillo.

We all have different strengths and weaknesses,
Our uniqueness is what makes us shine…

When the humans of Hedge Hollow head off to school, Hedgehog and her furry, feathery friends decide to start a school of their very own!

Owl will teach reading. Beaver will teach shop. Mole will teach geography. Hen will teach math. And Hedgehog . . . Hedgehog isn’t so sure. After all, you have to be an expert to teach a class, don’t you? Hedgehog doesn’t feel like an expert in anything. Lucky for Hedgehog her friends are happy to lend a paw, sharing laughter and kind words as they figure out a solution.

From the award-winning author-illustrator of Our Friend Hedgehog: The Story of Us comes a tale of overcoming doubts and taking pride in doing what you love.

LAUREN CASTILLO studied illustration at the Maryland Institute College of Art and received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She is the author and illustrator of the 2015 Caldecott Honor-winning book Nana in the City, as well as The Troublemaker and Melvin and the Boy. She currently draws and dreams in Harrisburg, PA.

Visit her at laurencastillo.com
Follow her on Instagram at @studiocastillo

MEET THE AUTHOR! Join us for a free Book Launch Party, Story Time, and Signing at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore, on Saturday, July 18, 2026, 10am-12pm. 

Where to park:

FREE PARKING is available in the bookstore's dedicated parking lot behind the store, as well as around the neighboring Broad Street Market and in the municipal lot at 6th and Verbeke Streets. Metered street parking is available on the ParkMobile app.

We are pleased to welcome Zinzi Clemmons on Friday, July 17, at 6pm, to discuss her powerful new book, FREEDOM.

Free and open to the public.

This special author talk represents the first in a 10 Evening Series of important topics in history and society, in honor of America’s 250th! Learn more about our America’s 250th programs at HBGBookFest.com.

FREEDOM is a radically vulnerable, evocative, and challenging inquiry into the pursuit of freedom and the nature of struggle, resilience, and community. From the award-winning author of What We Lose.

About the Book

Weaving personal reflections with piercing insight and expansive vision across nine brilliant essays, Zinzi Clemmons explores the complexities of the elusive concept of freedom. As the daughter of a South African mother and a Trinidadian America father, she recounts growing up in the largely white, affluent town of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania—and her frequent travels to Johannesburg, where the lofty promise of freedom was all around her. Coming of age amidst the euphoria of South Africa's first all-race elections, she grapples with the legacy of Nelson Mandela and the shattered hope in the wake of the Obama era. Clemmons critiques the entrenched inequalities that haunt both countries, from the tragic loss of a childhood friend to the violence that often befalls women who have the audacity to be free.

In a deft mix of memoir, family history, criticism, and reportage, drawing on a vast range of material from Joan Didion to James Baldwin, political analysis and history to Clemmons’s own experiences across the globe, Freedom is an incendiary exploration of race, sex, class, and inheritance. In elegiac prose, Clemmons trains her discerning eye on American institutions and mythologies, probing the bounds of liberation and autonomy to interrogate our most enduring quest—the relentless pursuit of freedom for all.

About the Author

Zinzi Clemmons is the author of What We Lose, which was a finalist for the NBCC John Leonard First Book Prize and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. A National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree, she was raised in Philadelphia by a South African mother and an American father. A cofounder of the literary journal Apogee, she lives in Northern California, where she serves as director of the creative writing program at the University of California, Davis.

About the Interviewer

André Naffis-Sahely is the author of two poetry collections, The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (2017) and High Desert (2022). He received the Cholmondeley Award for Poets in 2026.

An exhilarating novel about a trailblazing mathematician who unearths her own extraordinary family story and its roots in World War II. A recommended book of 2019 from Entertainment Weekly, BuzzFeed, and the Rumpus.

This July, the Midtown Scholar is pleased to welcome acclaimed novelist Catherine Chung to Harrisburg as she presents and signs copies of her new historical novel, The Tenth Muse. Chung will be in conversation with Dickinson College’s Adrienne Su. This event is free and open to the public.

About the Book:

From childhood, Katherine knows she is different, and that her parents are not who they seem to be. But in becoming a mathematician, she must face the most human of problems—who is she? What is the cost of love, and what is the cost of ambition?

On her quest to conquer the Riemann Hypothesis, the greatest unsolved mathematical problem of her time, she turns to a theorem with a mysterious history that holds both the lock and key to her identity, and to secrets long buried during World War II in Germany. Forced to confront some of the most consequential events of the twentieth century and rethink everything she knows of herself, she strives to take her place in the world of higher mathematics and finds kinship in the stories of the women who came before her—their love of the language of numbers connecting them across generations.

In The Tenth Muse, Catherine Chung offers a gorgeous, sweeping tale about legacy, identity, and the beautiful ways the mind can make us free.

About the Author:

Catherine Chung is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Director's Visitorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She was a Granta New Voice, and won an Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award with her first novel, Forgotten Country, which was a Booklist, Bookpage, and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2012. She has a degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and worked at a think tank in Santa Monica before going to Cornell University for her MFA. She has published work in The New York Times and Granta, and is a fiction editor at Guernica Magazine. She lives in New York City.

About the Interviewer:

Adrienne Su is the author of four books of poems, Middle Kingdom, Sanctuary, Having None of It, and Living Quarters. Her poems have been featured on websites such as Poetry Daily and Poem-a-Day and could turn up on your mobile device if you use the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry app. They also appear in anthologies such as The Hungry Ear; The New American Poets; Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation; Best American Poetry (2000, 2013, 2016); and The Norton Introduction to Literature. Su's awards include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, The Frost Place, The Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She studied at Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges (AB, 1989) and the University of Virginia (MFA, 1993). Since 2000, she has taught creative writing at Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she is Poet-in-Residence.

The Midtown Scholar is thrilled to welcome Richard Rothstein to our stage to discuss his book, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. A book signing will follow discussion. This event is free and open to the public.

About the Book

One of Publishers Weekly's 10 Best Books of 2017
Longlisted for the National Book Award

This “powerful and disturbing history” exposes how American governments deliberately imposed racial segregation on metropolitan areas nationwide (New York Times Book Review).

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation―that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation―the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments―that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.

Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north.

As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post–World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. “The American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book” (Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), as Rothstein’s invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past.

About the Author

Richard Rothstein is a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and a Fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He lives in California, where he is a Fellow of the Haas Institute at the University of California–Berkeley.

The Midtown Scholar is excited to welcome Pam Jenoff to discuss her book, The Lost Girls of Paris, followed by a book signing. This event is free and open to the public.

From the author of the runaway bestseller The Orphan’s Tale comes a remarkable story of friendship and courage centered around three women and a ring of female secret agents during World War II.

1946, Manhattan

One morning while passing through Grand Central Terminal on her way to work, Grace Healey finds an abandoned suitcase tucked beneath a bench. Unable to resist her own curiosity, Grace opens the suitcase, where she discovers a dozen photographs—each of a different woman. In a moment of impulse, Grace takes the photographs and quickly leaves the station.

Grace soon learns that the suitcase belonged to a woman named Eleanor Trigg, leader of a network of female secret agents who were deployed out of London during the war. Twelve of these women were sent to Occupied Europe as couriers and radio operators to aid the resistance, but they never returned home, their fates a mystery. Setting out to learn the truth behind the women in the photographs, Grace finds herself drawn to a young mother turned agent named Marie, whose daring mission overseas reveals a remarkable story of friendship, valor and betrayal.

Vividly rendered and inspired by true events, New York Times bestselling author Pam Jenoff shines a light on the incredible heroics of the brave women of the war and weaves a mesmerizing tale of courage, sisterhood and the great strength of women to survive in the hardest of circumstances.

Pam Jenoff is the author of several novels, including the international bestseller The Kommandant's Girl, which also earned her a Quill Award nomination. Pam lives with her husband and three children near Philadelphia where, in addition to writing, she teaches law school.

The Midtown Scholar is thrilled to welcome Ross Gay to discuss his new book of essay, The Book of Delights, followed by a book signing. This event is free and open to the public.

“Ross Gay’s eye lands upon wonder at every turn, bolstering my belief in the countless small miracles that surround us.” —Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize winner and U.S. Poet Laureate

The winner of the NBCC Award for Poetry offers up a spirited collection of short lyric essays, written daily over a tumultuous year, reminding us of the purpose and pleasure of praising, extolling, and celebrating ordinary wonders.

Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is a genre-defying book of essays—some as short as a paragraph; some as long as five pages—that record the small joys that occurred in one year, from birthday to birthday, and that we often overlook in our busy lives. His is a meditation on delight that takes a clear-eyed view of the complexities, even the terrors, in his life, including living in America as a black man; the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture; the loss of those he loves. Among Gay’s funny, poetic, philosophical delights: the way Botan Rice Candy wrappers melt in your mouth, the volunteer crossing guard with a pronounced tremor whom he imagines as a kind of boat-woman escorting pedestrians across the River Styx, a friend’s unabashed use of air quotes, pickup basketball games, the silent nod of acknowledgment between black people. And more than any other subject, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world—his garden, the flowers in the sidewalk, the birds, the bees, the mushrooms, the trees.

This is not a book of how-to or inspiration, though it could be read that way. Fans of Roxane Gay, Maggie Nelson, and Kiese Laymon will revel in Gay’s voice, and his insights. The Book of Delights is about our connection to the world, to each other, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed. Gay’s pieces serve as a powerful and necessary reminder that we can, and should, stake out a space in our lives for delight. 

Ross Gay is the author of three books of poetry, including Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Catalog was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry, the Ohioana Book Award, the Balcones Poetry Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. He is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call It Ballin’ and founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a nonprofit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. Gay has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at Indiana University.

The Midtown Scholar warmly welcomes Deborah and James Fallows to our stage to discuss their best selling book, Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America. A book signing will follow discussion. This event is free and open to the public.

About the Book

A vivid, surprising portrait of the civic and economic reinvention taking place in America, town by town and generally out of view of the national media. A realistically positive and provocative view of the country between its coasts. 

For the last five years, James and Deborah Fallows have been traveling across America in a single-engine prop airplane. Visiting dozens of towns, they have met hundreds of civic leaders, workers, immigrants, educators, environmentalists, artists, public servants, librarians, business people, city planners, students, and entrepreneurs to take the pulse and understand the prospects of places that usually draw notice only after a disaster or during a political campaign. 

The America they saw is acutely conscious of its problems—from economic dislocation to the opioid scourge—but itis also crafting solutions, with a practical-minded determination at dramatic odds with the bitter paralysis of national politics. At times of dysfunction on a national level, reform possibilities have often arisen from the local level. The Fallowses describe America in the middle of one of these creative waves. Their view of the country is as complex and contradictory as America itself, but it also reflects the energy, the generosity and compassion, the dreams, and the determination of many who are in the midst of making things better. Our Towns is the story of their journey—and an account of a country busy remaking itself.

About the Authors

JAMES FALLOWS has been a national correspondent for The Atlantic for more than thirty-five years, reporting from China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Europe, and across the United States. He is the author of eleven previous books. His work has also appeared in many other magazines and as public-radio commentaries since the 1980s. He has won a National Book Award and a National Magazine Award. For two years he was President Jimmy Carter’s chief speechwriter.

DEBORAH FALLOWS is a linguist and writer who holds a PhD in theoretical linguistics and is the author of two previous books. She has written for The Atlantic, National Geographic, Slate, The New York Times, and The Washington Monthly, and has worked at the Pew Research Center, Oxygen Media, and Georgetown University. She and her husband have two sons and four grandchildren.

The Midtown Scholar is pleased to welcome Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan to discuss her new book, Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic, followed by a book signing. This event is free and open to the public.

The riveting story of control over the mobility of poor migrants, and how their movements shaped current perceptions of class and status in the United States  

Vagrants. Vagabonds. Hoboes. Identified by myriad names, the homeless and geographically mobile have been with us since the earliest periods of recorded history. In the early days of the United States, these poor migrants – consisting of everyone from work-seekers to runaway slaves – populated the roads and streets of major cities and towns. These individuals were a part of a social class whose geographical movements broke settlement laws, penal codes, and welfare policies. This book documents their travels and experiences across the Atlantic world, excavating their life stories from the records of criminal justice systems and relief organizations.  

Vagrants and Vagabonds examines the subsistence activities of the mobile poor, from migration to wage labor to petty theft, and how local and state municipal authorities criminalized these activities, prompting extensive punishment. Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan examines the intertwined legal constructions, experiences, and responses to these so-called “vagrants,” arguing that we can glean important insights about poverty and class in this period by paying careful attention to mobility. This book charts why and how the itinerant poor were subject to imprisonment and forced migration, and considers the relationship between race and the right to movement and residence in the antebellum US.  Ultimately, Vagrants and Vagabonds argues that poor migrants, the laws designed to curtail their movements, and the people charged with managing them, were central to shaping everything from the role of the state to contemporary conceptions of community to class and labor status, the spread of disease, and punishment in the early American republic. 

Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan is Instructor in the Department of History at Rutgers University.

The Midtown Scholar is pleased to welcome award-winning Guardian journalist Chris McGreal to Harrisburg to discuss his new book, American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts, a detailed account of the history of the American opioid epidemic. McGreal will be in conversation with WITF's Brett Sholtis. This event is free and open to the public. Book signing to follow discussion. 

About the Book:

A comprehensive portrait of a uniquely American epidemic–devastating in its findings and damning in its conclusions.

The opioid epidemic has been called “one of the greatest mistakes of modern medicine.” But calling it a mistake is a generous rewriting of history. Driven by greed, incompetence, and indifference, it was an utterly avoidable tragedy.

Chris McGreal reveals this in his deeply reported account, covering everyone from the law enforcement who struggled to get prosecutors to go after the doctors they called “drug dealers in white coats;” to miners who grew addicted to opioids while trying to ease the pain of their strenuous job; to physicians and scientists who tried to warn of an epidemic; to a teenage girl dragged into the heroin trade.

American Overdose also presents new evidence of Big Pharma’s domination of the healthcare system as it flooded the country with opioids. It exposes how the Food and Drug Administration and Congress were coopted into the drive to push painkillers–resulting ultimately in the rise and resurgence of heroin cartels in the American heartland.

McGreal tells the story, in terms both broad and intimate, of a population hit by a catastrophe they never saw coming. It was years in the making; and its ruinous consequences will stretch years into the future.

About the Author:

Chris McGreal is a reporter for the Guardian and former journalist at the BBC. He was the Guardian’s correspondent in Johannesburg, Jerusalem and Washington DC, and now writes from across the United States. He has won several awards including for his reporting of the genocide in Rwanda, coverage of Israel/Palestine, and for writing on the impact of economic recession in modern America. He received the James Cameron prize for “work as a journalist that has combined moral vision and professional integrity”. He was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism for reporting that “penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth”. He is a former merchant seaman.

About the Interviewer: 

Brett Sholtis is WITF's Transforming Health Reporter. He covers health care and community health issues throughout the region.
In his life before journalism, Brett served in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard in Kosovo and worked in the motorcycle industry in Southern California. Originally from Cambria County, he's proud to report news for his home state.

Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey has been called "a masterpiece of translation," "a poetic feast," and "a staggeringly superior translation." Meanwhile, Madeline Miller's novel Circe, a creative retelling of the goddess Circe's story, took the world by storm this summer, quickly becoming a #1 New York Times Bestseller. 

The Midtown Scholar is thrilled to welcome author and scholar Emily Wilson and welcome BACK Madeline Miller for a conversation on translating The Odyssey.

About Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey:

A lean, fleet-footed translation that recaptures Homer’s “nimble gallop” and brings an ancient epic to new life.

The first great adventure story in the Western canon, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty, and power; about marriage and family; about travelers, hospitality, and the yearning for home.

In this fresh, authoritative version—the first English translation of The Odysseyby a woman—this stirring tale of shipwrecks, monsters, and magic comes alive in an entirely new way. Written in iambic pentameter verse and a vivid, contemporary idiom, this engrossing translation matches the number of lines in the Greek original, thus striding at Homer’s sprightly pace and singing with a voice that echoes Homer’s music.

Wilson’s Odyssey captures the beauty and enchantment of this ancient poem as well as the suspense and drama of its narrative. Its characters are unforgettable, from the cunning goddess Athena, whose interventions guide and protect the hero, to the awkward teenage son, Telemachus, who struggles to achieve adulthood and find his father; from the cautious, clever, and miserable Penelope, who somehow keeps clamoring suitors at bay during her husband’s long absence, to the “complicated” hero himself, a man of many disguises, many tricks, and many moods, who emerges in this translation as a more fully rounded human being than ever before.

A fascinating introduction provides an informative overview of the Bronze Age milieu that produced the epic, the major themes of the poem, the controversies about its origins, and the unparalleled scope of its impact and influence. Maps drawn especially for this volume, a pronunciation glossary, and extensive notes and summaries of each book make this an Odyssey that will be treasured by a new generation of scholars, students, and general readers alike.

About Circe:

In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child–not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power–the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves.

Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus.

But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from, or the mortals she has come to love.

With unforgettably vivid characters, mesmerizing language and page-turning suspense, Circe is a triumph of storytelling, an intoxicating epic of family rivalry, palace intrigue, love and loss, as well as a celebration of indomitable female strength in a man’s world.

Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Philadelphia.

Madeline Miller was born in Boston and attended Brown University where she earned her BA and MA in Classics. She lives in Narbeth, PA with her husband and two children. The Song of Achilles was awarded the Orange Prize for Fiction and has been translated into twenty-five languages.

In her New York Times bestseller White Rage, Dr. Carol Anderson laid bare an insidious history of policies that have systematically impeded black progress in America, from 1865 to our combustible present. With One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy, she chronicles a related history: the rollbacks to African American participation in the vote since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Dr. Carol Anderson will deliver the closing keynote address to the Harrisburg Book Festival, offering us a timely glimpse into the history of voter suppression. With vivid characters, she explores the resistance: the organizing, activism, and court battles to restore the basic right to vote to all Americans as the nation gears up for the 2018 midterm elections.

This event is free and open to the public!

From her performance in Macklemore's "Same Love" — to her smash single, "Secrets," which launched her to No. 1 on the Billboard Dance charts — Mary Lambert has solidified herself as an emerging and important new voice on the scene. Now, the Grammy-nominated singer, songwriter, and spoken word performer Mary Lambert can add poet to her list of accomplishments with her debut collection, Shame Is An Ocean I Swim Across. 

Lambert will deliver a spoken word performance, followed by an intimate musical acoustic set. In her new collection, Lambert speaks to anyone who's ever been knocked down―and picked themselves up again. In verse that deals with sexual assault, mental illness, and body acceptance, Lambert provides strength and resilience even in the darkest of times.

This title is available for in-store purchase on Friday, October 12th ONLY. Signed copies will be re-released to the public on its publication date — Tuesday, October 23rd. 

This event will be standing-room only, and entrance is first come, first served. No reservation or ticket is required. Book signing to take place after the performance. 

Oprah's 2018 Book Club Selection. Barack Obama's summer reading recommendation. Instant New York Times Bestseller. You've heard the praise — now meet bestselling novelist and speaker Tayari Jones as she delivers the 2018 Keynote Address for the 2018 Harrisburg Book Festival.

In An American Marriage, Jones takes us to the Deep South, offering us an unforgettable masterpiece of storytelling, and an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward—with hope and pain—into the future.

This is a ticketed event. Book signing to take place after the keynote address. Tickets can be purchased at www.hbgbookfest.com. 

"IT'S AMONG TAYARI'S MANY GIFTS THAT SHE CAN TOUCH US SOUL TO SOUL WITH HER WORDS."

-OPRAH WINFREY

In conjunction with the LGBT Center, the Midtown Scholar Bookstore is pleased to welcome author and TVLine.com founder Michael Ausiello to present his memoir, Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies. A book signing will follow discussion. This event is free and open to the public.

About the Book:

Michael Ausiello is the founder and editor-in-chief of TVLine.com, a television entertainment website owned by Penske Media that launched in 2010. Ausiello began his publishing career in 1997 at Soaps In Depth magazine before moving on to TVGuide.com in 2000, where he debuted his signature, spoiler-tinged “Ask Ausiello” column and established himself as a major player in the world of TV journalism. In 2008, he jumped to Entertainment Weekly, where he penned a column in the magazine as well as an award-winning blog on EW.com (both titled “The Ausiello Files”). He currently splits his time between New York City and Los Angeles.

“With the voice of a gifted narrator and the insight of a relentless journalist, Kaplan lifts the veil on the Supreme Court."

This September, the Midtown Scholar Bookstore is pleased to welcome New York Times bestselling author David Kaplan to Harrisburg as he discusses his new book, The Most Dangerous Branch: Inside the Supreme Court's Assault on the Constitution. Kaplan will be in conversation with book critic Harvey Freedenberg. This event is free and open to the public. Book signing to follow discussion. 

About the Book: 

In the bestselling tradition of The Nine and The Brethren, The Most Dangerous Branch takes us inside the secret world of the Supreme Court. David A. Kaplan, the former legal affairs editor of Newsweek, shows how the justices subvert the role of the other branches of government—and how we’ve come to accept it at our peril.

With the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Court has never before been more central in American life. It is the nine justices who too often now decide the controversial issues of our time—from abortion and same-sex marriage, to gun control, campaign finance and voting rights. The Court is so crucial that many voters in 2016 made their choice based on whom they thought their presidential candidate would name to the Court. Donald Trump picked Neil Gorsuch—the key decision of his new administration. The next justice—replacing Anthony Kennedy—will be even more important, holding the swing vote over so much social policy. Is that really how democracy is supposed to work?

Based on exclusive interviews with the justices and dozens of their law clerks, Kaplan provides fresh details about life behind the scenes at the Court – Clarence Thomas’s simmering rage, Antonin Scalia’s death, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s celebrity, Breyer Bingo, the petty feuding between Gorsuch and the chief justice, and what John Roberts thinks of his critics.

Kaplan presents a sweeping narrative of the justices’ aggrandizement of power over the decades – from Roe v. Wade to Bush v. Gore to Citizens United, to rulings during the 2017-18 term. But the arrogance of the Court isn’t partisan: Conservative and liberal justices alike are guilty of overreach. Challenging conventional wisdom about the Court’s transcendent power, The Most Dangerous Branch is sure to rile both sides of the political aisle.

About the Author: 

David A. Kaplan is the former legal affairs of Newsweek, where he covered the Court for a decade. His other books include The Silicon Boys (a New York Times bestseller that was translated into six languages), The Accidental President (an account of the 2000 election on which HBO’s Recount was partially based), and Mine’s Bigger (a biography of the largest sailboat in the world that won the Loeb Award for Best Business Book of 2008). A graduate of Cornell and the New York University School of Law, he teaches courses in journalism and ethics at NYU. He and his family live in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York.

“With a skill reminiscent of Robert Caro, [Weiss] turns the potentially dry stuff of legislative give-and-take into a drama of courage and cowardice.”–The Wall Street Journal

The Midtown Scholar is thrilled to welcome award-winning journalist and writer Elaine Weiss to Harrisburg to discuss her book, The Woman's  Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote followed by a book signing. This event is free and open to the public.

About the Book:

Nashville, August 1920. Thirty-five states have ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, twelve have rejected or refused to vote, and one last state is needed. It all comes down to Tennessee, the moment of truth for the suffragists, after a seven-decade crusade. The opposing forces include politicians with careers at stake, liquor companies, railroad magnates, and a lot of racists who don’t want black women voting. And then there are the “Antis”–women who oppose their own enfranchisement, fearing suffrage will bring about the moral collapse of the nation. They all converge in a boiling hot summer for a vicious face-off replete with dirty tricks, betrayals and bribes, bigotry, Jack Daniel’s, and the Bible. 

Following a handful of remarkable women who led their respective forces into battle, along with appearances by Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Frederick Douglass, and Eleanor Roosevelt, The Woman’s Hour is an inspiring story of activists winning their own freedom in one of the last campaigns forged in the shadow of the Civil War, and the beginning of the great twentieth-century battles for civil rights.

About the Author:

Elaine Weiss is an award-winning journalist and writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Times, and The Christian Science Monitor, as well as in reports and documentaries for National Public Radio and Voice of America. A MacDowell Colony Fellow and Pushcart Prize Editor’s Choice honoree, she is also the author of Fruits of Victory: The Woman’s Land Army in the Great War (Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press).

The Midtown Scholar Bookstore is pleased to welcome William Oldfield and Victoria Bruce to Harrisburg to present their new book, INSPECTOR OLDFIELD AND THE BLACK HAND SOCIETY: America's Original Gangsters and the U.S. Postal Detective who Brought Them to Justice. This event is free and open to the public. Book signing to follow discussion.

About the Book:

The incredible true story of the US Post Office Inspector who took down the deadly Black Hand, a turn-of-the-century Italian-American secret society that preyed on immigrants across America’s industrial heartland—featuring fascinating and never-before-seen documents and photos from the Oldfield family’s private collection.

Before the emergence of prohibition-era gangsters like Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, there was the Black Hand: an early twentieth-century Sicilian-American crime ring that preyed on immigrants from the old country. In those days, the FBI was in its infancy, and local law enforcement were clueless against the dangers—most refused to believe that organized crime existed. Terrorized victims rarely spoke out, and the criminals ruled with terror—until Inspector Frank Oldfield came along.

In 1899, Oldfield became America’s 156th Post Office Inspector—joining the ranks of the most powerful federal law enforcement agents in the country. Based in Columbus, Ohio, the unconventional Oldfield brilliantly took down train robbers, murderers, and embezzlers from Ohio to New York to Maryland. Oldfield was finally able to penetrate the dreaded Black Hand when a tip-off put him onto the most epic investigation of his career, culminating in the 1909 capture of sixteen mafiosos in a case that spanned four states, two continents—and ended in the first international organized crime conviction in the country.

Hidden away by the Oldfield family for one hundred years and covered-up by rival factions in the early 20th century Post Office Department, this incredible true story out of America’s turn-of-the-century heartland will captivate all lovers of history and true crime.

About the Author:

Victoria Bruce is the author of No Apparent Danger, Hostage Nation, and Sellout. She is the recipient of the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for excellence in broadcast journalism for her film, The Kidnapping of Ingrid Betancourt. She lives in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.

William Oldfield is an archivist and historical lecturer. He is currently engaged in entrepreneurial pursuits in the areas of environmental and sustainable operations. He grew up in Akron, Ohio, and currently lives in Annapolis, Maryland.

“If you’re going to a march, you’re going to want a sign”—and this inspiring handbook, which introduces children to the world of action and activism. 

All little scholars are welcome for this special storytime with children's author, Martha Freeman! She'll read from her brand-new children's book, If You're Going to a March. This event is free and open to the public! 

About the Book:

As more and more children attend the growing number of marches across the country, this cheerful guide serves as a great reference tool and conversation starter for youthful participants. Inspired by author Martha Freeman’s own experiences, this picture book addresses many of the questions kids might have: What should I wear? How will I get there? Where will I be able to go to the bathroom? Is it okay to dance? (Yes, it is!). All the while the text stays focused on the fact that the right to assemble is a Constitutional part of our life as Americans . . . whatever our political point of view.

About the Author: 

Martha Freeman has been marching since she was in middle school. Her 30 children’s books include Mrs. Wow Never Wanted a Cow, Zap!, and Effie Starr Zook Has One More Question. She has three children and lives in Philadelphia.

The Midtown Scholar is pleased to welcome Pennsylvania bestselling author Cara Sue Achterberg as she presents her new book, Another Good Dog: One Family and Fifty Foster Dogs. A book signing will follow discussion. This event is free and open to the public.

About the Book

When Cara felt her teenage children slipping away and saw an empty nest on the horizon, she decided the best way to fill that void was with dogs―lots of them―and so her foster journey began.

In 2015, her Pennsylvania farm became a haven for Operation Paws for Homes. There were the nine puppies at once, which arrived with less than a day’s notice; a heart- worm positive dog; a deeply traumatized stray pup from Iraq; and countless others who just needed a gentle touch and a warm place to sleep. Operation Paws for Homes rescues dogs from high-kill shelters in the rural south and shuttles them north to foster homes like Cara’s on the way to their forever homes.

What started as a search for a good dog led to an epiphany that there wasn’t just one that could fill the hole left in her heart from her children gaining independence―she could save dozens along the way. The stories of these remarkable dogs― including an eighty-pound bloodhound who sang arias for the neighbors―and the joy they bring to Cara and her family (along with a few chewed sofa cushions) fill the pages of this touching and inspiring new book that reveals the wonderful rewards of fostering.

About the Author

Cara Sue Achterberg is the author of several books, including I’m Not Her and Girls Weekend, which were national bestsellers. She lives in New Freedom, Pennsylvania.

In conjunction with the LGBT Center of Central PA, the Midtown Scholar Bookstore is pleased to welcome renowned activist Darnell Moore to Harrisburg as he presents his new memoir, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America. This event is free and open to the public. Book signing to follow presentation.

About the Book: 

From a leading journalist and activist comes a brave, beautifully wrought memoir.

When Darnell Moore was fourteen, three boys from his neighborhood tried to set him on fire. They cornered him while he was walking home from school, harassed him because they thought he was gay, and poured a jug of gasoline on him. He escaped, but just barely. It wasn't the last time he would face death.

Three decades later, Moore is an award-winning writer, a leading Black Lives Matter activist, and an advocate for justice and liberation. In No Ashes in the Fire, he shares the journey taken by that scared, bullied teenager who not only survived, but found his calling. Moore's transcendence over the myriad forces of repression that faced him is a testament to the grace and care of the people who loved him, and to his hometown, Camden, NJ, scarred and ignored but brimming with life. Moore reminds us that liberation is possible if we commit ourselves to fighting for it, and if we dream and create futures where those who survive on society's edges can thrive.

No Ashes in the Fire is a story of beauty and hope-and an honest reckoning with family, with place, and with what it means to be free.

About the Author: 

Darnell L. Moore is an editor-at-large at CASSIUS (Urban One), a columnist at LogoTV.com and NewNextNow.com, and a contributor at Mic, where he hosted their widely viewed digital series The Movement. He writes regularly for Ebony, Advocate, Vice, and Guardian. Moore was one of the original Black Lives Matter organizers, organizing bus trips from New York to Ferguson after the murder of Michael Brown. Moore is a writer-in-residence at the Center of African American Religion, Sexual Politics, and Social Justice at Columbia University, has taught at NYU, Rutgers, Fordham, and Vassar, and was trained at Princeton Theological Seminary. In 2016, he was named one of The Root 100, and in 2015 he was named one of Ebony magazine's Power 100 and Planned Parenthood's 99 Dream Keepers. He divides his time between Brooklyn and Atlanta.

The Midtown Scholar Bookstore is pleased to welcome local author and poet Juelz Davenport to the Scholar as he signs copies of his new book, In My Eyes II: Urban Poetry. 

In this new collection of poetry, Davenport delivers poems on addiction, justice, equality, and how to explore the world through the eyes of another.
 

"Julian is a remarkably talented man who puts his raw emotions and painful experiences on paper, leaving his readers charged up and inspired by his poetic tales of the urban experience. I hope his gifts will encourage others to learn, leave their old ways behind and push forward to a better life." -- Representative Patty Kim

This July, the Midtown Scholar Bookstore is pleased to welcome Bernie Sanders's Campaign Manager Jeff Weaver to Harrisburg as he discusses his new book, How Bernie Won: Inside the Revolution That's Taking Back Our Country -- and Where We Go From Here. Weaver will be in conversation with Mayor of Braddock County, John Fetterman. This event is free and open to the public. 

About the Book:

When Jeff Weaver hopped in a car with Bernie Sanders in the summer of 1986, he had no idea the Vermont backroads would lead them all the way to the 2016 presidential campaign.

In How Bernie Won, Weaver shows how Bernie sparked a movement that would sweep America and inspire millions. He vowed not to run a negative campaign. He would focus on policies, not personalities. He would not be beholden to big money. He would actually make America work for ordinary people. Weaver also shows how they overcame significant challenges: A media that thrived on negative campaigns. A party controlled by insiders. And a political system dependent on big money. Weaver explains how Bernie beat them all and, in doing so, went from having little national name recognition when he entered to the race to being one of the most respected and well-known people in the world by its end―because, Weaver argues, Bernie won the race.

He moved the discussion from the concerns of the 1% to those of the 99%. He forced the Democrats to remember their populist roots. And he showed that an outsider with real ideas and ways to get them done could compete and win against the establishment’s hand-picked candidate.

From holding bags of “Bernie buttons” and picket-stick signs, to managing thousands of campaign workers, to looking ahead to 2020, Weaver chronicles the birth of a revolution that didn’t end in November 2016. It’s only just begun.

About the Author:

Jeff Weaver, who began working for Bernie Sanders in 1986, was his campaign manager for the 2016 presidential election, as well as president of Our Revolution, a nonprofit founded by Sanders until June 2017. He is currently senior political adviser to Senator Sanders. He graduated from the University of Vermont and Georgetown University Law School. He lives in Falls Church, Virginia.

The Midtown Scholar Bookstore and WITF are pleased to welcome former White House Stenographer Beck Dorey-Stein to Harrisburg! Dorey-Stein will discuss her new memoir, From the Corner of the Oval.  Audience Q&A and book signing to follow discussion. This event is free and open to the public!

Universal Pictures and Anonymous Content have optioned the film rights, which is now in development. Read more here!

About the Book:

The compulsively readable, behind-the-scenes memoir that takes readers inside the Obama White House, through the eyes of a young staffer learning the ropes, falling in love, and finding her place in the world.

In 2012, Beck Dorey-Stein is working five part-time jobs and just scraping by when a posting on Craigslist lands her, improbably, in the Oval Office as one of Barack Obama’s stenographers. The ultimate D.C. outsider, she joins the elite team who accompany the president wherever he goes, recorder and mic in hand. On whirlwind trips across time zones, Beck forges friendships with a dynamic group of fellow travelers—young men and women who, like her, leave their real lives behind to hop aboard Air Force One in service of the president.

As she learns to navigate White House protocols and more than once runs afoul of the hierarchy, Beck becomes romantically entangled with a consummate D.C. insider, and suddenly the political becomes all too personal.

Against the backdrop of glamour, drama, and intrigue, this is the story of a young woman making unlikely friendships, getting her heart broken, learning what truly matters, and, in the process, discovering her voice.

About the Author: 

Beck Dorey-Stein is a native of Narberth, Pennsylvania, and a graduate of Wesleyan University. Prior to her five years in the White House, she taught high school English in Hightstown, New Jersey; Washington, D.C.; and Seoul, South Korea. This is her first book.

"Four centuries ago, a Muslim woman ruled an empire. Her legend still lives, but her story was lost — until now."

This July, the Midtown Scholar Bookstore is thrilled to welcome acclaimed historian Ruby Lal to Harrisburg as she presents her new book, Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan. Book signing to follow discussion. This event is free and open to the public. 

About the Book: 

When it came to hunting, she was a master shot. As a dress designer, few could compare. An ingenious architect, she innovated the use of marble in her parents’ mausoleum on the banks of the Yamuna River that inspired her stepson’s Taj Mahal. And she was both celebrated and reviled for her political acumen and diplomatic skill, which rivaled those of her female counterparts in Europe and beyond.

In 1611, thirty-four-year-old Nur Jahan, daughter of a Persian noble and widow of a subversive official, became the twentieth and most cherished wife of the Emperor Jahangir. While other wives were secluded behind walls, Nur ruled the vast Mughal Empire alongside her husband, and governed in his stead as his health failed and his attentions wandered from matters of state. An astute politician and devoted partner, Nur led troops into battle to free Jahangir when he was imprisoned by one of his own officers. She signed and issued imperial orders, and coins of the realm bore her name.

Acclaimed historian Ruby Lal uncovers the rich life and world of Nur Jahan, rescuing this dazzling figure from patriarchal and Orientalist clichés of romance and intrigue, and giving new insight into the lives of women and girls in the Mughal Empire, even where scholars claim there are no sources. Nur’s confident assertion of authority and talent is revelatory. In Empress, she finally receives her due in a deeply researched and evocative biography that awakens us to a fascinating history.

About the Author: 

Ruby Lal is professor of South Asian history at Emory University. Her previous books are Coming of Age in Nineteenth Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness and Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World.

Join us on for an Equality Pennsylvania event with HRC Press Secretary Sarah McBride as she discusses how we bend the arc of justice.

The evening will be an excellent opportunity to learn and hear from one of the most visible advocates in the national movement for equality as she discusses her book, Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality.

A book signing will follow the conversation, and everyone is invited to stick around to meet and mingle and to learn more about how they can get engaged in their local community.

Light refreshments to be provided.

About Tomorrow Will Be Different:

“A brave, powerful memoir.” —PEOPLE
 
Before she became the first transgender person to speak at a national political convention in 2016 at the age of twenty-six, Sarah McBride struggled with the decision to come out—not just to her family but to the students of American University, where she was serving as student body president. She’d known she was a girl from her earliest memories, but it wasn’t until the Facebook post announcing her truth went viral that she realized just how much impact her story could have on the country.

Four years later, McBride was one of the nation’s most prominent transgender activists, walking the halls of the White House, advocating inclusive legislation, and addressing the country in the midst of a heated presidential election. She had also found her first love and future husband, Andy, a trans man and fellow activist, who complemented her in every way . . . until cancer tragically intervened.

Informative, heartbreaking, and profoundly empowering, Tomorrow Will Be Different is McBride’s story of love and loss and a powerful entry point into the LGBTQ community’s battle for equal rights and what it means to be openly transgender. From issues like bathroom access to health care to gender in America, McBride weaves the important political and cultural milestones into a personal journey that will open hearts and change minds.

As McBride urges: “We must never be a country that says there’s only one way to love, only one way to look, and only one way to live.”

The fight for equality and freedom has only just begun.

About the Author

Sarah McBride is the national press secretary at the Human Rights Campaign, working tirelessly to advocate for LGBTQ equality. She has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, TIME, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Vogue, Rolling Stone, and The New Yorker, and she speaks regularly at national LGBTQ and political events. A native of Delaware, Sarah is on the front lines of the progressive movement.