Discover the World of Fungi
Join Mason Goes Mushrooming author Melany Kahn & illustrator Ellen Korbonski for interactive kid -friendly activities about mushrooms. Identify real mushrooms, grab provided paints and materials to make your own wooden, paper or model fungi to take home, or watch an illustrator at work making mushrooms appear from the tip of her watercolor brush.
Growing Upwards
A young woman seeks ways to distract herself after her mother’s death. An intelligent liberal arts student looks to guidance from her favorite authors to move past heartbreak. Two Taiwanese-American best friends continue to find themselves drawn to each other, despite the passage of time, distance, and shame. Ella Baxter’s New Animal, Elif Batuman’s Either/Or, […]
Police State
A mother struggling to find her footing under the weight of immigrant parent expectations, a time-traveler in search of freedom through the mysteries of the past, and a sociologist held captive by an unknown civilization on Jupiter. These protagonists are each forced to confront the abusive power and violence imposed upon them by the structures […]
Virtual Poetry Reading
Poets Kaveh Akbar (Pilgrim Bell), Victoria Chang (The Trees Witness Everything), and Warsan Shire (Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head) read from their new volumes of poetry. Introduced by the co-chair of the Brooklyn Book Festival’s Poetry Committee, Hafizah Augustus Geter (The Black Period: On Personhood, Race, and Origin).
Illustrator Draw-Off
Watch, laugh, and cheer as artist Raúl The Third presides over the year’s most dynamic live action drawing competition featuring George O’Connor (Olympians series), Benson Shum (Anzu the Great Kaiju), Charise Mericle Harper (I Cannot Draw A Horse), Jay Davis (Girl Dad) and more. Due to the weather, this program has moved indoors to […]
The Truth About Banned Books
Join Newbery Honor and National Book Award finalist Kyle Lukoff (Different Kinds of Fruit), Stonewall Award winner Brandy Colbert (The Only Black Girls in Town), and Maulik Pancholy (The Best at It) on a panel about banned and challenged middle grade books, moderated by Kat Savage, managing librarian at Adams Street Library, Brooklyn Public Library’s […]
Carrimebec, The Town That Walked by David Barclay Moore
Carrimebec, The Town That Walked is a stunning tale of magical realism that is truly the perfect merge between history, African American folk wisdom, and mystical elements. David Barclay Moore creates a captivating tale for children as a way to educate on the Reconstruction era in this modern classic illustrated by John Holyfield.
Telling Others’ Stories (Masks Required)
A long-shot political campaign built from scratch, an anti-crime squad policing the immigrant suburbs of Paris, a sweeping cross-country investigation into the many ways of gender expression, a deep and compassionate dive into the lives of military veterans struggling to reconcile wartime and post-war lives—these are powerful works of journalism and social science made even […]
Legacies of Injustice
Two authors craft compelling narratives that paint vivid portraits of America’s shameful past. In Geraldine Brooks’s Horse, two storylines from different time periods are threaded together to reveal America’s enduring legacy of injustice and racism. And in Jabari Asim’s Yonder, a group of strivers connect through love and friendship while fighting to survive the cruel […]
Ways of Healing
The long tail of COVID-19 has brought into view several simultaneous health crises, as well as the inability of our health care system to sufficiently address them. Some are products of the last two years; others of decades of disregard and misunderstanding. Chloé Cooper Jones (Easy Beauty), Linda Villarosa (Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll […]
All About Romance
Fall head over heels with superstar authors Casey McQuiston (I Kissed Shara Wheeler), Dustin Thao (You’ve Reached Sam), and Debbie Rigaud (A Girl’s Guide to Love & Magic) as they discuss romantic love—the joy, the heartbreak, and everything in-between. Moderated by NYT bestselling author Sayantani DasGupta (Debating Darcy).
What Language Can Do
Poets Wo Chan (Togetherness), John Keene (Punks: New & Selected Poetry), Yesenia Montilla (Muse Found in a Colonized Body), and Claire Schwartz (Civil Service) discuss how language serves as a tool for discovering one’s place in the world, while also investigating loss, grief and the possibilities of desire and joy. Moderated by Tina Chang (Hybrida).
Where We Come From
Home will always call out to you, no matter where you go. The story of a couple meeting in modern-day New York is intimately entangled with the histories of their parents’ first loves in the Virgin Islands and Ghana. In County Mayo, Ireland, the daily lives of long-time residents are threaded through with loss, disillusion, […]
Genre & Exploding Form presented by the Whiting Foundation
Join us for a discussion with Anthony Cody (Borderland Apocrypha), Andrea Lawlor (Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl), and Nana Nkweti (Walking on Cowrie Shells), writers who are dissolving genre boundaries to bring new life to familiar literary forms. Moderated by Lincoln Michel (The Body Scout).
