In her new book, Fran Allen McKinney offers the experiences of her life as a life-line for others: the confirmation that you are not alone, validation that you are not crazy, and realization that you will survive the twists and turns of life.

A native of Omaha, Nebraska, McKinney served nearly eight years in the U.S. Marine Corps. She eared a Bachelor's degree in business from Johns Hopkins University and now serves as District Director of Congressman Elijah E. Cummings. She is president and CEO of Self Development Success (SDS), providing services for leadership coaching and nonprofit fundraising.

• Central Library   Wednesday, Feb 10, 2010 (6:30 p.m.)
    Poe Room

• Adults
 
• Seniors
 

In 2007, David Beckham left the comfort and securiity of European soccer and embarked on a new and risky adventure in the U.S. with the L.A. Galaxy. Sports writer Grant Wahl spent two years following Beckham and the Galaxy. In The Beckham Experiment, he provides the behind-the-scenes drama of Beckham's time on the road in one of sports' most fascinating gambles. 

In 12 years at Sports Illustrated, Grant Wahl has written 31 cover stories and covered five World Cups, three Olympics, and 12 NCAA basketball tournaments.

• Central Library   Wednesday, Feb 17, 2010 (7:00 p.m.)
    Wheeler Auditorium

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Alexandra Natapoff, professor of law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, is an award-winning scholar and a nationally recognized expert on snitching in the criminal justice system.

In her book, she discusses the widespread use of criminal informants, the legal, cultural and political consequences, from street to drug crime to Hip Hop music, the FBI, and terrorism.

Natapoff served as assistant federal public defender in Baltimore from 1998 to 2003.

• Central Library   Sunday, Feb 21, 2010 (2:00 p.m.)
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When gold rush fever gripped the globe in 1849, thousands of Chinese immigrants came through San Francisco on their way to seek their fortunes. In The Poker Bride, Christopher Corbett looks at this Chinese experience through a little-known legend from Idaho lore, the story of Polly, a young Chinese concubine, won by a white gambler in a poker game in Idaho.

Corbett is the author of Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express and Vacationland. He writes the popular "Back Page" column for Style magazine and teaches at UMBC.

• Central Library   Wednesday, Feb 24, 2010 (6:30 p.m.)
    Poe Room

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Ted Venetoulis' novel turns the Washington scene upside down when the First Lady kicks her unfaithful husband out of of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Full of twists and turns and a White House filled with cronies and chicanery, this far-fetched spoof boasts an ending unlike any in the long annals of the affiars of state.

Former Baltimore County executive, Ted Venetoulis currently serves as chairman and CEO of Corridor Media, Inc., a regional business and political news magazine serving the Baltimore Washington corridor. He has taught courses on politics and the media at Johns Hopkins University and Goucher College. Venetoulis has been the leader of efforts to return the Baltimore Sun to local ownership and is recognized nationally for his knowledge of the various approaches to restructuring and salvaging the newspaper industry.

• Central Library   Tuesday, Mar 02, 2010 (6:30 p.m.)
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Young urban black men are overwhelmingly the victims and perpetrators of violent crime in the U.S. Troubled by this tragedy -- and his medical colleagues apparent numbness in the face of it -- Dr. Rich, a black man who grew up in relative comfort, reached out to many of these young patients to learn why they lived in a seemingly endless cycle of violence and how it affected them.

Dr. John A. Rich is the chair of and a professor in the Department of Health Management and Policy at the Drexel University School of Public Health, where he is also the director of the Center of Academic Public Health Practice. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2006 and is the former medical director of the Boston Public Health Commission and the Young Men's Health Clinic in Boston.

Joining Dr. Rich at this program: Roy Martin, a senior youth development specialist in the Youth Development Network, Boston Public Health Commission. He helps connect young men with health and social services they desperately need. Previously Martin worked as a network manager and constituent services manager in the office of Senator John Kerry. Martin combines his wisdom from the streets with his passion for social justice to help young men survive and heal from the trauma of their lives.

• Central Library   Tuesday, Mar 16, 2010 (6:30 p.m.)
    Poe Room

• Teens
 
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What's it like to be a sister, more specifically a twin, who is overshadowed by her sibling in every way? Lindsey Rose tackled this dilemma by being an academic and professional overachiever. Then, at age 29, her career in an elite Manhattan ad agency abruptly ends. She moves back to her family home in suburban Maryland where she reinvents herself and establishes a new relationship with her sister.

At times laugh-out-loud funny, at times truly poignant, The Opposite of Me is destined to be one of the hot reads in the summer of 2010. Sarah Pekkanen's work has appeared in numerous national publications (People, USA Today, The New Republic, Reader's Digest) and in the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post, and Washingtonian magazine. She lives in Maryland.

• Central Library   Tuesday, Mar 23, 2010 (6:30 p.m.)
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Through a series of fictional episodes about a small Midwestern town, Jabari Asim brings into focus how the tumultuous events of 1968 affected real people's lives. The 16 connected stories are set in one of the most turbulent years in modern history, 1968, in the fictional town of South Gateway, where second-generation offspring of the Great Migrators have pieced together a thriving if uneasy existence. Centered on the lives of a diverse cast of well-drawn characters, the stories evoke a uniquely American epoch. With police brutality on the rise, the civil rights movement gaining momentum, and wars raging at home and abroad, the community Asim has conjured stands on edge.

Jabari Asim is the author of What Obama Means, The N Word, and several books for children. He is a scholar-in-residence at the University of Illinois and editor-in-chief of The Crisis. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Essence, Ebony, and other publications. He recently was honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship. 

• Central Library   Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 (6:30 p.m.)
    Poe Room

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Baltimore is the setting for this examination of bigotry and residential segregation. Antero Pietila shows how continued discrimination practices toward African Americans and Jews has shaped the cities in which we live.

Eugenics, racial thinking, and white supremacist attitudes influenced even the federal government's actions toward housing in the 20th century. The Federal Housing Administration continued discriminatory housing policies even into the 1960s, long after civil rights legislation. This all-American tale is told through the prism of Baltimore, from its early suburbanization in the 1880s to the consequences of "white flight" after World War II and into the first decade of the 21st century. Pietila's narrative centers on the human side of residential real estate practices, whose discriminatory tools were the same everywhere: restrictive covenants, redlining, blockbusting, predatory lending.

Antero Pietila spent 35 years as a reporter with the Baltimore Sun, most of it covering the city's neighborhoods, politics, and government. A native of Finland, he became a student of racial change during his first visit to the United States in 1964.

• Central Library   Thursday, Mar 25, 2010 (6:30 p.m.)
    Poe Room

• Adults
 
• Seniors
 

Nearly half of all young black men in America are behind bars, on parole or probation. Legal scholars Michelle Alexander and Paul Butler argue that the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a system of racial control, targeting black men and decimating communities of color.

In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans -- employment and housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote and educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion of jury service.

Paul Butler's book, Let's Get Free: A Hip Hop Theory of Justice, offers a powerful new vision of justice. Americans live in a society fueled by fear and fettered by the lock-'em-up culture that dominates our criminal justice system; we have the highest rate of incarceration in the world, yet our streets are no safer. Part memoir, part manifesto, Let's Get Free takes a fresh investigative look at the dysfunctional politics of our broken justice system and proposes a series of controversial solutions.

A longtime civil rights advocate and litigator, Michelle Alexander was a 2005 Soros Justice Fellow. She served for several years as director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California. She clerked for Justice Harry Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court, directed the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School, and appeared as a commentaotr on CNN and MSNBC. She is currently a professor at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law.

Paul Butler is a former federal prosecutor and the country's leading expert on jury nullification. He regularly provides commentary for CNN, NPR, and Fox News. He has been featured on 60 Minutes and profiled and published in the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and The Progressive. Butler is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School. An award-winning law professor, he now teaches in the areas of criminal law, civil rights, and jurisprudence at George Washington University.

• Central Library   Wednesday, Mar 31, 2010 (6:30 p.m.)
    Poe Room

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Immediately after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Baltimore's liberal school board voted to desegregate and adopted a free choice policy that made integration voluntary. Baltimore's school desegregation proceeded peacefully, without the resistance or violence that occurred elsewhere. However, few whites chose to attend school with blacks, and after a few years of modest desegregation, schools resegregated and became increasingly segregated. The school board never changed its policy. Black leaders had urged the board to adopt free choice, and, despite the limited desegregation, continued to support the policy and never sued the board to do anything else.

Howell S. Baum is professor of Urban Studies and Planing at the University of Maryland. He is the author most recently of Community Action for School Reform and The Organization of Hope: Communities Planning.

• Central Library   Tuesday, Apr 27, 2010 (6:30 p.m.)
    Poe Room

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• Seniors