Welcome to the 25th anniversary season for the New York City Book Awards!
Event Recordings
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Wednesday, June 9, 2021 - 6:00 PM | Special Event | YouTube Live | open to the public | drop inThe New York City Book Awards, founded in 1996, honor each year’s best books about the city. This year's special ceremony honors the creators of great New York City books from 2019 and 2020.
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Tuesday, May 25, 2021 - 6:00 PM | Reception | YouTube Live | open to the public | drop inAward winners and participants are celebrated at a ceremony and reception, with writing advice and inspiration from the author judges.
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Mary Schmidt Campbell, An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden, with special guests
Monday, April 12, 2021 - 6:00 PM | Lecture | onlineAN AMERICAN ODYSSEY illuminates the life and work of Romare Bearden, whose art celebrated the traditions and ceremonies of African American culture. In this special event, biographer Mary Schmidt Campbell discusses Bearden's life and art and talks with gallery owners Sherman Edmiston and June Kelly.
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Thursday, March 25, 2021 - 6:00 PM | Online Event | online | open to the public | free of charge | registration requiredIn this original series of live online events, hear the voices of Black writers through history re-examined to inspire understanding of race in our country today. This third presentation brings to life the first half of the 20th century with dramatic readings, historical context, and images.
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Wednesday, February 3, 2021 - 7:30 PM | Lecture | presented online by the Athenaeum of Philadelphia"The latest sweeping, satisfying popular history from the British American author and journalist, this time covering a topic that many of us take for granted...Engaging revelations about land and property, often discouraging but never dull." - Kirkus Reviews
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Thursday, January 28, 2021 - 6:00 PM | Online Event | online | open to the public | free of charge | registration requiredIn this original series of live online events, hear the voices of Black writers through history re-examined to inspire understanding of race in our country today. This second presentation features works from the 1800s with dramatic readings, historical context, and images.
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Sunday, December 13, 2020 - 2:00 PM | Special Event | online | open to the public | $10 per person | registration requiredIn this lecture with recorded music, American Songbook expert and radio host Michael Lasser takes us back to the year almost a century ago when one of America's most iconic songwriters came fully into his own voice.
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Tuesday, December 8, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Lecture | online | open to the public | $10 per person | registration requiredIlluminating a culture that has long been romanticized by Westerners as deeply spiritual and peaceful, Demick reveals what it is really like to be a Tibetan in the twenty-first century, trying to preserve one’s culture, faith, and language against the depredations of a seemingly unstoppable, technologically all-seeing superpower.
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Tuesday, December 1, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Special Event | online | open to the public | $10 per person | registration requiredIn this combination of memoir, historical narrative, and contemporary political and social analysis, the essayist, journalist, and author investigates the struggle for Black voting rights from Reconstruction through the civil rights movement to 2020, in conversation with award-winning novelist, essayist, and playwright Caryl Phillips.
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Thursday, November 19, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Online Event | online | open to the public | free of charge | registration requiredIn this original series of live online events, hear the voices of Black writers through history re-examined to inspire understanding of race in our country today. This debut presentation features works from the 1700s with dramatic readings, historical context, and images.
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Monday, November 16, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Lecture | online | open to the public | $10 per person | registration requiredFrom the best-selling author of King Leopold's Ghost and Spain in Our Hearts comes the astonishing but forgotten story of an immigrant sweatshop worker who married an heir to a great American fortune and became one of the most charismatic radical leaders of her time.
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Thursday, November 12, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Lecture | online | open to the public | $10 per person | registration requiredEnter the mind of French literary giant Honoré de Balzac through a study of nine of his greatest characters and the novels they inhabit. Balzac's Lives illuminates the writer's life, era, and work in a completely original way.
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Tuesday, November 10, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Lecture | online | free for members of the New York Society Library and membership library members | registration required through the Athenaeum of PhiladelphiaThe Princeton University professor and author of BEGIN AGAIN: JAMES BALDWIN'S AMERICA AND ITS URGENT LESSONS FOR OUR OWN addresses the questions raised by Baldwin's 1962 essay "As Much Truth as One Can Bear."
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Sunday, November 8, 2020 - 2:00 PM | Lecture | online | open to the public | $10 per person | registration requiredMary Shelley, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner and Virginia Woolf: they all wrote dazzling books that forever changed the way we see history. Prodigy, visionary, 'outlaw,' orator and explorer. As society's outsiders, the exceptional subjects of this study inspired a new breed of women―and one another.
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Wednesday, November 4, 2020 - 2:00 PM | Special Event | YouTube | open to the public | free of charge | drop in2020 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of New York City diarist George Templeton Strong. Join Library staff Harriet Shapiro and Cathy McGowan for a visit to Strong's 19th-century world with historical narrative, images, dramatic readings, and music.
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Thursday, October 29, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Lecture | online | free for members of the New York Society Library and membership library members | registration required through the Athenaeum of PhiladelphiaThe acclaimed biographer recreates a celebrated eighteenth-century London club that included critic Samuel Johnson, biographer James Boswell, historian Edward Gibbon, political thinker Edmund Burke, economist Adam Smith, painter Joshua Reynolds, and actor David Garrick.
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Monday, October 26, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Lecture | online | open to the public | $10 per person | registration requiredThe iconic author of the bestselling phenomenon CRAZY RICH ASIANS returns with the glittering tale of a young woman who finds herself torn between two men.
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Thursday, October 22, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Lecture | online | open to the public | $10 per person | registration requiredA singular, beautifully written coming-of-age memoir of a Filipino boy with albinism whose story travels from an immigrant childhood to Harvard to a gender transition and illuminates the illusions of race, disability, and gender.
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Thursday, October 1, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Online Event | open to the public | $10 per person | registration requiredThe foremost expert on the book art of Margaret Armstrong talks about her life and career, with stunning images from his own comprehensive collection of her bindings.
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Tuesday, September 29, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Online Event | for members of the New York Society Library and membership library members | free of charge | registration required through the Athenaeum of PhiladelphiaIn the decades before the Civil War, African Americans in the North lived in an tenuous freedom, denied political rights and threatened with kidnapping and enslavement. In this presentation, REMAKING THE REPUBLIC author Christopher Bonner explores individual and collective strategies African Americans used to defend their freedom and secure rights.
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Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Online Event | open to the public | by donation | registration requiredA husband, a father, a son, a business owner...And the best getaway driver east of the Mississippi. Like Ocean's Eleven meets Drive with a Southern noir twist, S. A. Cosby's Blacktop Wasteland is a searing, operatic story of a man pushed to his limits by poverty, race, and his own former life of crime. Lee Child calls it "sensationally good - new, fresh, real, authentic, twisty, with characters and dilemmas that will break your heart. More than recommended."
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Wednesday, September 16, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Online Event | open to the public | $10 per person | registration requiredTwo acclaimed novelists discuss their research and writing about the experiences of women in the Second World War and its aftermath.
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Sunday, September 13, 2020 - 4:00 PM | Online Event | open to the public | free of charge | drop inStaffer and love-story reader Marialuisa Monda chats about guilty pleasures and pet peeves in classic romances and contemporary love stories.
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Tuesday, September 8, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Online Event | for members of the New York Society Library and membership library members | by donation | registration requiredIn Dawson’s Fall, a novel based on the lives of Roxana Robinson’s great-grandparents, we see America at its most fragile, fraught, and malleable. Set in 1889, in Charleston, South Carolina, Robinson’s tale weaves her family’s journal entries and letters with a novelist’s narrative grace, and spans the life of her tragic hero, Frank Dawson, as he attempts to navigate the country’s new political, social, and moral landscape.
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Monday, July 20, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Online Event | online | open to the public | $10 per person | registration requiredAn African-American writer’s concise, heartfelt take on the state of his nation, exploring the war between the values he has always held and the reality with which he is confronted in twenty-first-century America.
