Search the Signature Event Archive to discover past Library events. Watch videos, hear speaker interviews, and listen to audio recordings of previous presentations. Search by keyword (event title, subject, or presenter name), location or by date range.
Award-winning author, historian, podcast host, and New Yorker staffer Jill Lepore juxtaposes the political and personal in her new essay collection The Deadline. She discusses the essays, which crisscross over what she refers to as the “deadline,” the “river of time that divides the quick from the dead,” enveloping and digesting lockdowns, race commissions, and popular toys, as well as personal losses that riddle her life.
Starlight Theatre President and CEO Lindsey Rood-Clifford moderates a discussion about the importance of broadening historical narratives to include experiences from traditionally marginalized groups. Members of the current cast of the Tony Award-winning musical 1776, running at Starlight from July 25-30, are featured panelists. Note the 5 p.m. start time.
Philadelphia artist Amy Cousins and Kansas City educator and printmaker Ruben Castillo talk to the Library's Anne Kniggendorf about their work and their collaboration on the Kansas City Public Library exhibition All Modes are Open to Us, which is on display in the Central Library’s Guldner Gallery through August 12, 2023.
Barbara Brackman – quilter, quilting historian, and author – examines quilt making in Missouri with a Kentucky connection and 19th-century African American quilts stitched in Kentucky and Tennessee. She then joins the Library’s Anne Kniggendorf in a conversation about the historic and modern significance of quilting.
Jay Nordlinger has gained a reputation for open-mindedness in writing about politics, foreign affairs, and the arts, among other subjects, for National Review. He takes stock of journalism today, examining the roles of reporters, columnists, and editors and the practice of straight vs. opinion journalism. What’s good and bad? And how does one navigate this media environment?
Drawing from her book Unorganized Women: Repetitive Rhetorical Labor of Low-Wage Workers, 1837-1937, the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Jane Greer looks at how women working at Kansas City’s Nelly Don Garment Company in the 1930s sought a collective identity as practical and comfortable as the garments they stitched – but resisted union overtures.
UMKC professor and author Clancy Martin joins Angela Elam, formerly of public radio’s New Letters on the Air, in a discussion of Martin’s new book How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of a Suicidal Mind – about living with addiction and suicidal thoughts and his several attempts to take his life. He assures others who similarly struggle that they’re not alone and self-destruction is almost always avoidable.
Former Sumner High School band and orchestra teacher Leon Alexander Brady recounts an impactful career and its 1972 pinnacle: the Sumner stage band’s victorious performance in the Paris Jazz Internationale Festival, stamping it as the best in the world. He joins author Steve Penn in a discussion of Penn’s book From the Heart of the Hood to the Pinnacle of Paris.
Lawrence, Kansas, photographer Ann Dean discusses the impact and inspiration found in three seminal books – The Learning Tree, A Choice of Weapons, and Half Past Autumn – by Kansas-born Black author, photographer, and filmmaker Gordon Parks, one of the most renowned documentarians of American life and culture in the 20th century.
Lindsey Doolittle, Kristen Devlin, Ryan Sikes, Brad Friedman
In conjunction with the Library exhibition Peripheral Visions, filmmaker Lindsey Doolittle screens and discusses her award-winning, 8-minute short film Emerging Artists, inspired by Johnson County Developmental Supports’ Emerging Artists program. She is joined by JCDS Arts Program Specialist Kristen Devlin and artists Ryan Sikes and Brad Friedman.
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