Event Video

Esther Schor discusses her book about the life of Emma Lazarus, the iconoclastic 19th century poet and activist whose poem gave voice to the Statue of Liberty.

Schor is a poet and professor of English at Princeton University. Her work has been published in The Times Literary Supplement as well as The New York Times. Schor curated the exhibit Emma Lazarus: Voice of Liberty, Voice of Conscience now on display at the Central Library.

Join a public conversation with local brewing pioneer John McDonald, founder of Boulevard Brewing Company.

McDonald, recently named the 2011 Brewers Association Recognition Award winner, started the brewery in 1989 and hand delivered Boulevard beer to local restaurants in his pick-up truck. Today, his company employs over 90 people.

Since 1989, the award-winning company has grown to become the largest craft brewer in the Midwest and the largest independent American brewer in Missouri.

On May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space, making a brief suborbital mission that marked the first manned launch of Project Mercury.

Roger D. Launius, a senior curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, reconsiders NASA’s pioneering program, examining the origins of these first attempts to reach into space, the Cold War “space race,” and Project Mercury’s meaning a half-century later.

Kansas City-based independent writer and producer Jack Cashill discusses his latest book in which he contends President Barack Obama did not write his 1995 bestselling autobiography, Dreams from My Father, or his 2006 bestseller, The Audacity of Hope.

In Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Loves, and Letters of America’s First Postmodern President, Cashill contends nothing in Obama’s history suggests he was capable of writing either book. Indeed, Cashill concludes that the real author of Dreams from My Father was Bill Ayers.