BPL Presents is BPL’s curated cultural program, with arts and culture offerings including author talks, live performances, music, film and visual art exhibitions that explore the critical issues of our time in Brooklyn and beyond.
Center for Brooklyn History
Brooklyn's culture past and present from the Center for Brooklyn History
Upcoming
Miguel Ángel Hernández Discusses Anoxia
Join us for a discussion with author Miguel Ángel Hernández on his new book Anoxia (translated by Adrian Nathan West, Other Press, 2025). Hernández will be in conversation with award-winning journalist and writer Ana Vidal Egea. In this mesmerizing psychological novel, a strange job leads a…
Classical Interludes: Opera Essentia
Opera Essentia provides under-reached NYC communities with approachable performances in gardens, parks, libraries, churches, and other neighborhood gathering centers, for Free.
"The Queen's Heart" is a One-Hour Distillation of Handel's Radamisto (1720), created by Artistic Director and…
Environmental Injustice: Race, Class, and Toxic Inequality | The Path to Today
Join us for the first event in a three-part series exploring the intersection of racial inequality and the environment. Part 1 delves into the systemic roots of environmental racism and confronts a critical question: Why are communities of color and low-wealth populations…
Ruha Benjamin Discusses Race After Technology: BPL Book Prize at 10
In honor of the 10th year anniversary of the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, BPL Presents welcomes Ruha Benjamin back to the Dweck stage to discuss her 2020 prize-winning book Race After Technology and its pressing resonances with the recent explosion of artificial intelligence. Joining her…
Deborah Baker Discusses Charlottesville with Lorraine Adams
BPL Presents welcomes Deborah Baker, whose new book Charlottesville has been hailed as a “vivid account that … illuminates the evils half-hidden under a flickering torch” (Kirkus), in discussion with Lorraine Adams.
In August 2017, over a thousand members of the far-right descended on a…
Airway: Doctors' Tales From Inside the Hospital
Airway is an open-mic storytelling event for doctors to share their experiences of being a physician, started in 2015 as a local event among residency programs in New York City by Maimonides emergency physicians Mert Erogul, MD and Joshua Schiller, MD. Join us for an evening of…
CBH Talk | Deborah Archer and James Forman Discuss “Dividing Lines”
In her new book, Dividing Lines: How Transportation Infrastructure Reinforces Racial Inequality, acclaimed scholar and ACLU President Deborah Archer shows how seemingly innocuous transit planning functions – the development of roads, sidewalks, dividers, and other infrastructures –…
Myth Weaving, Summer Dreaming: Solstice Storytelling Workshop
What are the new stories of collective celebration and tenderness that our world urgently needs? How can we dream up new relationships to the land and to one another? In this imaginative storytelling workshop, participants will dream up new myths for the summer solstice. Writer and storyteller…
Yrsa Daley-Ward Discusses The Catch with Zakiya Dalia Harris
BPL Presents welcomes Yrsa Daley-Ward who discusses The Catch—named one of the Most Anticipated Books of 2025 by TIME, Publishers Weekly, Lit Hub, We Are Bookish, and Book Riot—in conversation with Zakiya Dalia Harris.
Twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have always struggled to relate, their…
Children of the Movement: Growing up with Parents in the Black Panther Party
This program is offered in partnership with The Guardian.
In March, The Guardian published a landmark article and produced a short film spotlighting the self-described “Panther cubs”—offspring of members of the Black Panther Party. This project, two…
Elie Mystal Presents the 2025 Kahn Humanities Lecture
BPL Presents invites you to the 2025 Kahn Humanities Lecture with Elie Mystal—a legal scholar, author, and commentator.
A legal analyst for the storied Nation magazine, Mystal is a fellow at Type Media Center and a New York Times bestselling author of several books. In this unique talk…
Pirate Radio in New York City 1939-1998: From Booger Brothers Broadcasting to WBAD-Bad Radio
Pirate radio stations have been sneaking onto New York City’s radio dial since the 1930s, mixing up a sonic stew ranging from self-proclaimed, “buzzy sounding, lousy sounding, get-your-ego-off radio” to a profusion of…
Environmental Injustice: Race, Class, and Toxic Inequality | The Present Crisis
Join us for Part 2 of a three-part series exploring the intersection of racial inequality and the environment. This time we explore the situation today. Leaders from across the country share solutions to environmental crises within their communities and discuss a new urgent challenge…
Opening the Archives: Finding LGBTQ+ History in the CBH Collections
When author Hugh Ryan researched his 2019 book When Brooklyn Was Queer, he delved deep into the archives at the Center for Brooklyn History. Queer history is rarely neatly labeled in finding aids or research guides. And so Hugh brought a queer lens to an array of seemingly unrelated…
CBH Talk | Rules and Rutabagas: A Conversation about the Park Slope Food Coop with Joe Holtz, Sun Yu, and Alexandra Schwartz
In the early 1970s, a remarkable experiment in collective action took root in Park Slope: the Park Slope Food Coop (PSFC). Founded in 1973 as a members-only, collectively-run buying club, the Coop has grown over 52 years into the largest single store food cooperative in the United…
Just Conversations | The Welcome Myth: Immigration and America’s Contradictions
About Just ConversationsJust Conversations is a series co-presented by the Center for Brooklyn History and Brooklyn Org that brings into dialogue issues facing our borough, city, and society and gives voice to the change makers who move us towards a more equitable future.The United…
Nicola Kraus Discusses The Best We Could Hope For with Amy Shearn
Join us for a discussion with Nicola Kraus on her new book The Best We Could Hope For. Kraus will be in conversation with author Amy Shearn.
When Bunny Linden abandons her three children with her older sister…
Environmental Injustice: Race, Class, and Toxic Inequality | The Way Forward
The final program in this three-part series on the intersection of racial inequality and the environment looks ahead. Join us in imagining a future free from the race and class based divides that determine who is — and isn’t — protected from toxins, pollutants, flooding, and the…
Brooklyn Bee: A Spelling Competition
Think you know how to spell Brooklyn? Prove it one word at a time!
Join us for the first ever Brooklyn-centric spelling bee, hosted by your resident experts at the Center for Brooklyn History. From historic names to iconic avenues, we are finding the most…
Miriam Toews Discusses A Truce That is Not Peace
BPL Presents welcomes internationally bestselling author Miriam Toews, whose memoir of the will to write is a work of disobedient memory, humor, and exquisite craft set against a content-hungry, prose-stuffed society.
“Why do you write?” the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City…
Art Spiegelman Discusses MetaMaus
BPL Presents is delighted to welcome Pulitzer-Prize winner Art Spiegelman to discuss the MetaMaus paperback.
In the pages of MetaMaus, Spiegelman re-enters Maus, the the Pulitzer Prize–winning modern classic that has altered how we see literature, comics, and the Holocaust ever since…
Lance Richardson Discusses True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen
BPL Presents welcomes Lance Richardson and this first biography of Peter Matthiessen, the novelist, naturalist, and Zen roshi, whose trailblazing work championed Native American rights and helped usher in the modern environmental movement.
Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014), a towering figure…
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