Borrowed

Ingrid Douglas never finished high school as a teenager. When she started looking for a better job at age sixty, she found not having a degree was a huge barrier. So, Ingrid came to the library to get her diploma. In this episode, we talk to students and instructors at BPL about how the library can be a refuge for those who have experienced trauma or adversity on their path to education.

Burnout from work is something a lot of us are thinking about right now. It's been on the minds of librarians, too. We talk to a group of library workers who got together to combat the stress of the profession, and support each other.

Hear me out: A Vietnamese refugee opens a restaurant to keep her kids out of gangs, Brooklynites on their changing borough, a daughter seeks justice after her father's death from COVID-19, giving birth during a pandemic, the meaning of shelter for families experiencing homelessness, and the last lesbian bar in Brooklyn. These are all Brooklyn stories, created as part of BPL's first ever audio storytelling workshop.

Hear me out: a Bed-Stuy kid grapples with her Brooklyn identity, a Chassidic woman follows her faith to from South Africa to Crown Heights, musicians find belonging in the South Indian music diaspora, a Brooklynite memorializes early activism in the borough, and a Black Puerto Rican land worker paves her own career path. These are all Brooklyn stories, created as part of BPL's first ever audio storytelling workshop.

Our work in the correctional facilities in New York City didn't stop during the pandemic. We talked with the Justice Initiatives team at BPL to hear how they are connecting with patrons who are incarcerated and supporting families with loved ones in jails and prisons.  

What do librarians do all day? When they're not planning programs or working the reference desk, these librarians are also obscure trivia players, birders and ... sword fighters! 

This episode, we hear Drag Queen Cholula Lemon read Super Satya Saves the Day by Raakhee Mirchandani, and we visit BPL's wildly popular Tibetan language storytime, which provides language refuge for thousands of Tibetan-speaking New Yorkers, and reaches thousands more across the world. Bring a kiddo along to listen!

A special episode, created in partnership with Queens Memory and the online newspaper The CITY, on grief and mourning during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how we can move forward as a community.

Belle da Costa Greene and Nella Larsen are two librarians of color, one who is white passing, and the other of mixed heritage who wrote famously about the phenomenon of passing in her novels. We're telling the stories of these women and asking what they can tell us about race in librarianship and in literature.

To honor the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, we take a trip to Green-Wood cemetery to the grave of Sarah Smith Garnet, one of Brooklyn's Black women suffragists. We also talk with NYC Council Member Farrah Louis about how the women in her family encouraged activism through voting.