Richard Powers talks about his new novel Playground (W. W. Norton & Co., 2024). Playground gives us a masterful braided narrative of lives devoted to oceanography, computer programming, art, and literature, taking us from French Polynesia to right here in Illinois.

Powers is the author of fourteen acclaimed novels, including Orfeo (2014), The Overstory (2018), and Bewilderment (2021). He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize (for The Overstory), and the National Book Award.

Though he lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, Powers’ has a unique connection to Chicagoland and our community. Not only did Powers grow up in nearby Evanston, but listeners will also hear of the mutual friendship we share with my former English teacher at Deerfield High School, Jeff Berger-White. Powers praises Jeff as having “raised generations of Deerfield High students to not just love literature, but to take it seriously as a tool with which to navigate life.” We explore this theme in Playground, which centers around the competitive intellectual high school friendship of two boys in Chicago.

This is a profound conversation about the huge sea changes we face, from the climate crisis, to artificial intelligence, to how we attend to one another, and the role art can play.

You can check out Playground and other books by Richard Powers here at the library, or check out his website.

In celebration of this special podcast conversation with Richard Powers, we’ll be hosting a book discussion on Playground on Thursday December 5, at 7pm Central. Register to join us—the discussion will be held in a hybrid format, both in person at the Library and on Zoom. (Copies will be available to check out one month before the discussion.)

We hope you enjoy our 65th interview episode! Each month (or so), we release an episode featuring a conversation with an author, artist, or other notable guests from Chicagoland or around the world. Learn more about the podcast on our podcast page. You can listen to all of our episodes in the player below or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments and feedback—please send to podcast@deerfieldlibrary.org.

Follow us: Facebook Instagram YouTube TikTok

The Deerfield Public Library Podcast is a program from the Adult Services Department at the Library and may include Adult Language.

Lois Baer Barr—a poet and fiction writer living just next door to us in Riverwoods, IL—on her new novel The Tailor’s Daughter (Water’s Edge Press, 2023).

The Tailor’s Daughter uses Barr’s familial memories and prodigious research to explore the life of a Jewish immigrant family making their lives in Louisville, KY in the interwar years. Encompassing such dramatic history as the Great Depression, the Great Flood of the Ohio River in 1937, and the volunteer effort in WWII, the novel also brings us close to the quiet worries and hopes of children, parents, and grandparents. Listen to hear how a novelist turns fact into, “the truth of fiction.”

Barr is also the author of the poetry chapbook, Tracks: Poems on the “L” (Finishing Line Press, 2022), which uses observations and overheard conversations from her trips on Chicago’s “L” trains to make poems. Her unique project was covered by the Chicago Tribune in 2019. We hear a few poems from Tracks as well, as we get to know this fascinating writer, who just might be listening and staring

Look for The Tailor’s Daughter and Tracks: Poems on the “L” here at the library in our Podcast Collection. You can find out more about Lois Baer Barr on her website.

Barr was a finalist for the 2019 Rita Dove Poetry Award, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for her fiction and poetry. She is also the author of the chapbook Biopoesis, which won Poetica’s 2013 chapbook award. Her chapbook of fiction, Lope de Vega’s Daughter, was published in 2019 by Red Bird Press. Barr is professor emerita of Spanish at Lake Forest College.

A note that Lois Baer Barr has no relation to our 2023 podcast guest Lisa Barr (episode 59), author of The Woman on Fire and The Goddess of Warsaw, however, Lois does have connections to (and thanks in her acknowledgements!) the Deerfield Poets group; we featured members of that group in a podcast episode (#18) back in 2018!

We hope you enjoy our 64th interview episode! Each month (or so), we release an episode featuring a conversation with an author, artist, or other notable guests from Chicagoland or around the world. Learn more about the podcast on our podcast page. You can listen to all of our episodes in the player below or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments and feedback—please send to podcast@deerfieldlibrary.org.

Follow us: Facebook Instagram YouTube TikTok

The Deerfield Public Library Podcast is a program from the Adult Services Department at the Library and may include Adult Language.

Day 20: Mary Jo Bang reads her poem “Mary Jo in the Time of Sappho.” We are honored to be the original publication of this poem.

Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems—including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, which was nominated for a Lammy Award, A Doll for Throwing, and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has published translations of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher, and Purgatorio. Her translation of Paradiso is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2025. She is also the translator of Colonies of Paradise: Poems by Matthias Göritz and co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi, forthcoming in 2024 from the Princeton University Press Lockert Poetry in Translation Series. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Text of today’s poem and more details about our program can be found at: deerfieldlibrary.org/queerpoemaday/

Find books from participating poets in our library's catalog.

Queer Poem-a-Day is a program from the Adult Services Department at the Library and may include adult language.

Queer Poem-a-Day is directed by poet and professor Lisa Hiton and Dylan Zavagno, Adult Services Coordinator at the Deerfield Public Library. Music for this fourth year of our series is from the second movement of the “Geistinger Sonata,” Piano Sonata No. 2 in C sharp minor, by Ethel Smyth, performed by pianist Daniel Baer. Queer Poem-a-Day is supported by generous donations from the Friends of the Deerfield Public Library and the Deerfield Fine Arts Commission.