Books, Authors, and Podcasts ...

Learn about Books and Authors through Podcasts

R. Stuhr

Three sites provide podcasts of lectures, interviews, and panel presentations featuring authors and their recently published works. All three are well organized, easy to browse through, and quick to load (depending on your internet set up of course...).

Connie Martinson Talks Books provides 65 podcasts of interviews conducted by Martinson between 1983 and 2007. She interviews a wide variety of authors. Two that stood out for me were her 1995 interview with Barack Obama after Dreams from My Father was published and her 1992 interview with Rosa Parks after her autobiography, My Story appeared.

URL: http://ccdl.libraries.claremont.edu/collection.php?alias=/cmt. Click on the Connie Martinson link to see the list of 65 interviews.

The Free Library of Philadelphia posts a podcast for each of their Author Events. They have several a week so there are more than 255 to choose from. Sponsored by the Free Library's foundation, these events feature novelists, historians, teen authors, romance authors, public affairs authors, and more. Recent podcasts include a pannel of graphic novelists including Art Spiegelman, Jessical Abel, Chip Kidd, Charles Burns, and David Heatley, novelist Christopher Buckley, and fantasy and teen novelist Cornelia Funke. See all FLP has to offer at

http://libwww.freelibrary.org/podcast/.

Finally, FORA.tv offers lectures and panels on all topics: politics, business, culture, technology and science, and "the world." Under "culture" you'll find music, books and authors, religion, history, visual arts and film, law, giving, and sports. Get immersed in this site at

http://fora.tv/.