Closer to home, there is a membership library in Cincinnati Ohio that would be well worth a stop if you find yourself in the Queen City. Our guest this week, Amy Hunter, is the programs and marketing manager at The Mercantile Library, one of only about 18 surviving membership libraries around the country. She gives a crash course in membership libraries that were invented by Benjamin Franklin before the rise of public libraries at the turn of the 20th century.

Our guest this week, Danica Novgorodoff, is a writer, graphic novelist, and illustrator who has written 3 of her own graphic novels but her work has received some extra special attention recently. She is the illustrator of the new graphic novel edition of Jason Reynolds’ award winning young adult novel Long Way Down. She believes she was chosen for the book partly because of her special use of watercolors as a medium for graphic art, which gives the work an ephemeral feel.

Our rebroadcast this week is from Season 3, episode 58 with Clare Wallace, the executive director of South Louisville Community Ministries which also runs The Rosewater bookstore in coordination with The BookWorks. The community bookstore opened just as COVID was hitting the city in the spring of 2020, and it took several months for them (and everyone) to figure out the new normal.

We welcomed Cassie Chambers as a guest back in March 2020, just as Covid was starting to hit this country in full force. Her memoir HIll Women was written as a response in her own way to Vance’s memoir; about a different view of the Appalachian experience from a woman’s perspective. Cassie’s had some more exciting news in 2020 as she went on to win a seat on the Lousiville Metro City Council as well as becoming a visiting professor at the University of Louisville School of Law.

For this last episode of 2020, Carrie and I decided to talk about some notable books that we didn’t have a chance to talk about during the year and also take a look forward to 2021 to some books we are anxious to read.

There is a saying, “If you want a happy ending, read a cookbook”. Our guest, Laura Lucchese, is in a book club that always ends well because her group reads and then produces a group meal from cookbooks.

Our guest this week, Mindy Jett, is a self-professed book nerd who still gravitates toward YA fiction even though she has teenagers of her own. She talks about how reading YA is just like immersing yourself in a sci-fi world or a different time period except it is the world from a teen perspective. We discuss how reading YA fiction has given her more insight into her own children, and how much nostalgia from her own childhood plays into her love of books from that era.

Our guest this week, Tori Murden McClure, is a Renaissance woman. She has a law degree, a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard as well as a Master of Fine Arts from Spalding University, the institution where she currently serves as President. She was the first woman and first American to ski 750 miles to the geographic South Pole. She worked as an assistant to Muhammad Ali at the Ali Center, and has served as a chaplain in Boston area hospitals. But what she is most known for is her solo journey to successfully row a boat across the Atlantic Ocean in 1999. Ten years later, she published her memoir about that experience, A Pearl in the Storm: How I Found My Heart in the Middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

This week’s episode is a rebroadcast of episode 25, where we featured two librarians from the Northeast Regional branch of the Louisville Free Public Library. Mk Eagle and Hannah Elliott talked about Books and Brews 502, which is similar to the Library’s summer reading program for kids, except it is for adults and can include beer and coffee.

While the in-person Christmas Carol performance has long been a feast for the eyes, the radio program will be a feast for the ears. Our guest this week, Amy Wegener, will give us the scoop on how we can interact with The Christmas Carol in a whole new exciting way. She is the literary director and a dramaturg at Actor’s Theater.