Upcoming Author Events & Readings
27 upcoming author events and readings from Boston Public Library, with dates, venues and ticket links taken from the organization’s own pages and refreshed weekly. All readings in Greater Boston →
Tue Oct 6 · 6:30pm
Carlton Champion, a local author, reads from his new memoir Notes to My Father, which is “told through a series of notes” and “explores fatherhood, absence, identity, and ultimately forgiveness and self-definition.” He reads several of the notes, tells the stories behind them and then opens the floor to discussion and questions. He gives a second reading at the Lower Mills branch on October 19.
Wed Oct 7 · 6:00pm
The educator Joel Mackall walks through four hundred years of African-American Boston: Faneuil Hall and Long Wharf and the city's place in the Atlantic world, the Black community on Beacon Hill in the early republic, and the South End and Roxbury in the early twentieth century. He builds the session around activism, religion, civil rights and economics, and runs it as a discussion.
Thu Oct 8 · 6pm
Jayne Anne Phillips, who won the Pulitzer for Night Watch, on Small Town Girls — her ninth book and first work of nonfiction, a memoir in essays about Buckhannon, West Virginia, her mother, and the ties between the women of the town. Hosted by the Friends of the Jamaica Plain Library.
Wed Oct 14 · 6:30pm
The former NFL player's debut novel follows Coltrane Davis, who climbs out of San Diego's back alleys into the city's halls of power as fixer to a crooked kingmaker, running multimillion-dollar scams until the arrangement turns. Hardy opens the Friends of the South End Library's fall author series, at Union Church on Columbus Avenue. Free.
Thu Oct 15 · 6:00pm
Sammarco traces how Beacon Hill developed after the nineteenth century, past the Federal row houses and gaslit cobbles the neighbourhood is known for. He has written more than seventy-five books on the history of Boston, among them Beacon Hill Through Time, taught history at Boston University and the Urban College of Boston, and holds the Bulfinch Award and the Washington Medal.
Mon Oct 19 · 6:00pm
Carlton Champian, a Boston-area author, reads from and discusses Notes to My Father, “a deeply personal exploration of fatherhood, abandonment, identity, and the journey of confronting what we inherit.” The book, a memoir written as a series of notes, begins from the question of what happens when a father’s absence becomes part of who his son is. The reading is followed by discussion.
Tue Oct 20 · 1:30pm
Kelly Yang — author of the Front Desk series, New From Here, Finally Seen and the YA novels Parachutes and Private Label — talks about her work and meets young readers at the Adams Street branch. Part of the BPL's Author & Illustrator Series.
Oct 21/24 · 6:00pm/2:00pm
Wed Oct 21 · 6:00pm / Sat Oct 24 · 2:00pm
David Kruh discusses Little Mister Victory, the true story of a daughter’s search for the woman who abandoned her father on Boston Common on VJ Day, August 15, 1945. Kruh, a writer, historian and playwright, is best known for his two books on Scollay Square, Boston’s former entertainment district; he also wrote a musical about the Red Sox “Curse” that premiered at the Lyric Stage in 2001.
Wed Oct 21 · 6:00pm
Nathan Sanders, Dr. Avijit Ghosh and Jessica Chapel discuss what artificial intelligence is doing to civic life, moderated by BPL President David Leonard. Chapel is the library's Chief of Digital & Online Services and runs Digital Commonwealth, the repository linking more than 270 Massachusetts libraries, archives and museums. Part of the 2026 Lowell Lecture Series.
Thu Oct 22 · 12:00pm
Karin Martin discusses her new book Get Plum Island!, on Massachusetts's ten-year fight over the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge, which local communities and the state nearly had abolished before Congressional hearings and a Truman pocket veto ended in a compromise that roughly halved it. Martin, who grew up in Amesbury, is the Mark A. Chesler Collegiate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan.
Thu Oct 22 · 6:00pm
Stephanie Tabashneck, a psychologist and attorney at Harvard Law School's Center for Law, Brain & Behavior, walks through how memory is formed and altered by stress, trauma, suggestion and interrogation, and what neuroscience can and cannot say about eyewitness testimony and false confessions. The presentation is interactive.
Sat Oct 24 · 2:00pm
Humphries discusses her new book on what a warming climate means for Boston: several feet of sea level rise this century on higher-emissions paths, tidal and storm flooding across low-lying neighbourhoods, heavier rainfall, and summers with most days above ninety degrees. She sets the city's mitigation and adaptation efforts against four hundred years of filling and building its shoreline.
Tue Oct 27 · 6:00pm
Levitt, a sociologist at Wellesley College, discusses Move Over, Mona Lisa, which asks why museums, libraries and classrooms change so slowly when audiences are asking for a wider range of work. She calls the obstacles an “inequality pipeline,” and reports from Argentina, Lebanon and South Korea on people building alternative routes rather than waiting. A signing follows.
Wed Oct 28 · 6:00pm
Boggs discusses Baldwin: A Love Story, his biography of James Baldwin, which won the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography and the Randy Shilts Nonfiction Award, and which Time and The Atlantic named among the ten best books of 2025. Programmed for LGBTQ+ History Month; a signing with Trident Booksellers follows.
Thu Nov 5 · 6:00pm
Linford D. Fisher discusses Stealing America, which traces the enslavement of Indigenous people from the years just after 1492, “ensnaring an estimated three to six million Natives throughout the Americas,” nearly 600,000 of them in North America, through the boarding schools that followed its 1867 ban. Fisher, an associate professor of history at Brown, wrote The Indian Great Awakening and leads the Stolen Relations project.
Mon Nov 9 · 6:00pm
Corbett led the team whose work underpinned the first COVID-19 vaccines; her patented spike-protein technology is used in the Moderna, Pfizer and Novavax shots, and TIME named her a Hero of the Year. She is a professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Part of the Lowell Lecture Series.
Tue Nov 10 · 10:30am
The author and illustrator Grace Lin discusses her work and meets young readers. Lin has written and illustrated dozens of children's books, among them Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and the Ling and Ting series, and holds Newbery, Caldecott and Theodor Geisel Honors.
Wed Nov 11 · 6:30pm
Laura Zigman discusses her new novel The Author Weekend, in which bestselling mystery writer Faye Wader, her sales slipping, hosts her first fan weekend on Great Misery Island, only for a rival novelist to crash it and an attendee to turn up dead. Zigman, author of Animal Husbandry and Separation Anxiety, also collaborated on Eddie Izzard’s bestseller Believe Me. The Friends of the South End Library present the talk.
Thu Nov 12 · 5:00pm
Lauren Klein and Tanvi Sharma discuss their new book, Data by Design: Visualization and Power from Abolition to the Dawn of Data Science, which “returns to the history of data visualization to expose the power of charts and maps.” Klein, an Emory professor, co-wrote Data Feminism; Sharma is an art director at Apple. Arvind Satyanarayan, who teaches data visualization at MIT, joins them in conversation.
Tue Nov 24 · 10:30am
Chad, a cartoonist who has been making comics since 2006, visits to talk about his work with children. He draws the Bikeman comics and titles in the Get to Know Your Universe! science comics series, and takes his subjects from science, giant robots, math, monsters, friendship and trust. Part of the library's Author & Illustrator Series.
Sat Dec 5 · 2:00pm
Lewis, professor emeritus at Boston College, discusses his book on how Poe's “The Raven” became the most famous American poem. More than 5,300 poems appeared in American magazines in 1845; he asks why this one was reprinted, attacked and parodied so relentlessly, in versions swapping the raven for owls, turkeys, pigs and bedbugs, and what Poe's own reputation had to do with it.
Wed Dec 9 · 6:30pm
Jason Allison discusses his debut novel The Killing Yards, set in 1993 New York, where reformed drug trafficker Jimmy Lettner runs a Manhattan nightclub while his right-hand man deals ecstasy inside it and a rookie cop goes undercover. Allison, born and raised in the Bronx, spent twenty years with the NYPD, mostly as a homicide detective. The talk closes the Friends of the South End Library’s fall series.
Thu Jan 28 · 6:00pm
Rob Quinn discusses On the Other Side of the Street, his first book, an account of living through HIV, addiction and the loss of a career and identity, organised around the image of a street crossing. Quinn shares passages and opens a community conversation. A Hyde Park resident, long-term survivor and advocate, he founded R4 Style and has worked with children and families in hospitals.
Tue Feb 23 · 10:15am
De la Peña, who won the Newbery Medal for Last Stop on Market Street, visits to talk about his work with children. His young adult novels include Mexican WhiteBoy, We Were Here and Superman: Dawnbreaker; his picture books include Love. He took an MFA at San Diego State and attended the University of the Pacific on a basketball scholarship.
Tue Mar 9 · 10:30am
Magoon visits to talk about her work with children and teenagers. She writes novels and nonfiction on identity, community and social justice; her books include the NAACP Image Award-nominated young adult novel The Rock and the River, The Secret Library, The Season of Styx Malone and the Robyn Hoodlum adventure series.
Tue Apr 27 · 10:30am
Knisley visits to talk about her comics with children. She has published more than a dozen titles for readers from infancy to adulthood, mostly about food, found family and cats, among them the New York Times bestsellers Relish: My Life in the Kitchen and French Milk, and the Peapod Farm series.
Tue Jun 8 · 1:00pm
Lincoln Peirce, the New York Times bestselling cartoonist, visits to talk about his work and meet children. Peirce created the Big Nate comic strip, which he has drawn since 1991, and writes and illustrates the Big Nate novels for young readers, along with the graphic-novel series Max and the Midnights. He has also written animated shorts for Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon.
