NICHOLSON BAKER | KATHERINE LANPHER

In Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids, Nicholson Baker embeds himself in an ordinary public school district and transforms each classroom’s daily events - overdue assignments, lesson plans, time-outs - into an elegant and compelling examination of education in America. On the LIVE stage, Baker will be joined by journalist Katherine Lanpher, where they will dive deep into the issues that face our country's education system and the challenges students confront as a result.

NICHOLSON BAKER is the author of ten novels and five works of nonfiction, including The Anthologist, The Mezzanine, and Human Smoke. He has won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Hermann Hesse Prize, and a Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Maine with his wife, Margaret Brentano; both his children went to Maine public schools.

KATHERINE LANPHER is a prizewinning journalist who has interviewed more than 1,000 authors and artists (including Margaret Atwood, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie and David Lynch) both in her work as a public radio host and as the host of the former literary and musical performance series “Upstairs at the Square.’’ You’ve heard her voice on WNYC and most recently as a guest host for The Diane Rehm Show on NPR. She moved to New York to work as the co-host for Al Franken on Air America and her memoir on that transition, Leap Days, was published in 2006. She is the recipient of a Gracie Award from the Alliance for Women in Media and she is a past host of “America Abroad,’’ a monthly foreign policy documentary series heard on public radio around the globe. As a travel writer, she’s been up the Nile on a felucca and tracked a jaguar in Belize. Most recently, she was the digital features editor at Al Jazeera America, where she put the spotlight on coverage of Native Americans and organized a World Cup tourney of 32 writers for the food-obsessed.

A note to our patrons: LIVE from the NYPL programs begin promptly at 7p.m. We recommend arriving twenty minutes before the scheduled start time to get to your seats. In order to minimize disturbances to other audience members, we are unable to provide late seating.

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