One of the biggest events of last fall’s author event series put on by the Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation was with former President Bill Clinton, who spoke to a sold-out crowd about his post-presidency life as described in his new book, Citizen: My Life After the White House.
It’s always a big deal when a president comes to speak. But there was something even more gratifying about this event, according to Daniel Blank, the library foundation’s new managing director of public events. Clinton did only five talks to promote his book. The night before, he was in New York at the Beacon Theater, which can seat 2,900 people; the night after, he went to D.C. to DAR Constitution Hall, with a capacity of 3,700. The main branch of the Free Library? It can fit 380 guests.
“The fact that he was willing to come to our 380-seat auditorium really speaks to what we’re able to accomplish here,” Blank says. “These events are incredibly intimate; even if you’re in the very last row, you are having a very close up experience with the author. That’s part of what makes it so appealing, not just to patrons and audience members, but to the authors themselves, that they get to have these really incredible interactions with audiences and this close engagement.”
“This place is a bastion of literature and free speech, and has this historic drive towards making literature accessible and open to all. It’s a place where we showcase literature, we showcase authors, we open up these exciting conversations to the public.” — Free Library Foundation’s Daniel Blank
Blank joined the foundation last fall, following the resignation and subsequent immediate firing of the library’s entire author events team, including Andy Kahan, the beloved staffer who ran the 30-year-old series for 24 years. (Kahan and the other three employees told The Inquirer they resigned because of a “heartbreaking” work culture and low morale.)
A Philly native and Shakespearean scholar, Blank this month has launched his first full season overseeing public events — and The Citizen for the first time will be a media partner for the series, which includes events with novelists, poets, political commentators, doctors, a musician and others.
I caught up with Blank last week to talk about what to expect from the book series under his tenure. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What did you do before you took this job at the Free Library Foundation?
Before this, I spent the past 15 years studying and teaching English literature. I did my PhD at Princeton. After that, I did a postdoc for three years at Harvard, and then I was lucky enough to get a job as a professor at Durham University in the Northeast of England. My passion has always been Shakespeare and his contemporaries. I loved performing in Shakespeare plays, directing Shakespeare plays, and so I was really lucky to be able to pursue that for a while.
One one of the other things that I was doing during that decade and a half was putting on some arts and cultural programming, which I’ve also always really been passionate about — trying to make the arts and performance as accessible as possible.
So when this job came available, it seemed like a really great fit. It allows me to do something that relates to my main passion, which of course is books and literature, and also to put on high impact cultural events, which is really what I see to be the great strength of this series.
I also missed my hometown of Philadelphia, so there were personal reasons that I wanted to be back in the Philly area.
Your hiring came after the FLP’s entire author events team publicly quit. Has that made it hard to attract authors to the series?
I wondered if that would be the case, if people would be reluctant, but I have heard that from almost no one. People have been extremely excited to work with us. I receive on average several pitches a week from publishers, even as our spring schedule is near capacity. I think this program has such a tremendous reputation — and it’s a well deserved reputation — that we’re excited to build on.
How did you decide what would be included in your first full season overseeing author events?
The first was to look at what was coming out; I contacted publishers, made sure to get their winter and spring catalogs. And I started thinking about what it was that I wanted out of a season which was a really vibrant, really rich, really diverse set of authors in every sense, in terms of genre, in terms of subject. And I feel like we’ve definitely accomplished that. The goal in putting together a season is to have something that appeals to every member of the Philadelphia community, so when you look at what we put together for the spring, we have scientists, sociologists, political commentators; we have novelists, we have food writers, we have travel writers. There is something here for everyone.
I would also just say that, while it’s true the fall season was mainly set when I arrived, but my team and I did plan two events: One was with the artist and illustrator, Maira Kalman that had over 200 people in attendance. And the other one, was the event with Bill Clinton, who chose us for one of the stops on his very short book tour. That speaks to one of my other priorities for this series, which is bringing in high profile names. What’s exciting about the author events series is that we can have former presidents, and we can also have debut novelists.
So what are a couple things you’re most excited about in this new season?
It’s hard to choose! We already have two completely sold out events. One of them is with [former National Institutes of Health Director] Dr. Anthony Fauci, who’s coming at the beginning of April. That event sold out in less than 24 hours. We also have a sold-out event with the travel writer Rick Steves. We’ve opened up an overflow space for that room, and we’ve already sold something like 40 tickets for that. People just want to be in the building, which honestly surprised me. Believe me when I tell you that people are stopping me on the street to say, “well done getting Rick Steves.”
I’m really excited about an event we have coming up this week with Dr. Uché Blackstock [Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons With Racism In Medicine]. She’s a physician who’s written this wonderful and very important book about racism in medicine. That event has almost 300 people signed up.
“We have a real opportunity to make this a place where we connect readers with writers, which is something that’s so important in the 21st century, especially in this moment.” — Daniel Blank
And I’m excited about some of the fiction writers we have coming: the novelist Katie Kitamura, whose book Audition is going to be really important; it’s a follow up to her novel, which was a big splash, called Intimacies. Lauren Francis Sharma [Casualties of Truth], is coming through, and we have last year’s Booker Prize winner, Samantha Harvey [Orbital].
The other thing I’m excited about are some of the difficult conversations. I think our events can be a space where we can have these challenging conversations. We have an event coming up with Catherine Stewart about her book called Money, Lies and God, talking about the rise of far right conservatism. And we have a number of political events coming up, including with political commentators like Juan Williams [New Prize For These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement] and Jonathan Capehart [Yet Here I Am: Lessons from a Black Man’s Search for Home], who moderated the Bill Clinton event.
Now that you’ve been here for a few months, what is your vision for the author series?
I want this to continue to be one of the top author speaker series, not just in the Philadelphia region, but even beyond. We have a real opportunity to make this a place where we connect readers with writers, which is something that’s so important in the 21st century, especially in this moment. As we think about promoting reading, promoting literacy — which is one of the main goals of the foundation — this series reflects those priorities. So we need to grow the program’s profile and reach more members of the Philadelphia community. That does not mean abandoning any of our long time patrons. What it does mean is bringing in new audience members, maybe younger audience members, maybe more diverse audience members, reaching neighborhoods in Philadelphia that historically have not come to the author events at Parkway Central.
How might you do that?
We’re exploring a lot of different things. We’ve talked about the of chartering of busses to bring people here. We’ve talked about holding events at the neighborhood library branches in future seasons. I would like to offer blocks of tickets for people who may not be able to afford the ticket price. Making these events accessible is a top priority.
We are doing that already with a new, more affordable pricing structure. In the past, some events were free, and other events cost money; the way they determined which ones cost money and which ones didn’t was a little bit opaque. The standard price for a ticket that did not include the purchase of a book was $17.50 — and sometimes as much as $20 or $25. That seemed cost-prohibitive to me. So we decided that all events are going to be $5, which we’re really hoping will make these events more accessible across the board. (There are a few events where the publishers have required us to sell a copy of the book, so we’ll add $5 to the hard copy price.)
I love that we have this author event series in Philadelphia — that’s partly why The Citizen decided to become a media partner. We don’t live in a time when books are appreciated and authors are prominent figures. It’s nice that this is a series that celebrates them.
I think that’s right. We live in an age of book bans. There are a lot of people out there trying to restrict what people can read. This place is a bastion of literature and free speech, and has this historic drive towards making literature accessible and open to all. It’s a place where we showcase literature, we showcase authors, we open up these exciting conversations to the public. That’s more valuable right now than ever.
See upcoming Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation author events here. All are held at the main branch of the Free Library, 1901 Vine Street, $5 entry, various days and times.
