Lots Happening At Free Library Of Philadelphia!

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Join the Free Library for a celebration of literacy and the arts at the eighth annual Philadelphia Book Festival! This beloved celebration continues with events at neighborhood librariesthroughout the city, along with headlining author events in the Parkway Central Library’s Montgomery Auditorium during National Library week from April 13-19, 2014. The Book Festival now stretches into every Philadelphia community, ensuring that book worms and literacy lovers from across the city can get in on the fun! Headlining authors that will appear throughout the week at Parkway Central include Debbie Macomber, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Pat and Gina Neely.

Check It Out

Would your business like a tax credit of 75% or more? Consider joining the Educational Improvement Tax Credit program (EITC). Pennsylvania offers businesses the incredible opportunity to direct a portion of their state tax dollars to Educational Improvement Organizations like the Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation. These funds are used to support innovative educational programs that directly benefit students in Pennsylvania schools. Corporations that make a donation are eligible to receive 75% of their contribution in tax credit! Learn more here.

Take Action!

Every day, the Free Library works to provide teens with opportunities to master new technology and make their voices heard at our Hot Spots and through initiatives at libraries throughout the city. We now have the fantastic opportunity to expand this programming with our Library Bullhorn project. Through mentoring teens in blogging, web design, coding, video production, and more, we will give them a platform to engage in civic discourse in a meaningful way. But we need your support! Help the Free Library inspire and empower Philadelphia’s teens by voting for our Library Bullhorn project in the Knight News Challenge. Your support will help us provide positive opportunities for our city’s teens and truly make a difference in their lives. Please vote today!

Exhibit A

A photograph from Survival in Sarajevo The Library will host a new traveling exhibition entitled Survival in Sarajevo: Jews, Muslims, Serbs, and Croats during the Siege of Sarajevo, 1992-1995, in partnership with centropa.org, a Jewish historical institute dedicated to preserving 20th century Jewish family stories from Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Opening March 31 through May 2, Survival in Sarajevo will be mounted on the second floor of the Parkway Central Library and will be free and open to the public during regular library hours. Survival in Sarajevo tells the story of La Benevolencija, the non-sectarian humanitarian aid agency established by Jewish families in Sarajevo’s last remaining synagogue and through which more than 50 Jews and Muslims, Serbian Orthodox and Catholic Croats all worked together to provide aid—and hope—to an entire city besieged by war. Digitally printed on 10 panels that were designed in Vienna, edited in The Hague, and printed in Bucharest, Survival in Sarajevo paints a broad picture of Jewish history, from the expulsion of the Sephardic Jews from Spain in 1492 to the heroic deeds of the last Sephardim living in Sarajevo 500 years later.

Start Here, Go Anywhere

April is a busy month in the neighborhood libraries! Join the Library for the 2014 Philadelphia Science Festival; celebrate Shakespeare's birthday with a bash at Parkway Central and events around the system; take cooking classes at Haverford; watch screenings of selectSundance films from Film Forward at various libraries; or practice English at Lillian Marrero.

Now Appearing

Max Brooks | The Harlem Hellfighters | Illustrated by Caanan White  Tuesday, April 1, 2014 at 7:30 p.m. Parkway Central Library Free! No tickets required. One of history’s least celebrated—and most successful—military units, the 369th Infantry, nicknamed “The Harlem Hellfighters” by their enemies, was the first African American regiment to fight in World War I. Simultaneously surviving prolonged attacks from the enemy—the Hellfighters endured an incredible 191 consecutive days of combat, more than any other unit—while suffering constant barrages of extreme discrimination from their own government, the nearly mythic 369th never lost a trench under its defense. Max Brooks tells their heroic story in his “intensely furious” and “painful, memorable” (Publisher’s Weekly) new graphic novel. A former Saturday Night Live staff writer, Brooks is also the author of the New York Times bestseller World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, a Studs-Terkel-meets-George-Romero verite take on the legions of the undead that was adapted into a film starring Brad Pitt; The Zombie Survival Guide; and The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks.      Barbara Ehrenreich | Living with a Wild God: A Memoir   Wednesday, April 16, 2014 at 7:30 p.m. Parkway Central Library Free! No tickets required. “Veteran muckraker” (The New Yorker) Barbara Ehrenreich is the New York Times bestselling author of 14 books, including the working class exposé Nickel and Dimed andBait and Switch, in which she investigated the economic shadow world of white-collar unemployment. A journalist, historian, and social critic, she writes with great passion on subjects as varied as healthcare, sex, class, and families. In middle age, she came across the journal she had kept during her wild adolescence. In her new memoir, Ehrenreich—a staunch atheist and rationalist—sets out to reconstruct the philosophical and spiritual inquiry of her youth.

Holiday Closings The Free Library of Philadelphia will be closed Friday, April 18 in observance of Good Friday. For up-to-date information on neighborhood library closures, pleaseclick here.