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Library staff members read a poem every day during April to mark National Poetry Month.

Yllari shares "Las Manos De Mi Madre" from the book Angels Ride Bikes and Other Fall Poems / Los Ángeles Andan En Bicicleta Y Otros Poemas De Otoño by Francisco X. Alarcón and illustrated by Maya Gonzalez.

This recording is presented in partnership by Princeton Public Library and Princeton Symphony Orchestra.

The Bergamot Quartet and Princeton Music Department Chair Dan Trueman explore Norway's national instrument and perform newly composed and adapted works for these unique stringed instruments.

The Bergamot Quartet perform new works composed and adapted by Trueman specifically for these unique stringed instruments, tracing the fiddle's origins from 1650 Norway to today. Come and learn what makes these instruments special, and how Bergamot Quartet is reviving the Hardanger tradition for modern audiences.

This event was recorded on February 04, 2026

This recording is presented by Princeton Public Library. The author, a noted food writer and podcaster, discusses her culinary memoir "Care and Feeding."

About the Books (from the publisher):
A candid, funny, and occasionally devastating culinary memoir of a woman making her way through the food world, navigating addiction, a cultural reckoning, and an unexpected tragedy

Laurie Woolever's memoir traces her path from a small-town childhood to working within the high-stakes celebrity chef culture at revered restaurants and food publications, alternately bolstered and overshadowed by two of the most powerful men in the business. But there’s more to the story than the two bold-faced names on her resume: Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain.

Behind the scenes, Laurie’s life is frequently chaotic, a high-functioning addict’s often pleasurable buffet of bad decisions at which she frequently overstays her welcome. Acerbic and wryly self-deprecating, Laurie attempts to carve her own space as a woman in this world that is by turns toxic and intoxicating. Laurie seeks to try it all—from a seedy Atlantic City strip club to the Park Hyatt Tokyo, from a hippie vegetarian co-op to the legendary El Bulli—while balancing her consuming work with her sometimes ambivalent relationship to marriage and motherhood.

As the food world careens toward an overdue reckoning and Laurie’s mentors face their own high-profile descents, she is confronted with the questions of where she belongs in a story of both workplace toxicity and personal recovery, and how to hold on to the parts of her life’s work that she truly values: care and feeding.

This is a story of keeping it together, until several successive implosions—careers, marriages, reputations, lives—show that control is an illusion.

About the Author:
Laurie Woolever is a writer and editor, and for nearly a decade, she worked as the lieutenant to the late Anthony Bourdain. She has written for the New York Times, Vogue, GQ, Food & Wine, Lucky Peach (RIP), Saveur, Dissent, Roads & Kingdoms, and more. In her career she has been a private cook, nanny, caterer, writer, busgirl, recipe tester, farm hand, public speaker, video store clerk, and an editor at Art Culinaire and Wine Spectator. She is is the author of "Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography," as well as several cookbooks. With Chris Thornton she is the co-host a food-focused podcast, Carbface for Radio. Laurie lives and works in New York City.

About the Moderator:
Daria Lavelle is an American fiction writer. Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and raised in the New York metro area, her work explores themes of identity and belonging through magic and the uncanny. Her short stories have appeared in The Deadlands, Dread Machine, and elsewhere, and she holds degrees in writing from Princeton University and Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in New Jersey with her husband, children, and goldendoodle, all of whom love a great meal almost as much as she does.

This event was recorded on April 12, 2026

This recording is presented in partnership by Princeton Public Library and Sustainable Princeton and Princeton Environmental Film Festival. Princeton teens share environmentally-related research lightning talks, followed by a poster session.

Each speaker presents their research for 5-7 minutes. Audience members are invited to visit each speaker's table to learn more at the poster session following the presentations. Refreshments will be served.

This event was recorded on April 09, 2026.

This recording is presented in partnership by Princeton Public Library and Labyrinth Books. The author is joined by library public humanities specialist Cliff Robinson to discuss her new book "True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color-from Azure to Zinc Pink."

About the Book (from the publisher):
A kaleidoscopic journey through the secret history of hues—and the story of the obsessive genius behind the definitions of colors we use today, from the author of "Word by Word."

What could “bluer than fiesta” possibly mean? While editing dictionaries for Merriam-Webster, Kory Stamper found herself drawn again and again to the whimsical color definitions in "Webster’s Third New International Dictionary"—especially when compared to the dry and impersonal entries that filled the rest of the volume. Stamper couldn’t help but wonder: Who was the voice behind these peculiar definitions?

Meet I. H. Godlove, an erratic but brilliant up-and-coming scientist who was one of the experts Merriam-Webster hired in 1930 to help revise the dictionary to reflect a rapidly modernizing world. His fascinating life mirrors the wild and winding journey that color science, color psychology, and color production took through the twentieth century. Stamper tracks these industries as they move into the atomic age and intertwine in strange and surprising ways, spanning two world wars and involving chemical explosions, an unexpected suicide, dramatic office politics, and an extraordinary love story.

Filled with captivating facts about color words and colors themselves—did you know that the word “puke” used to refer to a fashionable shade of reddish-brown before it was associated with vomit?—and fueled by Stamper’s inexhaustible curiosity, True Color will transform the way you see the world, from black-and-white to Technicolor.

About the Author:
Kory Stamper is a lexicographer who has written dictionaries for nearly thirty years at Merriam-Webster, Cambridge Dictionaries, and Dictionary.com. She is the author of "Word by Word." Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, New York, and The Washington Post. She travels around the country giving talks and presentations on things that only other word nerds would be interested in and she blogs regularly on language and lexicography at www.korystamper.com.

About the Moderator:
Clifford Robinson is the Public Humanities Specialist at the Princeton Public Library. Working closely with the library’s programming team and a humanities council, his effort on behalf of the library's public humanities initiative promotes critical thinking, civic engagement, and empathetic understanding through community collaboration and dynamic programs and resources. He received his Ph.D. from Duke University's Department of Classical Studies in 2014. Prior to joining the library staff, he was Assistant Professor of Classics in the Department of Humanities at the University of the Sciences and a Visiting Scholar at Saint Joseph's University.

This event was recorded on April 08, 2026.

Library staff members read a poem every day during April to mark National Poetry Month.

Marissa shares "Rain" from the book Windsongs by Douglas Florian.