A virtual series featuring author talks with Q&A and conversational book club meetups

Discussions will focus on works that explore a sense of place, our built environment, cultural heritage, New York, and other issues that intersect with historic preservation. The aim of Preservation Book Club is to center diverse voices and perspectives as a way to drive dialogue around important issues that have not necessarily been part of traditional preservation conversations.

If having a sign language interpreter present for any of our Book Club programs would facilitate your participation, please let us know at least one week in advance of the particular program: kpeace@preservenys.org

A'Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance: Author Talk with A'Lelia Bundles

Wednesday, September 3, 4:00 p.m.

Click here to register | Click here to buy the book

Joy Goddess: A'Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance is a vibrant, deeply researched biography of A’Lelia Walker—daughter of Madam C.J. Walker and herself a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance—written by her great-granddaughter, A'Lelia Bundles. After inheriting her mother’s hair care enterprise, A’Lelia would become America’s first high profile black heiress and a prominent patron of the arts. Joy Goddess takes readers inside her three New York homes—a mansion, a townhouse, and a pied-a-terre—where she entertained Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Robeson, Florence Mills, James Weldon Johnson, Carl Van Vechten, W.E.B. DuBois, and other cultural, social and intellectual luminaries of the Roaring Twenties. Now, based on extensive research and Walker’s personal correspondence, her great-granddaughter creates a meticulous, nuanced portrait of a charismatic woman struggling to define herself as a wife, mother, and businesswoman outside her famous mother’s sphere. In Joy Goddess, A’Lelia’s radiant personality and impresario instincts—at the center of a vast, artistic social world where she flourished as a fashion trendsetter and international traveler—are brought to vivid and unforgettable life.

The Cities We Need: Author Talk with Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

Tuesday, September 16, 12:00 p.m.

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In The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places, photographer and urbanist Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani introduces us to the complex, political, and eminently personable stories of residents who answered this question in Brooklyn, New York, and Oakland, California. Their universal stories and Bendiner-Viani’s evocative images illuminate what’s at stake in our everyday places—from diners to churches to donut shops. In this culmination of two decades of research and art practice, Bendiner-Viani intertwines the personal, historical, and photographic to present us with placework, the way that unassuming places foster a sense of belonging and, in fact, do the essential work of helping us become communities.

The Art Spy: Author Talk with Michelle Young

Tuesday, September 30, 12:00 p.m.

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Join us to hear from author Michelle Young about her new book The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland. Based on troves of previously undiscovered documents, The Art Spy chronicles the brave actions of the key Resistance spy in the heart of the Nazi’s art looting headquarters in the French capital. A veritable female Monuments Man, Valland has, until now, been written out of the annals, despite bearing witness to history’s largest art theft. While Hitler was amassing stolen art for his future Führermuseum, Valland, his undercover adversary, secretly worked to stop him.

Digging Into The Historic House Handbook, co-hosted by the Landmark Society of Western New York

Thursday, October 16, 6:00 p.m.

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The Historic House Handbook: A Sensible Guide for Old-House Living is the authoritative maintenance and repair resource for old-house owners with helpful guidelines and advice for historic neighborhood living. Join us for this panel discussion with author Steve Jordan and a few folks who are undergoing their own old house renovation adventures. Steve Jordan has been in the old-house repair and restoration business for forty years and is the author of THE WINDOW SASH BIBLE and STORM WINDOWS: A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO WOOD, WOOD COMBINATION, ALUMINUM, AND INTERIOR STORM WINDOWS.

Past Picks

AUTHOR TALK | Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Ross Perlin
AUTHOR TALK | The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever by Prudence Peiffer
AUTHOR TALK | Spiritualism’s Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Séances in Lily Dale by Averill Earls, Sarah Handley-Cousins, Elizabeth Garner Masarik, and Marissa C. Rhodes
AUTHOR TALK | When No One is Watching and One of Us Knows by Alyssa Cole
AUTHOR TALK | Stand In My Window: Meditations on Home and How We Make It by LaTonya Yvette
AUTHOR TALK | A Vanishing New York: Ruins Across the Empire State by John Lazzaro
AUTHOR TALK | Louise Blanchard Bethune: Every Woman Her Own Architect by Kelly Hayes McAlonie
AUTHOR TALK | For the Love of Renovating: Tips, Tricks & Inspiration for Creating Your Dream Home by Barry Bordelon and Jordan Slocum
AUTHOR TALK | The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America's Jewish Vacationland by Marisa Scheinfeld
AUTHOR TALK | Cheap Old Houses: An Unconventional Guide to Loving and Restoring a Forgotten Home by Elizabeth and Ethan Finkelstein
AUTHOR TALK | Sleeping with the Ancestors: How I Followed the Footprints of Slavery by Joseph McGill Jr. & Herb Frazier
AUTHOR TALK | America Redux: Visual Stories from Our Dynamic History by Ariel Aberg-Riger (May 2023)
American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods by Bonnie Tsui (April 2023)
Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies by Leslie Kern (March 2023)
AUTHOR TALK | Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design by Kristina Wilson (February 2023)
The World We Make by N.K. Jemisin (January 2023)
AUTHOR TALK | Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange (December 2022)
Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush (September 2022)
Zabar’s: A Family Story, With Recipes by Lori Zabar (August 2022)
When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole (July 2022)
The Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead (June 2022)
AUTHOR TALK | Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States by Whitney Martinko (May 2022)
AUTHOR TALK | Olmsted & Yosemite: Civil War, Abolition, and the National Park Idea by Rolf Diamant and Ethan Carr (April 2022)
Wayward by Dana Spiotta (March 2022)
AUTHOR TALK | The Sustainers: Being, Building and Doing Good through Activism in the Sacred Spaces of Civil Rights, Human Rights and Social Movements by Catherine Fleming Bruce (February 2022)
How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith (January 2022)
Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West by Lauren Redniss (October 2021)
AUTHOR TALK | A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers, 1983-2008 by Jen Jack Gieseking (September 2021)
The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom (August 2021)
AUTHOR TALK | A Wild Idea: How the Environmental Movement Tamed the Adirondacks by Brad Edmondson (July 2021)
Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin (June 2021)
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer (May 2021)
Evicted: Poverty & Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond (April 2021)
Whose Story is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters by Rebecca Solnit (March 2021)
AUTHOR TALK | It’s a Helluva Town: Joan K. Davidson, the J. M. Kaplan Fund, and the Fight for a Better New York, by Roberta Brandes Gratz (March 2021)
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson (February 2021)
AUTHOR TALK | The Architecture of Downtown Troy: An Illustrated History by Diana S. Waite (January 2021)
AUTHOR TALK | Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights by Gretchen Sorin (December 2020)
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein (November 2020)
The Aesthetics of Equity: Notes on Race, Space, Architecture, and Music by Craig L. Wilkins (October 2020)
The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin (September 2020)
Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead (August 2020)

Thank you to our sponsor: Peggy N. & Roger G. Gerry Charitable Trust

Continuing Education Credits

We are pleased to offer 1.0 CE credits for architects who attend Author Talks, offered through the New York State Education Department.

Please note: The League does not report to NYSED the way that other credit programs (ex., AIA) would. Certificates of completion are for each architect's individual records and reporting procedures for maintaining licensure.