queens public library
2023
GALA
Wednesday, June 7 at 6pm
at The Foundry
42-38 9th Street, Long Island City, NY
Join us for cocktails and dinner at The Foundry as Queens Public Library honors Brian Lehrer, host of The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC New York Public Radio, and National Book Award-winning authors Sigrid Nunez and Jacqueline Woodson, for their distinguished contributions to the spoken and written word. We will present the Queens Public Library Award to our honorees on June 7, 2023 with a recording of the event available for viewing on our website in July.
Brian Lehrer is host of The Brian Lehrer Show, WNYC Radio's daily call-in program, covering politics and life, locally and globally. The live show airs weekdays from 10am-noon on WNYC 93.9 FM, AM 820 and wnyc.org. He also hosts Brian Lehrer: A Daily Politics Podcast.
The New York Times has called Lehrer a "master interviewer." David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, says Lehrer is “the equivalent of Lebron James or Steph Curry in the interviewing game.” New York Magazine put him on its “dream dinner party guest list.”
The Brian Lehrer Show was recognized with a 2007 George Foster Peabody Award for "Radio That Builds Community Rather Than Divides."
Political guests have ranged from Barack Obama and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Mitch McConnell and Boris Johnson, and beyond. Lehrer has been a questioner in televised New York City Mayoral Debates for every election since 1997.
Lehrer is also a commentator on local and national issues on television and in print. He has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, C-SPAN, NY1, and The Colbert Report on Comedy Central. He has written op-ed pieces for publications including The New York Times, The Daily News, Newsday, and Slate.
In addition to the Peabody, Lehrer has won numerous awards, including seven Associated Press New York Broadcasters "Best Interview" Awards since 2000 and two “Best Talk Show” awards from The Garden State Journalists Association.
Lehrer holds master's degrees in public health from Columbia University and journalism from The Ohio State University and a bachelor's in music and mass communications from the State University of New York at Albany.
Sigrid Nunez has published eight novels, including The Friend, winner of the 2018 National Book Award, and, most recently, What Are You Going Through. Her ninth novel, The Vulnerables, will be published in Fall, 2023. Nunez is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Her books have been published in thirty countries. She has been a contributor to The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and Harper’s Magazine, among other journals. Her honors and awards include a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Guggenheim. Nunez is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York City and is on the faculty of the MFA creative writing program at Hunter College (CUNY).
Jacqueline Woodson received a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and the 2018 Children's Literature Legacy Award, and was the 2018-2019 National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. Her New York Times bestselling memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, won the National Book Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor, and the NAACP Image Award. Her books for young readers include Coretta Scott King Award and NAACP Image Award winner Before the Ever After, New York Times bestsellers The Day You Begin and Harbor Me, Newbery Honor winners Feathers, Show Way, and After Tupac and D Foster, and Each Kindness, which won the Jane Addams Children's Book Award.
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