A New Deal for Los Angeles – featuring Libros Schmibros 2022 Summer Fellowship

Artbound Season 13 Episode 4 premieres 10/19 9 PM

Dear Booklovers, the big news: Libros Schmibros is appearing this week on your teevee set!

David Kipen, here. Yes, “our” PBS documentary, A New Deal for Los Angeles, premieres Wednesday, Oct. 19 at 9 pm on your local PBS station — and Libros is prominently featured.

KCET’s cameras came to Libros and filmed our Summer Fellowship students engaged in an overdue, spirited rewrite of the 1941 WPA Guide to Los Angeles’s pages about Boyle Heights and Hollenbeck Park. The whole doc is a fairly impassioned call to rediscover and reinvent FDR’s New Deal for L.A.. I started out as a lowly consulting producer on it, but I’ve wound up as the host, too.

Watch it on your local PBS station on your home TV, or watch it on YouTube.

SCHMIBROS STORIES Episode 5: Strength | Fuerza

We are excited to share the fifth episode of Schmibros Stories, where four storytellers from Mexico City take us on a journey as they explore their perspectives on this month’s theme: Strength / Fuerza.

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SCHMIBROS STORIES is a monthly virtual showcase of stories from the community.
Una celebración virtual mensual de historias de la comunidad.
A place for us to explore, create and share our own stories.

SCHMIBROS Stories, Episode 4: What Do You Fear / A Que Le Temes?

We are excited to explore the fourth episode of Schmibros Stories, the theme this month: “What Do You Fear? / A Que Le Temes?” Join us in celebrating the voices of five community members that have been gracious enough to share their perspectives on what the month’s theme means to each of them.

Episode 4: What Do You Fear? / A Que Le Temes? will go live on September 12th at 8:45 Pacific Time, and can be viewed here. Click on the image above to see the video on YouTube — but remember, it won’t work until 8:45 AM Pacific Time on Sunday September 12th.

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SCHMIBROS STORIES is a monthly virtual showcase of stories from the community.
Una celebración virtual mensual de historias de la comunidad.
A place for us to explore, create and share our own stories.

Reinventing the Depression-era Federal Writers’ Project could help reintroduce America to itself – USA Today

Congress is going to the movies this week, and you’re invited. 

Rep. Ted Lieu has arranged a free public virtual screening for the nation – and for his colleagues on the Hill – of Soul of a People, a terrific Smithsonian documentary about the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s. This follows a bill he and Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez introduced in May, the 21st-Century Federal Writers’ Project Act, which is jockeying for inclusion this week in the upcoming $3.5 trillion human infrastructure package. 

The bill would hire 900 writers to reinvent a New Deal initiative whose work can still educate and delight readers 85 eighty years later. Among the Federal Writers’ Project’s many gifts, it created the American Guides, a shelf of useful, cheap, shockingly well-written book-length explorations of all 48 states at the time, plus Puerto Rico and Alaska. The Project also recorded roughly 10,000 oral histories around the country, including 2,300 invaluable interviews with formerly enslaved people. 

Read more here:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/09/07/3-5-trillion-infrastructure-bill-hire-900-writers-editors-teachers/5722004001/

Soul of a People Documentary – Free Screening & Panel Discussion – Sept 7, 2021

Please join Rep. Ted Lieu, David Kipen, the filmmakers & maybe a special guest or two, Tues 9/7 at 4pm PT / 7pm ET, to watch this terrific doc about the original Federal Writers’ Project, part of the WPA.

A free, virtual screening of “Soul of the People“, a documentary about the Depression era Federal Writers’ Project + panel discussion is being put on jointly by L A Public Library, National Endowment for the Humanities, Library of Congress and Spark Media. Details & a link to get your zoom info are here: https://bit.ly/soulofapeople”

Then contact your member of Congress to co-sponsor HR 3054, the new FWP bill, thanks! Don’t know who that is? Check here: bit.ly/supporthr3054