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Borrowed & Returned

by Brooklyn Public Library
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Latest episodes

  • Sandra Cisneros Has a Prescription For Us

    August 6, 2026 · 25 min

    Over forty years after The House on Mango Street came out, Sandra Cisneros is still hearing from readers about how her words healed them. In this episode, the award-winning writer shares the books that were her medicine growing up, and the…

  • Linda Sarsour on Building a Better World

    July 30, 2026 · 23 min

    Linda Sarsour is a proud Brooklyn-born Palestinian-American activist, writer, and organizer. She’s spent her career building bridges between diverse groups of people, and working to make America a more equitable place. In this episode, she…

  • Julia Alvarez on Bilingualism as a Superpower

    July 23, 2026 · 25 min

    So many authors writing across languages and cultures point to Julia Alvarez’s debut novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, as one of their ancestors. In this episode, we hear from Alvarez about the importance of defending all…

  • Edwidge Danticat Is Invited to this Party

    July 16, 2026 · 23 min

    Celebrations of the nation’s 250th anniversary can feel like a party not everyone is invited to, especially for those whose immigration status is in limbo. In this episode, Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat talks about the impact of…

  • Jacqueline Woodson on Telling Stories of our Ancestors

    July 9, 2026 · 26 min

    When award-winning author Jacqueline Woodson sat down to write her family’s story of the Great Migration, she wanted to make it accessible to all kinds of readers. So she wrote a children’s book called This Is the Rope. In this episode…

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  • Jose Antonio Vargas Redefines America

    July 2, 2026 · 27 min

    Jose Antonio Vargas is a journalist, filmmaker, and author of the book Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen. He came to the US from the Philippines when he was twelve years old, and he didn’t discover he was undocumented until he…

  • This Guy Sucked: D W Griffith with Kellie Carter Jackson

    February 3, 2026 · 28 min

    Today we’re bringing you a really interesting episode from our friends at This Guy Sucked, a podcast hosted by historian and writer Claire Aubin about the worst people in history. Each episode, Claire sits down with an expert to pull back…

  • Thresholds: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson on the Future That’s Still Possible

    October 21, 2025 · 39 min

    Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist, climate scientist and activist. Recently, she sat down with Jordan Kisner, of the Thresholds podcast, to talk about our climate future. You may have heard clips of their conversation in…

  • We are the Environment: Silent Spring’s Enduring Wisdom

    October 14, 2025 · 28 min

    When Silent Spring came out in 1962, it was an instant best-seller and led to the establishment of the EPA, as well as the ban of harmful pesticides such as DDT. But Rachel Carson’s seminal work also shifted our way of thinking about…

  • Molly Crabapple on Making Art in a Turbulent World

    October 7, 2025 · 19 min

    Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer who documents the extremes, from nightclubs to war zones. She’s also the author of several books, including Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun, a memoir of the Syrian War co-written with Marwan…

  • Art Spiegelman on Resistance, Memory, and Speaking Up

    September 30, 2025 · 20 min

    Art Spiegelman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the graphic novel Maus, the story of his parents’ experience during the Holocaust. We got to sit down with Spiegelman at Brooklyn Public Library’s recording studio earlier this month…

  • Maus and the Power of Images

    September 23, 2025 · 26 min

    Art Spiegelman’s Maus almost single-handedly elevated comics from throw-away inserts in newspapers to a serious literary art worthy of winning the highest award in book publishing. But it’s not an accident that this book is coming back to…

Full episode archive on Apple Podcasts →

About the show

Brooklyn Public Library is full of stories. Borrowed brings the best of them to you. Current podcast series: Borrowed & Returned is a new podcast series that examines what our reading public borrowed in the past, and what we’re all reading now. In conversations with library workers, authors and readers across the country, we’ll return to the books that changed us, and changed America, too.  Previous podcast series:   Borrowed and Banned is BPL's Peabody-nominated series about America's ideological war with its bookshelves. From September to December 2023, we released ten episodes featuring the stories from students, librarians, and teachers on the frontlines of intellectual freedom, and writers whose books have become political battleground. This series also won a Webby Award and was nominated for an Ambie Award.   BPL's Anthem Award-winning podcast is a narrative show about superhero librarians, neighborhood stories, and what it means to be a free, democratic place in today’s changing world. We’ve told stories about libraries during natural disasters, the challenges of homelessness, and NYC’s fraught relationship with trash. For transcripts, pictures, book lists, and resources, please visit our web page: bklynlib.org/podcasts  The views, thoughts, and opinions of the guests do not represent the views, thoughts, and opinions of Brooklyn Public Library.