Mt. Lebanon Public Library Speaker Series
An Evening with Nate Powell
Monday, September 29, 2025, 7 pm
Meeting Room A
Nate Powell is a National Book Award-winning cartoonist who began self-publishing as an Arkansas teenager in 1992. His work includes the new graphic novel Fall Through and a new comics adaptation of James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, as well as Save It For Later, civil rights icon John Lewis’s March trilogy, Come Again, Two Dead and more.
He has published nonfiction comics and writing for The Washington Post, The Nib, Popula, Lit Hub, Booklist, Scholastic, CNN, and The Weather Channel.
Powell’s work has received multiple Eisner and Ignatz awards, ALA and YALSA distinctions, the Comic-Con International Inkpot Award, CXC Transformative Work Award, and is a two-time finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He has discussed his work at the United Nations, on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, PBS, CNN, and NPR.
He lives in Bloomington, Indiana.
An Evening with Andrew Moore
Thursday, November 13, 2025, 7 pm
Meeting Room A
Pawpaw: The Story of America's Forgotten Fruit
The largest edible fruit native to the United States tastes like a cross between a banana and a mango. It grows wild in twenty-six states, gracing Eastern forests each fall with sweet-smelling, tropical-flavored abundance. So why have so few people heard of the pawpaw, much less tasted one? Author Andrew Moore will explore the past, present, and future of this remarkable species.
Andrew Moore is the author of Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit, which was a James Beard Foundation Award nominee in Writing & Literature. His next book, The Beasts of the East: The Fall and Rise of America's Eastern Wilderness, will be published by Mariner Books next summer.
An Evening with Silas Maxwell Switzer
Bleach and Water: The AIDS Crisis and Preserving Queer History in Pittsburgh
Monday, December 1, 2025, 7 pm
Meeting Room A
Join poet and historian Silas Maxwell Switzer for a talk and a reading from Nine Parts Water, One Part Bleach, a documentary poetry collection exploring the AIDS crisis in Pittsburgh. Blending archival research and lyric memory, Silas traces the stories that survive and the silences that remain. The evening will reflect on how queer histories are remembered — or erased — in Pittsburgh’s cultural memory.
Silas Maxwell Switzer is a queer scholar and poet. In 2023, he published his docupoetry chapbook, Nine Parts Water, One Part Bleach, chronicling the local history of the AIDS crisis in Pittsburgh. Silas has an essay in the journal Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture analyzing the queer worldbuilding in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He has also been published in Lunch Ticket and Waxing & Waning. When he isn’t buried in the archives or writing poetry, Silas enjoys contemplating the mysteries of American urban fauna, particularly the noble possum.
An Evening with the Iliad
Tuesday, December 2, 2025, 7 pm
Meeting Room A
Join us for an evening with Mt. Lebanon author Josh Cannon, as he discusses his forthcoming book Fatal Second Helen: A Veteran's Iliad (2025 - Blue Ear Books). This book uses Emily Wilson's recent translation of the Iliad to discuss how the poem continues to resonate with modern warfare. While our conceptions of warfare have changed in many ways, they have also remained rooted in millennia old patterns of thinking. Cannon's book examines these similarities and differences in light of his own experiences as a Marine Corp sergeant and combat veteran with two deployments to Iraq (2003, 2004).
Josh Cannon holds a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilization from the University of Chicago. He is currently part-time faculty in the Classics Department at the University of Pittsburgh and is also the Director of Research for Pitt's Frederick Honors College.
An Evening with Tyler McAndrew
Thursday, December 4, 2025, 7 pm
Meeting Room A
Set largely in the 1990s and early 2000s Rust Belt, My Prisoner and Other Stories gives us protagonists who repeatedly confront helplessness in the face of others’ suffering.
The structural forces that stain life in late-capitalist America—the prison system, economic desperation—lurk throughout these muscular and empathetic tales, but in the face of endemic adversity, shrewd and loving characters strive for and sometimes achieve hope and tenderness. Tyler McAndrew shows us an unadorned America that can still tap its capacity for human kindness.