10:00AM - 6:00PM Monday - Wednesday
10:00AM - 5:00PM Thursday - Saturday
Closed Sundays and Holidays
Hours:
RPL Presents:Ten Evenings
A Community Screening Series
Join us after hours for Ten Evenings, Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures' celebrated author series — streamed live and screened right here at RPL. Each evening brings a discussion following the lecture, moderated by Aimeé Kemick.
All events begin at 7:30pm. Registration required for each author talk.
Author Schedule
September 14, 2026
George Saunders
Photo by Zach Krahmer
George Saunders is the author of nine books, including the novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize, and the story collections Pastoralia and Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2006 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2013 he was awarded the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and was included in Time’s list of the one hundred most influential people in the world. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.
October 5, 2026
Mary Roach
Mary Roach is the author of eight New York Times bestsellers, including STIFF: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers; GULP: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, FUZZ: When Nature Breaks the Law and PACKING FOR MARS: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. Her new book, REPLACEABLE YOU: Adventures in Human Anatomy, debuts in September 2025. Mary's books have been published in 21 languages, and her second book, SPOOK, was a New York Times Notable Book. Mary has written for National Geographic, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, and the Journal of Clinical Anatomy, among others. She was a guest editor of the Best American Science and Nature Writing series and an Osher Fellow with the San Francisco Exploratorium and serves as an advisor for Orion and Undark magazines. She has been a finalist for the Royal Society's Winton Prize and a winner of the American Engineering Societies' Engineering Journalism Award, in a category for which, let's be honest, she was the sole entrant.
Photo by Jen Siska
October 26, 2026
Michael Lewis
New York Times best-selling author Michael Lewis has published many books on subjects ranging from politics to Wall Street to sports.
In The Blind Side, Lewis told the story of former NFL offensive tackle Michael Oher, and the transformations in his life after he was taken in by white evangelical Christians. Before that, Lewis wrote Moneyball, a book simultaneously about baseball and the way markets value people. Both of these sports bestsellers became Oscar-nominated films.
Previous bestsellers The Big Short and Boomerang were narratives set in the global financial crisis. The Big Short was made into an Oscar-winning film directed by Adam McKay. Other works include Coach, about the transformative powers of his own high school baseball coach; Home Game, his essays on fatherhood; The New New Thing, about Silicon Valley during the internet boom; Losers, about the 1996 presidential campaign; and Liar’s Poker, a Wall Street story based in part on his own experience working as a bond salesman for Salomon Brothers. More recently, Lewis edited Who Is Government?, an anthology by an all-star team of writers exploring the consequential work of government workers.
Lewis is the creator and host of Apple’s #1-rated podcast Against the Rules, a searing look at what’s happened to fairness in American life through the lens of people who depend on public trust. He grew up in New Orleans and lives in Berkeley, California, with his family.
Photo by Tabitha Soren
November 16, 2026
Min Jin Lee
Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award, runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a New York Times "100 Best Books of the Century.” Lee's third novel American Hagwon will be published on September 29, 2026.
As New York State Author Laureate (2025-2027), Lee received the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit. She is the 2024 recipient of The Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence. Lee has received the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award, and the Samsung Happiness for Tomorrow Award for Creativity from South Korea. Her fiction has been translated into over 35 languages. She is the recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Lee is an inductee of the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.
Photo by Andrew Kung
December 7, 2026
Nicholas Boggs
Nicholas Boggs is the New York Times bestselling author of Baldwin: A Love Story, the first major biography of the iconic figure in over three decades. He also co-edited a new edition of Baldwin's collaboration with French artist Yoran Cazac, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (2018). He is the recipient of a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and fellowships from the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Scholars-in-Residence program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Gilder Lehrman Center and Beinecke Library at Yale, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell. Most recently he was the 2024-2025 John Hope Franklin Fellow at the National Humanities Center. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., he received his BA from Yale and his PhD from Columbia, both in English, as well as an MFA in Creative Writing from American University. He now resides in New York City.
Photo by Noah Loof
February 1, 2027
Emily St. John Mandel
Emily St. John Mandel's seventh novel, Exit Party, will be published in September 2026. Her previous novels include Sea of Tranquility, which has been translated into 25 languages and was selected by President Barack Obama as one of his favourite books of 2022; The Glass Hotel, which was also on Obama’s list, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and has been translated into 26 languages; and Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award among other honours, has been translated into 37 languages, and aired as a limited series on HBO Max. She lives in New York City and Los Angeles.
Photo by Laura Barisonzi
March 1, 2027
Douglas Stuart
Douglas Stuart is a NY Times bestselling author whose work has been translated in to over forty languages.
His debut novel, Shuggie Bain, won the 2020 Booker Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. It was named both the Overall Book of the Year, and Debut of the Year at the British Book Awards, and was selected by the Sunday Times as one of ‘the 25 best novels of the 21st century’.
His next novel, Young Mungo, was a Sunday Times #1 bestseller and a finalist for the Carnegie Medal.
His latest novel John of John will publish in May 2026.
His essays on gender, class and conformity have feature on Lit Hub and his short stories are published in The New Yorker.
Born in Glasgow, Scotland, he has an MA from the Royal College of Art in London and Honorary Doctorates from the University of Glasgow and Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh. In a previous life he was a designer for Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Kate Spade, and The Gap. Since 2000, he has lived and worked in New York City, although he spends as much time in Glasgow as he can.
March 15, 2027
Edwidge Danticat
.webp)
Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection, Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist, The Farming of Bones, The Dew Breaker, Brother, I’m Dying, Create Dangerously, Claire of the Sea Light, The Art of Death, Everything Inside, a Reese’s Book Club selection and National Book Critics Circle Awards winner. She is also the editor of The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, Best American Essays 2011, Haiti Noir, and Haiti Noir 2. She has written eight books for children and young adults: Anacaona, Behind the Mountains, Eight Days, The Last Mapou, Mama's Nightingale, Untwine, My Mommy Medicine, Watch Out For Falling Iguanas, and a travel narrative, After the Dance. Her memoir, Brother, I'm Dying, was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and a 2008 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow, a 2018 Ford Foundation “Art of Change” fellow, the winner of the 2018 Neustadt International Prize, the 2019 St. Louis Literary Award, the 2020 Bocas Fiction Prize, the 2020 Vilcek Prize for Literature, a 2020 United States Artists Fellow, a two-time winner of The Story Prize and the 2023 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Her 2024 essay collection, We’re Alone, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and in March 2026, she received the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. Her novel Dèy will be published in August 2026.
Photo by Lynn Savarese
April 26, 2027
Arthur Sze
Arthur Sze is a poet, a translator, and an editor. He is the author of 12 books of poetry, including Into the Hush (2025), the winner of the 2025 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry for Lifetime Achievement; The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021); Sight Lines (2019), which won the National Book Award for Poetry; Compass Rose (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist; The Ginkgo Light (2009), selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award; Quipu (2005); The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998 (1998), selected for the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Asian American Literary Award; and Archipelago (1995), selected for an American Book Award, all published by Copper Canyon Press. Sze has also published The Silk Dragon II (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), an expanded edition of his 2001 book of Chinese poetry translations, The Silk Dragon, which was selected for the Western States Book Award for Translation; a prose collection The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2025); and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (Trinity University Press, 2010).
On September 15, 2025, Sze was named 25th U.S. Poet Laureate.
May 10, 2027
Deeshaw Philyaw
Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Story Prize, the LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Deesha is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, a Baldwin for the Arts Fellow, a United States Artists Fellow, and co-host of two podcasts, Ursa Short Fiction (with Dawnie Walton) and Reckon True Stories (with Kiese Laymon). She is currently at work developing TV shows based on her short fiction.
Deesha’s debut novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, is forthcoming from Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, in September 2026.