Upcoming Events

DownRight Ent & Yo! Adrian! Present

Back To Basics Vol.2 Tour featuring The Widdler, Pushloop, Smith. & Rez.

April 9, 2020, We are truly going back to the basics. We asked if you all wanted more underground shows in unique and untouched spaces so we are going to be giving you just that. This venue is a 350-capacity dark room with beautiful acoustics and has never seen the liking of a show of this nature!

~~Lineup~~
The Widdler
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Pushloop
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smith.
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REZ
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18+ Event

Left Bank Books welcomes award winning St. Louis native author, Walter Johnson, in conversation with Tef Poe discussing Johnson’s new book on the racial dynamics entwined with American and St. Louis history, The Broken Heart of America.

A searing portrait of the racial dynamics that lie inescapably at the heart of our nation, told through the turbulent history of the city of St. Louis. From Lewis and Clark’s 1804 expedition to the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, American history has been made in St. Louis. And as Walter Johnson shows in this searing book, the city exemplifies how imperialism, racism, and capitalism have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation’s past. St. Louis was a staging post for Indian removal and imperial expansion, and its wealth grew on the backs of its poor black residents, from slavery through redlining and urban renewal. But it was once also America’s most radical city, home to anti-capitalist immigrants, the Civil War’s first general emancipation, and the nation’s first general strike—a legacy of resistance that endures. A blistering history of a city’s rise and decline, The Broken Heart of America will forever change how we think about the United States.

“The thread that runs through this entire book is the historical relationship between US imperialism, Indian removal, and anti-Black racism. Although also a granular history of the city of St. Louis, The Broken Heart of America is a deep history of the United States’ continental empire with St. Louis at the center of economic and military operations. This may be the most important book on US history you will read in your lifetime.” — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.

Walter Johnson is Winthrop Professor of History and professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and author of the critically acclaimed River of Dark Dreams and Soul by Soul, which won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, the Avery O. Craven Award, and several other prestigious prizes. A Missouri native, he lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.

Tef Poe is an American-born rapper, author, educator, award-winning journalist, and social revolutionary from St. Louis, MO. He is one of the co-founders of the Hands Up United movement, founded in Ferguson after the killing of Michael Brown Jr. In 2017–2018, he was selected to be the Nasir Jones Hip Hop Fellow via Harvard University’s prestigious W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute. He is currently an Independent Scholar at Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for American Studies. As a hip hop artist, he has performed on stages with the likes of Mos Def and Talib Kweli, Lupe Fiasco, Rick Ross, Bia, Dead Prez, TI, Macklemore, Harry Belafonte, Stevie Wonder, and more.

The River Styx Reading Series is our featured event during the fall, winter, and spring, in which we invite both local and national acclaimed writers to read their work for a St. Louis audience.

Readings start at 7:00 p.m. on the third Monday of the month.

$5 general admission
$4 students and seniors

Apr. 20, 2020
Shane Seely
Erika T. Wurth

The WHY of MY City explores place-keeping in St. Louis neighborhoods. If you love STL, you’ll love this show!

Q&A with Master Storyteller Bobby Norfolk and author John A. Wright will follow the performance.

The WHY of MY City is created and will premiere at the 2020 St. Louis Storytelling Festival with support from Mid-America Arts Alliance and the National Endowment for the Arts, Missouri Humanities Council, a state agency and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Missouri Foundation for Health, and Kranzberg Arts Foundation.