Common Read Community Conversation: The Illustrated Man

Maurice Broaddus moderates a conversation on Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man at the Indiana Historical Society on Tuesday, November 10, with panelists Daniel Kraus and Dr. Abigail Fraeman. It's a free public event, and it serves as the culminating experience of the 2026 Indianapolis Common Read.

If you haven't heard of the Common Read, it's a city-wide initiative led by IU Indianapolis that spent the year bringing together readers, students, educators, libraries, book clubs, workplaces, and community organizations around a single shared book. Thousands of copies were made available through Indianapolis-area libraries, so the conversation on the 10th is meant to be the capstone for everyone who's been reading along. The evening centers on The Illustrated Man, a science fiction classic that's 75 years old now and still raises questions about how technology changes our lives and relationships, what we fear and hope for, and how imagination, family, and community shape the world we create together.

The program is presented in partnership with the Ray Bradbury Center, Indiana Humanities, the Indiana Life Sciences Association, and the Indianapolis Public Library System. It also runs as part of the Spirit & Place Festival, which goes from November 5 to 15. The Ray Bradbury Center, housed at IU Indianapolis, is one of the larger single-author archives in the United States, holding more than 100,000 pages of Bradbury's published and unpublished work, forty years of correspondence, and a working library of about 4,000 volumes.

The conversation runs from 6:00 to 8:00 PM at the Indiana Historical Society, 450 West Ohio Street, with doors opening at 5:30 PM. Admission is free.