Podcasts about pen american center

In TikTok v. Garland, the Supreme Court will determine whether TikTok—the social media platform used by an estimated 170 million Americans—can continue to operate in the United States under the ownership of a Chinese holding company. Jameel Jaffer of Columbia Law School and Zephyr Teachout of Fordham Law School join Jeffrey Rosen to debate whether the law that forces TikTok to be sold or banned violates the First Amendment.  Resources:  Jameel Jaffer, “Brief of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, Free Press, and PEN American Center as Amici Curiae in Support of Petitioners," TikTok v. Garland  Jameel Jaffer, “The Supreme Court Must Intervene in the TikTok Case,” The New York Times (Dec. 10, 2024)  Zephyr Teachout, “Brief of AMICI CURIAE Zephyr Teachout and Joel Thayer in Support of Respondent,” TikTok v. Garland  United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Opinion of the Court, TikTok v. Garland  Arcara v. Cloud Books, Inc. (1986)  Reed v. Town of Gilbert (2015)  Moody v. NetChoice (2024) Stay Connected and Learn More Questions or comments about the show? Email us at podcast@constitutioncenter.org Continue the conversation by following us on social media @ConstitutionCtr. Sign up to receive Constitution Weekly, our email roundup of constitutional news and debate. Subscribe, rate, and review wherever you listen. Join us for an upcoming live program or watch recordings on YouTube. Support our important work. Donate

Send us a textIn this episode, I chat with translator Oonagh Stransky about her love of the Italian language, the importance of small presses, Héloïse Press, and the art of translating books to English. Oonagh Stransky has translated a range of fiction and nonfiction writers, including Roberto Saviano, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Giuseppe Pontiggia, and Carlo Lucarelli. Her work has received important prizes and nominations. Born in Paris, Stransky grew up in the Middle East, London, and the United States and attended Mills College, Middlebury College, and Columbia University. A member of PEN American Center and the American Literary Translators Association, she currently lives in Tuscany. Support the showThe Bookshop PodcastMandy Jackson-BeverlySocial Media Links

Francine Prose is the author of the memoir 1974: A Personal History, available from Harper. Prose is the author of twenty-two works of fiction including the highly acclaimed The Vixen; Mister Monkey; the New York Times bestseller Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932; A Changed Man, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include the highly praised Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, which has become a classic. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director's Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College. *** Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc. Subscribe to Brad Listi's email newsletter. Support the show on Patreon Merch Twitter Instagram  TikTok Bluesky Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join Ocean House owner, actor, and bestselling author Deborah Goodrich Royce for a conversation with New York Times bestselling authors and mother/son duo Elliott Ackerman and Joanna Leedom-Ackerman. They discuss their books: Joanne Leedom-Ackerman's The Far Side of the Desert and Elliott Ackerman's 2054. About the Authors:  Elliot Ackerman is the author of the novels Halcyon, Red Dress in Black and White, Waiting for Eden, Dark at the Crossing, Green on Blue, and the memoirs The Fifth Act and Places and Names. His books have been nominated for numerous awards, including the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal in fiction and nonfiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a Marine veteran, having served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. About 2054: From the acclaimed authors of the runaway New York Times bestseller 2034 comes another explosive work of speculative fiction set twenty years further in the future, at a moment when a radical leap forward in artificial intelligence combines with America's violent partisan divide to create an existential threat to the country, and the world It is twenty years after the catastrophic war between the United States and China that brought down the old American political order. A new party has emerged in the US, holding power for over a decade. Efforts to cement its grip have resulted in mounting violent resistance. The American president has control of the media but is beginning to lose control of the streets. Many fear he'll stop at nothing to remain in the White House. Suddenly, he collapses in the middle of an address to the nation. After an initial flurry of misinformation, the administration reluctantly announces his death. A cover-up ensues, conspiracy theories abound, and the country descends into a new type of civil war. A handful of elite actors from the worlds of computer science, intelligence, and business have a fairly good idea of what happened. All signs point to a profound breakthrough in AI, of which the remote assassination of an American president is hardly the most game-changing ramification. The trail leads to an outpost in the Amazon rainforest, the last known whereabouts of the tech visionary who predicted this breakthrough. As some of the world's great powers, old and new, state and nonstate alike, struggle to outmaneuver one another in this new Great Game of scientific discovery, the outcome becomes entangled with the fate of American democracy. Combining a deep understanding of AI, biotech, and the possibility of a coming Singularity, along with their signature geopolitical sophistication, Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis have once again written a visionary work. 2054 is a novel that reads like a thriller, even as it demands that we consider the trajectory of our society and its potentially calamitous destination. Joanne Leedom-Ackerman is a novelist, short story writer, and journalist. Her works of fiction include Burning Distance, The Dark Path to the River, and No Marble Angels. She has published PEN Journeys: Memoir of Literature on the Line and was the editor for The Journey of Liu Xiaobo: From Dark Horse to Nobel Laureate. Former International Secretary of PEN International, she is a Vice President of PEN International and a former board member and Vice President of PEN American Center. She serves on the boards of Refugees International, the International Center for Journalists, the American Writers Museum, and Words Without Borders and is an emeritus director of Poets and Writers, the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, and Human Rights Watch and an emeritus trustee of Brown University and Johns Hopkins University. Joanne is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Texas Institute of Letters. A former The Christian Science Monitor reporter, Joanne has taught writing at New York University, City University of New York, Occidental College, and the University of California at Los Angeles extension. About The Far Side of the Desert: A terrorist attack—a kidnapping—the ultimate vacation gone wrong Sisters Samantha and Monte Waters are vacationing together in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, enjoying a festival and planning to meet with their brother, Cal—but the idyllic plans are short-lived. When terrorists' attacks rock the city around them, Monte, a U.S. foreign service officer, and Samantha, an international television correspondent, are separated, and one of them is whisked away in the frenzy. The family mobilizes, using all their contacts to try to find their missing sister, but to no avail. She has vanished. As time presses on, the outlook darkens. Can she be found, or is she a lost cause? And, even if she returns, will the damage to her and those around her be irreparable? Moving from Spain to Washington to Morocco to Gibraltar to the Sahara Desert, The Far Side of the Desert is a family drama and political thriller that explores links of terrorism, crime, and financial manipulation, revealing the grace that ultimately foils destruction.  

Madison author Beth Nguyen's latest book Owner of a Lonely Heart (Scribner, July 2023) is a memoir about parenthood, absence, and the condition of being a refugee: the story of Beth's relationship with her mother.At the end of the Vietnam War, when Beth Nguyen was eight months old, she and her family fled Saigon for America. Only Beth's mother stayed—or was left—behind, and they did not meet again until Beth was nineteen. Over the course of her adult life, she and her mother have spent less than twenty-four hours together. It was named a Best Memoir of 2023 by Oprah Daily, and was selected by Time, NPR, and BookPage as a Best Book of 2023.Beth joins host Sara Batkie ahead of the paperback release for a conversation about the expectations of motherhood, changing her name, and the fallibility of memory.Beth Nguyen is the author of four books, most recently the memoir Owner of a Lonely Heart, published by Scribner in 2023. Owner of a Lonely Heart was a New York Times Editors' Choice pick and was named a best book of 2023 by NPR, Time, Oprah Daily, and BookPage. Nguyen's three previous books, the memoir Stealing Buddha's Dinner and the novels Short Girls and Pioneer Girl, were published by Viking Penguin. Her awards and honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, a PEN/Jerard Award from the PEN American Center, a Bread Loaf fellowship, and best book of the year honors from the Chicago Tribune and Library Journal. Her books have been included in community and university read programs around the country. Nguyen's work has also appeared in numerous anthologies and publications including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Literary Hub, Time Magazine, and The Best American Essays.Nguyen was born in Saigon. When she was a baby, she and her family came to the United States as refugees and were resettled in Michigan, where Nguyen grew up. She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and is currently a professor in the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Building upon Kew's commitment to re-examine the history of its collections, this discussion explores the colonial legacies of botany and botanic gardens, featuring a panel of leading writers and thinkers in this area. All too often history shows us that the origins of botanic gardens are intertwined with the histories of colonialism, imperialism and enslavement. How can understanding these connections pave the way to a more inclusive future? Given this legacy, what is the role that botanic gardens play today in supporting and addressing climate justice? Speakers Sathnam Sanghera is a journalist and best-selling author. His acclaimed books include The Boy with the Topknot and Empireland, which inspired the Channel 4 series Empire State of Mind. His highly anticipated new book, Empireworld, traces the legacies of the British empire around the world. Andrea Wulf is an award-winning author of several books, including The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession and the international bestseller The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World which is published in 27 languages. A New York Times bestseller, it also won fifteen international literary awards, including the Royal Society Science Book Prize, Costa Biography Award and the LA Times Book Prize. Her latest book Magnificent Rebels was published under great acclaim in autumn 2022. Andrea is a member of PEN American Center and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Emma Nicolson is Head of Art at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh where she spearheads a transformative arts strategy, integrating nature, science, and environmental concerns. Initiating projects like Climate House and collaborating with institutions like Serpentine Galleries, Emma engages audiences with climate and ecological issues. With a background as the founding director of ATLAS Arts and senior roles at institutions like the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Emma has a proven passion for collaborative, audience-building initiatives. Chaired by Rosie Boycott, Crossbench Peer, Food Campaigner, and co-founder of 5x15. This talk is part of a series of activities planned by RBG Kew, aligning with its objectives under its Manifesto for Change and History, Equity, and Inclusion Plan. As part of its own journey of introspection and exploration, Kew Gardens looks to promote open dialogue, platform diverse perspectives and foster learning from the rich tapestry of voices that surround these matters. Kew is not only a botanic garden; it is a leading centre of plant and fungal science and a repository of history, a living testament to the relationships between humans and plants over centuries. In examining the history of its collections, the RBG Kew aims to enrich the stories it tells its visitors, providing different layers of information on plant history and the pivotal role of botanic gardens. Responsible investing at Rathbones Investment Management We see it as our responsibility to invest for everyone's tomorrow. That means doing the right thing for our clients and for others too. Keeping the future in mind when we make decisions today. Looking beyond the short term for the most sustainable outcome. This is how we build enduring value for our clients, make a wider contribution to society and create a lasting legacy. Recordings of Rathbones and 5x15's online series The Earth Convention can be viewed on 5x15's Youtube channel. Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

In conversation with award-winning journalist and broadcaster, Tracey Matisak Paul Alexander's bestselling and acclaimed biographies include portraits of James Dean, Sylvia Plath, John McCain, and J. D. Salinger, the last of which served as the basis of a documentary that appeared on HBO, PBS, and Netflix. Alexander's nonfiction has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Nation, The Washington Post, and Rolling Stone, as well as numerous literary journals. He is also the author of several stage plays and screenplays. A writing teacher at Hunter College in New York City and a former fellow at the Hoover Institution, he holds memberships at the PEN American Center, the Dramatists Guild, and the Academy of American Poets. In Bitter Crop, the first new biography of Billie Holiday in more than 20 years, Alexander presents a transcendently soaring look at the legendary jazz singer's last year of life.   Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees. (recorded 2/13/2024)

Is ten years long or short in the life of a writer? Fiction writer and journalist Joanne Leedom-Ackerman shows us how her perspective on this has shifted. She offers us a prompt via Rainer Maria Rilke to get us thinking about our own writing lives and to get us to build narrative with what she describes as concentric circles in this Inspiration Takeover, a series of mini-episodes with different writers who offer us a little dose of inspiration. Joanne Leedom-Ackerman is a novelist, short story writer, and journalist. Her works of fiction include upcoming novel The Far Side of the Desert and also Burning Distance, The Dark Path to the River, and No Marble Angels. Her nonfiction book PEN Journeys: Memoir of Literature on the Line was recently published, and she is the senior editor and contributor to The Journey of Liu Xiaobo: From Dark Horse to Nobel Laureate. She has also published fiction and essays in books and anthologies, including Short Stories of the Civil Rights Movement; Remembering Arthur Miller; Snakes: An Anthology of Serpent Tales, Fiction and Poetry by Texas Women, the Bicentennial Collection of Texas Short Stories and Beyond Literacy. A reporter for The Christian Science Monitor early in her career, Joanne has won awards for her nonfiction and published articles in newspapers and magazines, including World Literature Today, The Christian Science Monitor, The Los Angeles Times, GlobalPost, and others. Joanne is a Vice President of PEN International and the former International Secretary of PEN International and former Chair of International PEN's Writers in Prison Committee. She also serves on the boards of the International Center for Journalists, Refugees International, the American Writers Museum and Words Without Borders and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Edward R. Murrow Center at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the ICRW Leadership Council. She is a former board member and Vice President of PEN American Center and past President of PEN Center USA. She is an Emeritus Director of Poets and Writers, the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and Human Rights Watch, where she served as Chair of the Asia Advisory Committee. She is an Emeritus Trustee of Johns Hopkins University and Brown University and has served on the Board of Trustees of Save the Children and the International Crisis Group.

This week, writers Joanne Leedom-Ackerman and Sara Paretsky discuss their craft, the writing process, and the dangers of censorship and book bans. This conversation originally took place June 15, 2023 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum. This episode is presented in conjunction with Banned Books Week. Follow the link to learn more about this initiative from the American Library Association and see how you can take action to preserve open access to literature in your community. AWM PODCAST NETWORK HOME About the speakers: JOANNE LEEDOM-ACKERMAN is a novelist, short story writer, and journalist. Her works of fiction include Burning Distance and The Far Side of the Desert. She is editor of The Journey of Liu Xiaobo: From Dark Horse to Nobel Laureate. A former reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, Joanne is a Vice President Emeritus and former International Secretary of PEN International. She serves on the boards of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, the International Center for Journalists, Words Without Borders and Refugees International. She is an emeritus board member of Poets and Writers and Human Rights Watch and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and PEN American Center, where she served as a trustee. She is currently a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Writers Museum. SARA PARETSKY revolutionized the mystery world in 1982 when she introduced V.I. Warshawski in Indemnity Only. By creating a detective with the grit and smarts to take on the mean streets, Paretsky challenged a genre in which women historically were vamps or victims. V.I. struck a chord with readers and critics; Indemnity Only was followed by twenty more V.I. novels. Paretsky detailed her journey from Kansas farm-girl to New York Times bestseller in her 2007 memoir, Writing in an Age of Silence, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. In addition, Paretsky has written two stand-alone novels, Ghost Country, and Bleeding Kansas, set in the part of rural Kansas where Paretsky grew up. She has published several short story collections, most recently Love & Other Crimes, and has edited numerous other anthologies.

How do we support the writers, artists, and thinkers in our communities in times of profound change? Andrew Proctor, Executive Director of Literary Arts in Portland Oregon, sat down with us to answer this question and shared how he's engaged the literary world for over twenty years in the governmental, for profit, and nonprofit sectors. Andrew also talks with us about the beauty of art as a medium to process what's going on in the world, the importance of modeling rest for your community, and what career resilience and growth really looks like. He also shared an incredibly impactful musical composition from  Gabriel Kahane that's inspired us immensely! “Everything doesn't have to run on fumes because running your career or self on fumes makes you extremely vulnerable. It can seem heroic, but it is what endangers you the most.” Andrew earned a bachelor's degree in English and Music at Concordia University in Montreal, and later worked in London for the Cultural Attaché to the Canadian High Commission. In the UK, he also earned an MA in English Literature at the University of East. He's worked as an editor for HarperCollins in New York City and then as the Membership and Operations Director of the PEN American Center, a global literary and human rights organization focused on the welfare of writers and editors.  To get more content like this and learn more about ignite and PSR go to psr.edu.

Our intrepid hosts talk Deep Image poetics and nearly break into rosebud....er blossom.Support Breaking Form!Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.  Buy our books:Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. Publisher's Weekly calls the book "visceral, tender, and compassionate."James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books. Writing in Lit Hub, Rebecca Morgan Frank says the poems have "a gift for telling stories . . .  in acts of queer survival." Please consider buying your books from Bluestockings Cooperative, a feminist and queer indie bookselling coop.The word (and journal name) Trobar comes from the Old Catalan verb trobar, from Vulgar Latin tropāre, a verb presumably derived from Latin tropus, of Greek origin—for "to find." It transforms in French to also take on "to invent, to compose" and thus forms the root of "troubador."Watch Ellen Bass read her poem "Any Common Desolation" (~2 min) or read it for yourself here.Check out Cola Franzen's translation of Lorca's poem "La Guitarra." Cola Franzen (February 4, 1923 – April 5, 2018) was an American writer and translator. Among her awards are the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award and the Gregory Kolovakos Award from PEN American Center for expansion of Hispanic Literature to an English-language audience.Read James Wright's poem "A Blessing" or watch him read it here (at the 33:15 mark).According to Dr. Kristin Mark, a sex and relationships researcher and a professor at the University of Kentucky, ejaculated sperm can travel up to 28 mph. It is, as you can imagine, difficult to measure.

“It made me think about how our sense of identity really gets mixed up in names that other people give to us.” In real life, Bich Minh Nguyen now goes by the name Beth Nguyen - Beth is an award-winning writer and professor. In honor of AAPI Heritage Month, we wanted to share a conversation from the other podcast Modern Minorities - which features minority voices for all of our majority ears. Born in Saigon, Beth is the author of books like Stealing Buddha's Dinner, Short Girls, Pioneer Girl, and Owner of a Lonely Heart - her memoir in essays about post refugee life coming out later this year. Beth 2021 New Yorker article - “⁠America Ruined My Name For Me⁠” unpacks a necessary conversation about identity, adaption and assimilation - especially for those whose name is not hard to pronounce or understand. A refugee and a mother, Beth's moving work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, and Literary Hub. Beth's awards and honors include an American Book Award, a PEN/Jerard Award from the PEN American Center, a Bread Loaf fellowship, and best book of the year honors from the Chicago Tribune and Library Journal. Beth has taught at Purdue University and the University of San Francisco - she is and is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin. You'll enjoy this candid conversation about growing between the cultures of two worlds

Lesley Ewing is back with the Shorewords Podcast, ASPN's books and literature pod, and she sits down with James Nestor, author of DEEP: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves. DEEP was an Amazon Best Science Book of 2014, BBC Book of the Week, BuzzFeed 19 Best Nonfiction Book of 2014, ArtForum Top 10 Book of 2014, New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. In 2015, the PEN American Center recognized DEEPas one of the five best books of Literary Sports Writing. The book follows clans of extreme athletes, adventurers, and scientists as they plumb the limits of the ocean's depths and uncover weird and wondrous new discoveries that, in many cases, redefine our understanding of the ocean and ourselves. It has been translated into German, Chinese, Italian, Polish; editions in French and Portuguese will be released in 2018. Nestor is also a journalist who has written for Outside Magazine, Men's Journal, National Public Radio, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Scientific American, Surfer's Journal, Dwell Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, and more. Catch this incredible discussion with one of the most insightful and original writers in the realm. It's a blast.

Steve Silberman is an award-winning science writer whose articles have appeared in Wired, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Boston Globe. He is the author of "NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity" - a widely-praised bestseller in the US and the UK. His TED talk, “The Forgotten History of Autism,” has been viewed nearly 2 million times online. Steve also won a gold record from the Recording Industry Association of America for co-producing the Grateful Dead's career-spanning box set So Many Roads (1965-1995), which was Rolling Stone's box set of the year in 1999. His liner notes have been featured in CDs and DVDs by Crosby, Stills, and Nash, the Jerry Garcia Band, and many other groups. As a young man, he was Allen Ginsberg's teaching assistant at Naropa University.   On today's episode, Steve talks to Jack about the how The Beatles impacted his life, the importance of Sgt. Pepper in the counter culture revolution, and the influence of The Beatles on bands such as The Grateful Dead and Crosby Stills Nash and Young.   Check out Steve's website: https://www.stevesilberman.com/ Follow Steve on Twitter: https://twitter.com/stevesilberman   This episode is dedicated to David Crosby, who was one of the most influential musicians in rock history and a very close friend of Steve's. To the surprise of the world, David passed away just two weeks after this podcast was recorded.    One of the reasons I started this podcast was to ask great minds such as David's how The Beatles inspired his music - and thanks our guest Steve Silberman and his recent phone call with David Crosby, that question is answered in today's episode.   David will be sorely missed here on Earth, but as he once said, music is love. - and David has left behind a legacy of music and love that will live on forever.   If you like this episode, be sure to subscribe to this podcast! Follow us on Twitter and Instagram. Or click here for more information: Linktr.ee/BeatlesEarth   ----- The Beatles were an English rock band, formed in Liverpool in 1960, that comprised John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. They are regarded as the most influential band of all timeand were integral to the development of 1960s counterculture and popular music's recognition as an art form. Rooted in skiffle, beat and 1950s rock 'n' roll, their sound incorporated elements of classical music and traditional pop in innovative ways; the band later explored music styles ranging from ballads and Indian music to psychedelia and hard rock. As pioneers in recording, songwriting and artistic presentation, the Beatles revolutionised many aspects of the music industry and were often publicised as leaders of the era's youth and sociocultural movements. Led by primary songwriters Lennon and McCartney, the Beatles evolved from Lennon's previous group, the Quarrymen, and built their reputation playing clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg over three years from 1960, initially with Stuart Sutcliffe playing bass. The core trio of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, together since 1958, went through a succession of drummers, including Pete Best, before asking Starr to join them in 1962. Manager Brian Epstein moulded them into a professional act, and producer George Martin guided and developed their recordings, greatly expanding their domestic success after signing to EMI Records and achieving their first hit, "Love Me Do", in late 1962.   Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr all released solo albums in 1970. Their solo records sometimes involved one or more of the others; Starr's Ringo (1973) was the only album to include compositions and performances by all four ex-Beatles, albeit on separate songs. With Starr's participation, Harrison staged the Concert for Bangladesh in New York City in August 1971. Other than an unreleased jam session in 1974, later bootlegged as A Toot and a Snore in '74, Lennon and McCartney never recorded together again. Two double-LP sets of the Beatles' greatest hits, compiled by Klein, 1962–1966 and 1967–1970, were released in 1973, at first under the Apple Records imprint. Commonly known as the "Red Album" and "Blue Album", respectively, each has earned a Multi-Platinum certification in the US and a Platinum certification in the UK. Between 1976 and 1982, EMI/Capitol released a wave of compilation albums without input from the ex-Beatles, starting with the double-disc compilation Rock 'n' Roll Music. The only one to feature previously unreleased material was The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl (1977); the first officially issued concert recordings by the group, it contained selections from two shows they played during their 1964 and 1965 US tours. The music and enduring fame of the Beatles were commercially exploited in various other ways, again often outside their creative control. In April 1974, the musical John, Paul, George, Ringo ... and Bert, written by Willy Russell and featuring singer Barbara Dickson, opened in London. It included, with permission from Northern Songs, eleven Lennon-McCartney compositions and one by Harrison, "Here Comes the Sun". Displeased with the production's use of his song, Harrison withdrew his permission to use it.Later that year, the off-Broadway musical Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on the Road opened. All This and World War II (1976) was an unorthodox nonfiction film that combined newsreel footage with covers of Beatles songs by performers ranging from Elton John and Keith Moon to the London Symphony Orchestra. The Broadway musical Beatlemania, an unauthorised nostalgia revue, opened in early 1977 and proved popular, spinning off five separate touring productions. In 1979, the band sued the producers, settling for several million dollars in damages. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978), a musical film starring the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton, was a commercial failure and an "artistic fiasco", according to Ingham. Accompanying the wave of Beatles nostalgia and persistent reunion rumours in the US during the 1970s, several entrepreneurs made public offers to the Beatles for a reunion concert.Promoter Bill Sargent first offered the Beatles $10 million for a reunion concert in 1974. He raised his offer to $30 million in January 1976 and then to $50 million the following month. On 24 April 1976, during a broadcast of Saturday Night Live, producer Lorne Michaels jokingly offered the Beatles $3,000 to reunite on the show. Lennon and McCartney were watching the live broadcast at Lennon's apartment at the Dakota in New York, which was within driving distance of the NBC studio where the show was being broadcast. The former bandmates briefly entertained the idea of going to the studio and surprising Michaels by accepting his offer, but decided not to.   Steve Silberman is an award-winning science writer whose articles have appeared in Wired, the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Financial Times, the Boston Globe, the MIT Technology Review, Nature, Salon, Shambhala Sun, and many other publications. He is the author of NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity (Avery 2015), which Oliver Sacks called a “sweeping and penetrating history…presented with a rare sympathy and sensitivity.” The book became a widely-praised bestseller in the United States and the United Kingdom, and won the 2015 Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction, a California Book Award, and a Books for a Better Life award. It was chosen as one of the Best Books of 2015 by The New York Times, The Economist, The Financial Times, The Boston Globe, The Independent, and many other publications, and is being translated into 15 languages. In April 2016, Silberman gave the keynote speech at the United Nations for World Autism Awareness Day. He has given talks on the history of autism at Yale, Harvard, MIT, Oxford, the National Academy of Sciences, Queen Mary University, Apple, Microsoft, Google, the 92nd Street Y, Imperial College London, the MIND Institute at UC Davis, and many other major institutions. His TED talk, “The Forgotten History of Autism,” has been viewed more than a million times and translated into 25 languages. His article “The Placebo Problem” won the 2010 Science Journalism Award for Magazine Writing from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Kavli Foundation, and was featured on The Colbert Report. His writing on science, culture, and literature has been collected in a number of major anthologies including The Best American Science Writing of the Year and The Best Business Stories of the Year. Silberman's Twitter account @stevesilberman made Time magazine's list of the best Twitter feeds for the year 2011. He is proud to be a member of the PEN American Center. Silberman also won a gold record from the Recording Industry Association of America for co-producing the Grateful Dead's career-spanning box set So Many Roads (1965-1995), which was Rolling Stone's box set of the year. His liner notes have been featured in CDs and DVDs by Crosby, Stills, and Nash, the Jerry Garcia Band, and many other groups. As a young man, he was Allen Ginsberg's teaching assistant at Naropa University. He lives with his husband Keith in San Francisco.  

Today I talked to Richard Fulco about his novel We Are All Together (Wampus Multimedia, 2022). Stephen Cane is a guitarist – he's already walked out on one band to join another one that subsequently falls apart. He gets himself to New York City to try to rejoin his first band, the one headed by his best friend and former bandmate, Dylan John. It's 1967, drugs and girls are everywhere, Dylan is on the verge of becoming a rock n' roll star, and Stephen makes some extremely poor choices. When Dylan quits just before a big show, Stephen is given a huge opportunity, but it doesn't take long before he starts making more bad decisions. He's in turmoil, as is the entire country, and his choices in love and loyalty cause him to spiral into self-doubt. Is being a rock star worth losing everything he holds dear? Richard Fulco's first novel, There Is No End to This Slope (Wampus Multimedia) was published in 2014. He received an MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College where he was the recipient of a MacArthur Scholarship. His plays have either been presented or developed at The New York International Fringe Festival, The Playwrights' Center, The Flea, Here Arts Center, Chicago Dramatists and The Dramatists Guild. Richard's one-act play Swedish Fish was published by Heuer Publishing and his stories, poetry, interviews and reviews have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Failbetter, Across the Margin, Fiction Writers Review and American Songwriter (among others). Richard is a member of the Pen American Center where he is also a mentor in the Prison Writing Mentorship Program. For six years, he wrote about music on his blog, Riffraf. He teaches creative writing and English at an independent high school in New Jersey. Richard interviews writers for his “5 Questions” series at www.richardfulco.com. When he's not writing and teaching, Richard is playing basketball with his twins, Chloe and Connor, watching the Mets play, riding the Peloton bike, or listening to vinyl. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Today I talked to Richard Fulco about his novel We Are All Together (Wampus Multimedia, 2022). Stephen Cane is a guitarist – he's already walked out on one band to join another one that subsequently falls apart. He gets himself to New York City to try to rejoin his first band, the one headed by his best friend and former bandmate, Dylan John. It's 1967, drugs and girls are everywhere, Dylan is on the verge of becoming a rock n' roll star, and Stephen makes some extremely poor choices. When Dylan quits just before a big show, Stephen is given a huge opportunity, but it doesn't take long before he starts making more bad decisions. He's in turmoil, as is the entire country, and his choices in love and loyalty cause him to spiral into self-doubt. Is being a rock star worth losing everything he holds dear? Richard Fulco's first novel, There Is No End to This Slope (Wampus Multimedia) was published in 2014. He received an MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College where he was the recipient of a MacArthur Scholarship. His plays have either been presented or developed at The New York International Fringe Festival, The Playwrights' Center, The Flea, Here Arts Center, Chicago Dramatists and The Dramatists Guild. Richard's one-act play Swedish Fish was published by Heuer Publishing and his stories, poetry, interviews and reviews have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Failbetter, Across the Margin, Fiction Writers Review and American Songwriter (among others). Richard is a member of the Pen American Center where he is also a mentor in the Prison Writing Mentorship Program. For six years, he wrote about music on his blog, Riffraf. He teaches creative writing and English at an independent high school in New Jersey. Richard interviews writers for his “5 Questions” series at www.richardfulco.com. When he's not writing and teaching, Richard is playing basketball with his twins, Chloe and Connor, watching the Mets play, riding the Peloton bike, or listening to vinyl. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Andrew Solomon, PhD is a writer and lecturer on politics, culture and psychology; winner of the National Book Award; and an activist in LGBTQ rights, mental health, and the arts. He is Professor of Clinical Medical Psychology (in Psychiatry) at Columbia University Medical Center, Lecturer in Psychiatry at Yale University, and a former President of PEN American Center. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and other publications on a range of subjects, including depression, Soviet artists, the cultural rebirth of Afghanistan, Libyan politics, and Deaf politics.Solomon's book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression  won the 2001 National Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize.  His other books include the Irony Tower and Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity.  He divides between between New York City and Rhinebeck NY.Support the show

In this 2008 episode from the Vault we hear from fashion historian Anne Hollander, a longtime member of the Institute, and former president of the PEN American Center. Hollander was the author of Seeing Through Clothes, Moving Pictures, and Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress. At the time of her death, in 2014, she was working on a book about clothes in literature, which is the subject of this talk. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this 2008 episode from the Vault we hear from fashion historian Anne Hollander, a longtime member of the Institute, and former president of the PEN American Center. Hollander was the author of Seeing Through Clothes, Moving Pictures, and Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress. At the time of her death, in 2014, she was working on a book about clothes in literature, which is the subject of this talk. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this 2008 episode from the Vault we hear from fashion historian Anne Hollander, a longtime member of the Institute, and former president of the PEN American Center. Hollander was the author of Seeing Through Clothes, Moving Pictures, and Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress. At the time of her death, in 2014, she was working on a book about clothes in literature, which is the subject of this talk. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Born in the Mekong Delta, Hoa Nguyen was raised and educated in the United States and has lived in Canada since 2011. Hoa has had the privilege to work and teach all over the United States and Canada and is the author of several books including As Long As Trees Last, Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008, and Violet Energy Ingots which received a 2017 Griffin Prize nomination. Her fifth book of poems, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure was named a finalist for a Kingsley Tufts Award, National Book Award and the Governor General's Literary Award and has garnered additional support from The Poetry Foundation, Library Journal, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her writing has been promoted by such outlets as Granta, PEN American Center, CBC Books, Boston Review, The Best Canadian Poetry series, Poetry, The Walrus, and Pleiades. In 2019, she was nominated for a Neustadt International Prize for Literature, a prestigious international literary award often compared with the Nobel Prize in Literature. Read more about Hao here. You can follow Hoa on Twitter, here, on Instagram, here, and on Facebook, here. As always, we would love to hear from you. Have you tried sending me a message on the Eh Poetry Podcast page yet? Either way, we would like to reward you for checking out these episode notes with a special limited time coupon for 15% off your next purchase of Mary's Brigadeiro's amazing chocolate, simply use the code "ehpoetrypodcast" on the checkout page of your order. If you are a poet in Canada and are interested in hearing your poem on Eh Poetry, please feel free to send me an email: jason.e.coombs[at]gmail[dot]com Eh Poetry Podcast Music by ComaStudio from Pixabay --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ehpoetrypodcast/message

Critical reception Rushdie has had a string of commercially successful and critically acclaimed novels. His works have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, in 1981 for Midnight's Children, 1983 for Shame, 1988 for The Satanic Verses, 1995 for The Moor's Last Sigh, and in 2019 for Quichotte. In 1981, he was awarded the prize. His 2005 novel Shalimar the Clown received the prestigious Hutch Crossword Book Award, and, in the UK, was a finalist for the Whitbread Book Awards. It was shortlisted for the 2007 International Dublin Literary Award. Rushdie's works have spawned 30 book-length studies and over 700 articles on his writing. Academic and other activities Rushdie has mentored younger Indian (and ethnic-Indian) writers, influenced an entire generation of Indo-Anglian writers, and is an influential writer in postcolonial literature in general. He opposed the British government's introduction of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, something he writes about in his contribution to Free Expression Is No Offence, a collection of essays by several writers, published by Penguin in November 2005. Rushdie was the President of PEN American Center from 2004 to 2006 and founder of the PEN World Voices Festival. In 2007, he began a five-year term as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where he has also deposited his archives. In May 2008 he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2014, he taught a seminar on British Literature and served as the 2015 keynote speaker In September 2015, he joined the New York University Journalism Faculty as a Distinguished Writer in Residence. Rushdie is a member of the advisory board of The Lunchbox Fund, a non-profit organisation that provides daily meals to students of township schools in Soweto of South Africa. He is also a member of the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America, an advocacy group representing the interests of atheistic and humanistic Americans in Washington, D.C., and a patron of Humanists UK (formerly the British Humanist Association). He is also a Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism. In November 2010 he became a founding patron of Ralston College, a new liberal arts college that has adopted as its motto a Latin translation of a phrase ("free speech is life itself") from an address he gave at Columbia University in 1991 to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of the first amendment to the US Constitution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Rushdie

Laurie's moxie is expressed through her writing. Through this creative medium, she has explored herself and others, tackling challenges, embracing change, understanding setbacks, and making sense of universal themes in the human experience. In this episode, Laurie shares her writer's journey and provides insight into the creative process and the discipline required to make writing a career. It's a deep dive into a writer's brand of moxie.Laurie, the author of six books, cultivated her curiosity about the lives of American women, digging for truth and understanding before examining her own life. Drawing extensively on her journals, most recently, she has written a memoir, Word for Word: A Writer's Life. Written with courage and grace, writing it was an extraordinary inner journey--full of memories, discoveries, and insights--which enriched her understanding of the past and the present.She began writing as a young girl, almost always about what really happened rather than what she imagined. Her first job after college was working for The Providence Journal, where she got her first professional bylines for writing feature stories. After moving to New York City, she worked for Newsweek before writing her first book, the best-selling Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe.  She moved to a village in New England and wrote a biography about a sculptor, Louise Nevelson: A Passionate Life. Then she began to write books drawing on her own experiences--like passing up motherhood, passionately tending a flower garden, and attending a traditional girls' boarding school in Connecticut.She is a member of a long-standing academic seminar for biographers and memoirists, Women Writing Women's Lives, in New York City. Other memberships include the Authors Guild and PEN American Center. She has been awarded residencies at writers' colonies, including at the MacDowell Colony.For more information about Laurie, visit her website and this episode's show notes on the Main Street Moxie website.This episode is sponsored by Oblong Books and Elyse Harney Real Estate.

Subscribe to Quotomania on Simplecast or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!Salman Rushdie is the author of fourteen novels—including Luka and the Fire of Life; Grimus; Midnight's Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker); Shame; The Satanic Verses; Haroun and the Sea of Stories; The Moor's Last Sigh; The Ground Beneath Her Feet; Fury; Shalimar the Clown; The Enchantress of Florence; Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights; The Golden House; and Quichotte—and one collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published four works of non-fiction—Joseph Anton, The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, and Step Across This Line—and coedited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.From https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/26491/salman-rushdie. For more information about Salman Rushdie:Previously on The Quarantine Tapes:Salman Rushdie on The Quarantine Tapes: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-168-salman-rushdieAyad Akhtar about Rushdie, at 24:40: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-156-ayad-akhtar“Salman Rushdie on the wonders of paradox”: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/salman-rushdie-on-the-wonders-of-paradox-5sfd5jdfc29Languages of Truth: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/616882/languages-of-truth-by-salman-rushdie/“Salman Rushdie, the Art of Fiction No. 186”: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5531/the-art-of-fiction-no-186-salman-rushdie

Rick Moody was born in New York City. He attended Brown and Columbia universities. His first novel, Garden State, was the winner of the 1991 Editor's Choice Award from the Pushcart Press and was published in 1992. The Ice Storm was published in May 1994 by Little, Brown and Company. Foreign editions have been published in twenty countries. (A film version, directed by Ang Lee, was released by Fox Searchlight in 1997, and won best screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival.) In 1998, Moody received the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In May of 2002, Little, Brown and Company issued The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions, which was a winner of the NAMI/Ken Book Award, and the PEN Martha Albrand prize for excellence in the memoir. In 2019, he published The Long Accomplishment, A Memoir of Hope and Struggle in Matrimony. His novel The Diviners From 2005 to 2006 he was secretary of the PEN American Center. He also co-founded the Young Lions Book Award at the New York Public Library. He teaches at Brown University.· rickmoodybooks.com · www.creativeprocess.info

Rick Moody was born in New York City. He attended Brown and Columbia universities. His first novel, Garden State, was the winner of the 1991 Editor's Choice Award from the Pushcart Press and was published in 1992. The Ice Storm was published in May 1994 by Little, Brown and Company. Foreign editions have been published in twenty countries. (A film version, directed by Ang Lee, was released by Fox Searchlight in 1997, and won best screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival.) In 1998, Moody received the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In May of 2002, Little, Brown and Company issued The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions, which was a winner of the NAMI/Ken Book Award, and the PEN Martha Albrand prize for excellence in the memoir. In 2019, he published The Long Accomplishment, A Memoir of Hope and Struggle in Matrimony. His novel The Diviners From 2005 to 2006 he was secretary of the PEN American Center. He also co-founded the Young Lions Book Award at the New York Public Library. He teaches at Brown University.· rickmoodybooks.com · www.creativeprocess.info

Rick Moody was born in New York City. He attended Brown and Columbia universities. His first novel, Garden State, was the winner of the 1991 Editor's Choice Award from the Pushcart Press and was published in 1992. The Ice Storm was published in May 1994 by Little, Brown and Company. Foreign editions have been published in twenty countries. (A film version, directed by Ang Lee, was released by Fox Searchlight in 1997, and won best screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival.) In 1998, Moody received the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In May of 2002, Little, Brown and Company issued The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions, which was a winner of the NAMI/Ken Book Award, and the PEN Martha Albrand prize for excellence in the memoir. In 2019, he published The Long Accomplishment, A Memoir of Hope and Struggle in Matrimony. His novel The Diviners From 2005 to 2006 he was secretary of the PEN American Center. He also co-founded the Young Lions Book Award at the New York Public Library. He teaches at Brown University.· rickmoodybooks.com · www.creativeprocess.info

In the 1960s, three-quarters of American children lived in families with two first-time married, heterosexual parents. Today fewer than half do. The conventional family has broken into a multitude of perfect families, including gay families, multiparent families, adoptive families, foster families, families built through assisted reproduction, single parent-headed families, and child-free families. What does it mean to be an “ideal family” in America today? And for families learning to deal with their exceptional children, to what extent should parents accept their children for who they are, and to what extent should they help them become their best selves? In his books New Family Values and Far from the Tree, the Professor of Clinical Medical Psychology and bestselling author Andrew Solomon explores the startling proposition that diversity is what unites us all. The experience of difference within families is universal; these stories are everyone's stories. And themes of generosity, acceptance, and tolerance expand our definition of what it is to be human. Each year the cathedral chooses a theme for inspiration and reflection, and in 2021 our theme is healing. Join Dean Malcolm Clemens Young for a conversation with Solomon about how to make peace with difference across generations.   About the guest Andrew Solomon, Ph.D., is a writer and lecturer on politics, culture and psychology; winner of the National Book Award; and an activist in LGBTQ rights, mental health, and the arts. He is Professor of Clinical Medical Psychology (in Psychiatry) at Columbia University Medical Center, Lecturer in Psychiatry at Yale University, and a former President of PEN American Center. He is the author of the best-selling Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity (2012), Far and Away: How Travel Can Change the World) (2016) and New Family Values (2018) among others.

In this episode of the 18Forty Podcast, we talk to Andrew Solomon - a Pulitzer Prize finalist - about intergenerational divergence, as well as his book, Far from the Tree, which was in some ways the very inspiration for this topic. Andrew’s experience with intergenerational divergence began as a child, when his gay identity imbued him with a sense of outsiderness that is evident in his work. His book, Far from the Tree, deals with this topic explicitly, exploring the impact of things like deafness on a family’s ability to relate to and provide for their child. Andrew’s distinction between vertical and horizontal identities, referring to the ways in which the child relates to and is distinct from their family, is profound and underlies much of the message 18Forty has tried to convey this month. Among the topics covered, we discuss the following: What can lead a child to seek support outside of their family? How can parents best prepare for the possibility that their child will be different than they imagined? In such a situation, how can parents best help their child? In the event that they are unable to provide the support the child needs, how should the parents proceed? Tune in to hear Andrew Solomon give his thoughts on coping with generational differences.References:Far from the Tree by Andrew SolomonWelcome to Holland by Emily Perl KingsleyThe Noonday Demon by Andrew SolomonSound of Metal on AmazonFar and Away by Andrew SolomonAn Epistle to the Hebrews by Emma LazarusTorn in Two by Rozsika ParkerFor more, visit https://18forty.org/topics/divergence.Andrew Solomon, Ph.D., is a writer and lecturer on politics, culture and psychology; winner of the National Book Award; and an activist in LGBTQ rights, mental health, and the arts. He is Professor of Clinical Medical Psychology (in Psychiatry) at Columbia University Medical Center, Lecturer in Psychiatry at Yale University, and a former President of PEN American Center.

In this episode of "Keen On", Andrew is joined by Tom Bergreen, the author of "In Search of a Kingdom", to discuss the life and travels of Francis Drake, as well as his relationship with Queen Elizabeth I and the lasting impact that Drake's exploits had on modern British history. Laurence Bergreen is an award-winning biographer, historian, and chronicler of exploration. His books have been translated into over 25 languages worldwide. In May 2017, Roaring Brook Press, a division of Macmillan, published his first Young Adult book, Magellan: Over the Edge of the World, an adaptation of his international bestseller. His most recent adult book is Casanova: The World of a Seductive Genius, published by Simon & Schuster in 2016. His previous book was Columbus: The Four Voyages, a New York Times bestseller, published by Viking in 2011, and Penguin trade paperback in September 2012. It is a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, BOMC2, the History Book Club, and the Military Book Club, and is a New York Times Book Review “Editors Choice.” In October 2007, Alfred A. Knopf published Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu, a groundbreaking biography of the iconic traveler. His previous work, Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe, was published by William Morrow in October 2003. A New York Times “Notable Book” for 2003, it is also in development as a motion picture and is now in its 33rd printing. This book was awarded the Medalla de Honor by the Asociación de Alcades de V Centenario (spain), 2010. In 1997, Bantam Doubleday Dell published Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life, a comprehensive biography drawing on unpublished manuscripts and exclusive interviews with Armstrong colleagues and friends. It appeared on many “Best Books of 1997” lists, including those of the San Francisco Chronicle, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Publishers Weekly, and has been published in Germany, Finland, and Great Britain. In 1994, Simon & Schuster published his definitive Capone: The Man and the Era. A Book-of-the-Month Club selection, it has been published in numerous foreign languages, was optioned by Miramax, and was a New York Times “Notable Book.” His biography, As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin, appeared in 1990. This book won the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award and the ASCAP-Deems Taylor award and received front-page reviews in major American and British newspapers and appeared on bestseller lists; it was also a New York Times “Notable Book” for 1990. His previous biography, James Agee: A Life, was also critically acclaimed and was a New York Times “Notable Book” for 1984. His first book was Look Now, Pay Later: The Rise of Network Broadcasting, published by Doubleday in 1980. He has written for many national publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Newsweek, The Chicago Tribune, and Military History Quarterly. He has taught at the New School for Social Research, Kenyon College and served as Assistant to the President of the Paley Center for Media in New York. He has served as a judge for the National Book Awards and the PEN/ Albrand Nonfiction Award. A frequent lecturer at major universities and symposiums, and, on occasion, aboard cruise ships, he has served as a Featured Historian for the History Channel. Mr. Bergreen graduated from Harvard University in 1972. He is a member of PEN American Center, The Explorers Club, the Authors Guild, and the Board of Trustees of the New York Society Library. He lives in New York City and is represented by Dan Conaway of Writers House. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this special bonus episode, we remember our friend and advocate for women in prison, Sue Ellen Allen, who died this week on February 24, 2021. In the latter part of her life, she became an internationally renowned advocate for incarcerated women and girls. She championed banning the box, promoting reentry, and protecting the integrity and dignity of people tethered to the criminal justice system. She was a reformer. She spoke with tremendous grace and power about being formerly incarcerated. Take a listen as we revisit Sue Ellen Allen’s final interview—a wide-ranging and intimate conversation with her long-time friend, Michele Goodwin. Rest in power, Sue Ellen. Sue Ellen Allen is the founder and executive director of Reinventing Reentry. A University of Texas grad, educator, community leader, former inmate at Arizona State Prison and current activist, she found her purpose from serving time in prison. She is the author of The Slumber Party from Hell, a memoir about prison life, and the recipient of the Dawson Prize in Memoir in the 2009 Prison Writing Contest for PEN American Center.Rate and review “On the Issues with Michele Goodwin" to let us know what you think of the show! Let’s show the power of independent feminist media.Check out this episode’s landing page at MsMagazine.com for a full transcript, links to articles referenced in this episode, further reading and ways to take action.Tips, suggestions, pitches? Get in touch with us at ontheissues@msmagazine.com. Support the show (http://msmagazine.com)

Women make up the fastest growing incarcerated population in the U.S—yet, politicians and the media frequently frame incarceration as an issue that affects only boys and men. Why is so little attention paid to women and mass incarceration? What does the failure to include women in the analysis on mass incarceration mean for communities, families and the women themselves? What are the unique challenges women and girls face behind bars and after they are released? Helping us sort out these questions and more are very special guests: Sue Ellen Allen, founder and executive director of Reinventing Reentry. A University of Texas grad, educator, community leader, former inmate at Arizona State Prison and current activist, she found her purpose from serving time in prison. She is the author of The Slumber Party from Hell, a memoir about prison life, and the recipient of the Dawson Prize in Memoir in the 2009 Prison Writing Contest for PEN American Center. Piper Kerman, author of the memoir Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison. The book has been adapted by Jenji Kohan into an Emmy Award-winning original series for Netflix, which ran for seven seasons. Piper collaborates with nonprofits, philanthropies and other organizations working in the public interest and serves on the board of directors of the Women’s Prison Association and the advisory boards of the PEN America Writing For Justice Fellowship, InsideOUT Writers, Healing Broken Circles and JustLeadershipUSA. Kamilah Newton, a writer for Yahoo Lifestyle and associate producer for MAKERS. Her background is in advocacy, activism and social justice reform. She has been featured on CNN, Career Contessa, Miss Grass and Hello Beautiful among other publications. Most recently, she participated in a virtual reality piece directed by Al Jazeera called Still Here, which will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this year. Rate and review “On the Issues with Michele Goodwin" to let us know what you think of the show! Let’s show the power of independent feminist media.Check out this episode’s landing page at MsMagazine.com for a full transcript, links to articles referenced in this episode, further reading and ways to take action.Support the show (http://msmagazine.com)

Rick Moody was born in New York City. He attended Brown and Columbia universities. His first novel, Garden State, was the winner of the 1991 Editor's Choice Award from the Pushcart Press and was published in 1992. The Ice Storm was published in May 1994 by Little, Brown and Company. Foreign editions have been published in twenty countries. (A film version, directed by Ang Lee, was released by Fox Searchlight in 1997, and won best screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival.) In 1998, Moody received the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In May of 2002, Little, Brown and Company issued The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions, which was a winner of the NAMI/Ken Book Award, and the PEN Martha Albrand prize for excellence in the memoir. In 2019, he published The Long Accomplishment, A Memoir of Hope and Struggle in Matrimony. His novel The Diviners From 2005 to 2006 he was secretary of the PEN American Center. He also co-founded the Young Lions Book Award at the New York Public Library. He teaches at Brown University.· rickmoodybooks.com · www.creativeprocess.info

Todos amamos las historias post-nucleares. Si no fuera así, ¿por qué se habrían escrito tantas? Hay algo fascinante en la desaparición de todas esas personas, en el vagar por un mundo despoblado, rapiñando latas de cerdo con alubias, defendiendo a la propia familia de los merodeadores. Sin duda es horrible, sin duda nos apenamos por toda esa gente muerta. Pero en algún lugar oculto de nuestra mente pensamos que estaría bien sobrevivir, comenzar de nuevo. En secreto, sabemos que sobreviviremos. Son los demás los que morirán. De eso tratan las historias post-nucleares.📘 Octavia E. Butler fue autora de una docena de novelas y varios relatos cortos… un gigante en este campo que murió antes de tiempo. Fue la primera escritora de ciencia ficción que recibió la prestigiosa beca genius de la MacArthur Foundation, y también recibió un premio al mérito aún en vida por su obra producida desde el PEN American Center. En el campo de la ficción especulativa también fue reconocida su obra tras ganar dos Hugo, dos Nebula y un Locus… y su novela corta Bloodchild obtuvo los tres galardones. Murió en febrero de 2006. La obra de Butler explora con frecuencia el tema de la vida tras el Apocalipsis. Aunque ninguna de sus novelas podría ser clasificada primariamente como post-apocalíptica, sus tres series en varios volúmenes (la trilogía Xenogenesis , las series Patternist , y la bilogía Parable ) tienen lugar en un entorno post-apocalíptico, convirtiéndola en una importante autora de este subgénero, aunque sus libros no pertenezcan realmente a él.🖋️ Este relato, que ganó el premio Hugo en 1984, fue escrito por Butler tras presenciar una sangrienta y absurda pelea mientras iba en el autobús. En su colección de relatos, Bloodchild and Other Stories , Butler afirmaba que al presenciar la pelea se preguntó «si la especie humana evolucionaría lo suficiente para comunicarse sin emplear un tipo u otro de puños». Y entonces, se le ocurrió la primera línea de este relato. ⤵️ Estoy en Twitter @hleidas, no te pierdas nada!!------------------------------------------------ Todos los sábados un relato para ti. Ciencia Ficción, Fantasía, Terror, Ficción Sonora.----------------------------------------------------------- Gracias por tu comentario y tu escucha, hasta el próximo audio.💌 Escucha el episodio completo en la app de iVoox, o descubre todo el catálogo de iVoox Originals

Andrew was bullied as a boy for being gay. As an adult, he suffered from severe depression. Andrew realized that to survive and thrive he must create meaning of his experience, recreate his narrative, and build his identity to incorporate his experience and grow from them. In this episode, Andrew shares his insight on this process of creating meaning, as well as his research into communities that openly support depressed members of the community and how other communities are neglected in getting clinical help. the tension between acceptance and curing, and the ultimate power of compassion.Bio: Andrew Solomon, Ph.D., is a writer and lecturer on politics, culture and psychology; winner of the National Book Award; and an activist in LGBTQ rights, mental health, and the arts. He is Professor of Clinical Medical Psychology (in Psychiatry) at Columbia University Medical Center, and a former President of PEN American Center. He is the author of seven books including the best-selling Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity and his award-winning memoir The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. Links: http://andrewsolomon.com

Author, journalist, and adventurer James Nestor joins us to talk about the amazing ability of humans to freedive. Most are shocked to learn this is even something humans are capable of. Through his research and interest in freediving, James learned how freediving is allowing the closer study of sperm whales and how they communicate which is seriously fascinating. Could we be capable of cracking the communication code of the largest mammal on the planet and proving humans are not the only ones with advanced intelligence and speech? We spend millions searching for intelligent life in the cosmos when it could very well be on our own planet, existing just below us. ----- James Nestor is a San Francisco-based journalist who has written for Outside magazine, Men’s Journal, Scientific American, Dwell magazine, National Public Radio, The New York Times, The Atlantic, the San Francisco Chronicle magazine, and others. His science/adventure book, “DEEP: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves” was released in 2014 and was an Amazon Best Science Book of 2014, BBC Book of the Week, BuzzFeed 19 Best Nonfiction Book of 2014, New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. In 2015, the PEN American Center awarded “DEEP” as one of the five best books of Literary Sports Writing. On April 18, 2016, The New York Times and Within released “The Click Effect,” a Virtual Reality experience about the efforts of two freelance freediving researchers trying to decode the secret language of dolphins and whales. Nestor wrote “The Click Effect” and shared co-creator credits with director Sandy Smolan. “The Click Effect” was produced by The New York Times, The Sundance Institute, and The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and was an official selection of Sundance Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, Seattle Film Festival, and more. As of December 2016, “The Click Effect” has been downloaded more than one million times. Nestor’s new book, “Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art” will be released through Riverhead/Penguin Random House on May 26, 2020. It explores how the human species has lost the ability to breathe properly over the past several hundred thousand years and is now suffering from a laundry list of maladies — snoring, sleep apnea, asthma, autoimmune disease – because of it. Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of Sao Paulo. Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head.

Lesley Ewing is back with the Shorewords Podcast, ASPN's books and literature pod, and she sits down with James Nestor, author of DEEP: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves. DEEP was an Amazon Best Science Book of 2014, BBC Book of the Week, BuzzFeed 19 Best Nonfiction Book of 2014, ArtForum Top 10 Book of 2014, New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. In 2015, the PEN American Center recognized DEEPas one of the five best books of Literary Sports Writing. The book follows clans of extreme athletes, adventurers, and scientists as they plumb the limits of the ocean's depths and uncover weird and wondrous new discoveries that, in many cases, redefine our understanding of the ocean and ourselves. It has been translated into German, Chinese, Italian, Polish; editions in French and Portuguese will be released in 2018. Nestor is also a journalist who has written for Outside Magazine, Men's Journal, National Public Radio, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Scientific American, Surfer's Journal, Dwell Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, and more. Catch this incredible discussion with one of the most insightful and original writers in the realm. It's a blast.

This is the 84th installment of the Dreams of Consciousness podcast. I recorded this interview back in September of 2015, a few weeks after the raid at Rumah Api (wherein over 100 people were arrested for being at a punk rock show the night before the Bersih 4.0 rally). Originally my plan was to transcribe the interview, post it, and share it with my friends at the PEN American Center. It was a great idea, except for the part that required me to sit still for hours while transcribing the interview. Still, it was an important moment for the local scene that I felt needed to be documented. The raid made me realize how fragile the Malaysian scene really is, and how it could be taken away from us at any time. As critical as I often am, it really is the only part of my time here that seems worthwhile. I don't want it to disappear. My thanks to Emi, Man, and Wan Hazril for speaking to me; and to you for listening. TRACKLIST: Sarjan Hassan - Live Free taken from the Tape Rules compilation WWHIRR - Modern Hypocrisy (Rough) taken from the album Modern Hypocrisy Dung - Yr Righteous Fukk! taken from 2012/2013 demos Crimescene - Transgression taken from the PECHAH 7" Daighila - Every clouds has a silver lining taken from the RE-DEFINING DIY Split Tape OSMANTIKOS - Security Society taken from the EP Keep Fighting Oppressive Conditions

Diane Les Becquets is the author of THE LAST WOMAN IN THE FOREST (March, 2019) and BREAKING WILD, both published by Berkley, Penguin Random House. BREAKING WILD, an Indie Next Pick and a national bestseller, received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist. It was also the recipient of the Colorado Book Award in Fiction, the New Hampshire Outstanding Work of Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Reading the West Book Award in Fiction. Les Becquets is also the author of three young adult novels: THE STONES OF MOURNING CREEK (Kirkus starred review); LOVE, CAJUN STYLE (Booklist starred review) and SEASON OF ICE, the latter being the recipient of a Pen American Fellowship. Other awards she has received include a BCCB Blue Ribbon Award, the Maine Lupine Award, ALA Best Book of the Year, Foreward Reviews Gold Winner Book of the Year, Volunteer State Book Award Selection, and Garden State Book Award Finalist. A former professor of English, Les Becquets has served as a judge for the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and the Maine Arts Commission, and has taught writing workshops at venues across the country, including the University of Mississippi, Auburn University, the New Hampshire Writers' Project, the Department of Forestry, Writers Conference at Ocean Park, Writers in Paradise, the Arkansas Literary Festival, the Telluride Arts District, and at shelters for Katrina victims. She is a volunteer at Back in the Saddle Equine Therapy Center and an avid outdoors woman, enjoying archery, bicycling, snowshoeing, swimming, and backpacking with her dog, Izzy. Before moving to New Hampshire, where she now resides with her husband, she lived in a small ranching town in Northwestern Colorado for almost fourteen years, raising her three sons. Diane Les Becquets is a member of the New Hampshire Writers' Project, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and the Pen American Center.

Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky joined poet Monica Youn to share recent work and exchange ideas, along with moderator Elizabeth Bradfield, local poet and naturalist on June 9, 2018 in the Hawthorne Barn. Robert Pinsky‘s recent book is At the Foundling Hospital, nominated for the Nation Book Critics Award in poetry. As Poet Laureate of the United States (1997-2000), he founded the Favorite Poem Project, featuring the videos at www.favoritepoem.org. His best-selling translation The Inferno of Dante received the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Harold Morton Landon translation prize. His other awards include the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Korean Manhae Prize, the Italian Premio Capri and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pen American Center. He performs with pianist Laurence Hobgood on CDs PoemJazz and House Hour, from Circumstantial Productions. Monica Youn is the author of Blackacre (Graywolf Press 2016), which was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award, longlisted for the National Book Award, and named one of the best poetry books of 2016 by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and BuzzFeed. Her previous book Ignatz(Four Way Books 2010) was a finalist for the National Book Award. A former lawyer, she currently teaches at Princeton University and in the Sarah Lawrence and Columbia University MFA programs. Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of the poetry collections Once Removed, Approaching Ice, Interpretive Work and the forthcoming Toward Antarctica. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, West Branch, Orion and her awards include a Stegner Fellowship and the Audre Lorde Prize. Founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press, she lives on Cape Cod, works as a naturalist locally as well as on ships around the globe, and teaches creative writing at Brandeis University.

The 2018 Enoch Pratt Free Library / Little Patuxent Review Poetry Contest winner shares the stage with a contest runner-up, two contest judges, and a Little Patuxent Review contributor.Born in India and raised in Dubai, Poetry Contest winner Kanak (pronounced Kuh-nuck) Gupta is currently trying her luck in Baltimore, as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University. She likes reading, writing, and living stories (and poetry).Runner-up Rachel E. Hicks’s poetry has appeared in Saint Katherine Review, Welter, Off the Coast, Gulf Stream Magazine, and other journals. She also writes essays and fiction, and works as a freelance copy editor. An associate editor at Del Sol Press, she also served as the 2018 Poetry Out Loud Regional Coordinator for the Maryland State Arts Council. After living in eight countries -- most recently China -- she now resides in Baltimore. Her career has included teaching (high school English and homeschool) and volunteering with an international relief and development agency. Find her online at rachelehicks.com.Steven Leyva, Little Patuxent Review editor, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 2 Bridges Review, Fledgling Rag, The Light Ekphrastic, Cobalt Review, and Prairie Schooner. He is a Cave Canem fellow, the winner of the 2012 Cobalt Review Poetry Prize, and author of the chapbook Low Parish. Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an assistant professor in the School of Communication Design.Chelsea Lemon Fetzer, a Little Patuxent Review Poetry Reader, holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA in Fiction from Syracuse University.  Her fiction and poetry have appeared in journals such as Callaloo, Tin House, Mississippi Review, and The Minnesota Review.  A selection of her poetry received the honor of finalist for the 2015 Venture Award and her debut pamphlet (chapbook) is in the works.  Her nonfiction essay “Speck” was published in The Beiging of America: Personal Narratives About Being Mixed Race in the 21st Century, an anthology published by 2Leaf Press in 2017. Committed to bringing the literary arts to communities of all means, Fetzer has led writing workshops through The Create Collective, PEN American Center's "Readers & Writers" Program, the Black Writers Conference at Medgar Evers College, the New York Writers Coalition, The University of Baltimore, and independently.  Fetzer currently lives in Baltimore where she is mothering, working on her first novel, and serving on the board of CityLit Project. Wallace Lane, a Little Patuxent Review contributor, is a poet and author from Baltimore, Maryland. He received his MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts from the University of Baltimore in May 2017. His poetry has appeared in Skelter, The Avenue, Welter, and Rise Up and is forthcoming in several other literary journals. Wallace also works as a teacher with Baltimore City Public Schools.Runner-up Nancy Kang will not be able to attend this event, but you can learn more about her here.Watch a video of Kanak Gupta reading her winning poem, "Death in Dubai."Read "Chengdu Pastoral" by Rachel E. Hicks.Read "'I know you're never gonna wake up'" and "Supremacy" by Steven Leyva.Read "flare" by Chelsea Lemon Fetzer.Watch a video of Wallace Lane reading from Jordan Year.Read "Yellow Woman" by Nancy Kang.Recorded On: Tuesday, August 21, 2018

Introduced by Sonia Sanchez. Walter Mosley is best known for the Easy Rawlins mystery series featuring the hard-boiled detective and World War II vet living in L.A.'s Watts neighborhood. His diverse body of work includes science fiction, story collections, a graphic novel, plays, erotica, a young adult novel, and other mystery volumes. His many honors include an O. Henry Award, two NAACP Image Awards, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a Grammy award, and the PEN American Center's Lifetime Achievement Award. Down the River Unto the Sea tells the story of a wrongly convicted former NYPD investigator seeking justice and redemption. Watch the video here. (recorded 3/6/2018)

Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, Peter Mack is the pen name of Isiko Cooks, CEO of Peter Mack Presents, LLC. He has been writing groundbreaking novels for over ten years, including his recent release, FILTHY, based on a true story and winner of a PEN American Center book award. Peter Mack writes with desire, motivation and dedication in pursuit of peace, power and position. To live rich and die ready is the path to it all. Peter Mack strives to represent the best of creative fiction by offering dynamic situations with relatable characters. All of his novels are based on true events that readers find themselves living long after the last page is read. Isiko Cooks is the father of Jelani Malik, whose mother, Lisa Nichols, is herself an accomplished author and motivational speaker.

This week on Talk Nation Radio, a new book called King of Spies: The Dark Reign of America's Spy Master in Korea by Blaine Harden. Blaine Harden served as The Washington Post's bureau chief in East Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa. He also worked as national correspondent for the New York Times and has contributed to The Economist, PBS Frontline, Time, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot; Escape From Camp 14, an international bestseller that has been published in 28 languages; A River Lost; and Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent, which won a Pen American Center citation for a first book of non-fiction.

Writer, editor, and witch Lisa Marie Basile comes to talk about the magazine she founded, witchcraft, writing, her new novel, death, ritual, and feminism. The time William S. Burroughs tried to curse a coffee shop also comes up. You can learn more about Lisa Marie Basile and her magazine Luna Luna: http://www.lunalunamagazine.com/ https://twitter.com/lisamariebasile http://www.lisambasile.com/ Lisa Marie Basile is an editor, writer and poet living in NYC. She is the founding editor-in-chief of Luna Luna Magazine and the author of APOCRYPHAL (Noctuary Press, 2014), as well as a few chapbooks. Her book, NYMPHOLEPSY (co-authored with poet Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein), was a finalist in the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards and will be published in 2018. She is working on her first novel, due out with CLASH Books in 2019. Her poetry and other work can be or will be seen in PANK, Spork, The Atlas Review, Queen Mobs Teahouse, Grimoire, the Tin House blog, PEN American Center, and more.

Grace Cavalieri's forthcoming book is Other Voices, Other Lives (Oct 2017.) She's the founder/producer of Public Radio’s “The Poet and the Poem” now from the Library of Congress.  She celebrates 40 years on-air and is a CPB silver medalist. She co-founded Pacifica’s newest station, WPFW-FM, in 1977. Then was Asst. Director of Children’s Programming for PBS; and after, headed Children’s Programming for NEH. In 2015 Grace received the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award from the Washington Independent Review of Books, where she’s monthly columnist and poetry reviewer. She holds the Association Writing Program’s “George Garrett Award” for Service to Literature.  She’s twice the recipient of the Allen Ginsberg Award and, holds the Bordighera Poetry Prize, a Paterson Poetry Award, The Columbia Award, and “The National Commission on Working Women.” A recent poetry book Water on the Sun, is on the Pen American Center's "Best Books" list. Her latest play is “Calico and Lennie” (Theater for the New City, NYC, 2017.) Her latest book is With (2016, Somondoco Press) about her recent loss, husband (former Naval Aviator) Metal Sculptor, Kenneth Flynn. They have four children, four grandchildren and one great grandchild.  Since 2007, Richard Harteis has worked as the president of the William Meredith Foundation, an organization dedicated to preserving the legacy of the late US Poet Laureate and his partner of 36 years. Harteis served for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tunisia, worked as a physician assistant in North Africa and Asia and spent a Fulbright year as writer-in-residence at the American University in Bulgaria. For his work in the culture, he was accorded Bulgarian citizenship by decree of the President and Parliament in 1996. Harteis has taught literature and creative writing at a number of institutions over the years including The Catholic University of America, Creighton University, Mt. Vernon College, and Connecticut College. For two years he directed the PEN Syndicated Fiction Project and created the NPR radio program The Sound of Writing serving as writer/director and host. He has received honors and awards for his work including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the D.C. Commission on the Arts, and the Ford Foundation. Reunion is his fifteenth book.Recorded On: Thursday, September 14, 2017

Join us for a witchy lit convo talking about living in NYC & being a poet & Lana Del Rey & selfies & trying to have it all. Lisa Marie Basile is an editor, writer and poet living in NYC. She is the founding editor-in-chief of Luna Luna Magazine and the author of APOCRYPHAL (Noctuary Press, 2014), as well as a few chapbooks: Andalucia (Poetry Society of New York), War/Lock(Hyacinth Girl Press), and Triste (Dancing Girl Press). Her book NYMPHOLEPSY (co-authored with poet Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein), was a finalist in the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards. Her poetry and other work can be or will be seen in PANK, Spork, The Atlas Review, Tarpaulin Sky, the Tin House blog, The Huffington Post, The Rumpus, Rogue Agent, Moonsick Magazine, Best American Poetry, Spoon River Poetry Review, PEN American Center and the Ampersand Review, among others. 

Writing under the pen name of Peter Mack, literary genius, Isiko Cooks celebrates women and their desire, motivation and dedication in the pursuit for peace, power and position in life and love. Isiko Cooks encourages the discovery of a woman's self worth through his writing. The sex, violence, money and murder detailed in his novels merely serve as a hook for a larger conversation about life and its reward in the struggle. Coining the hash tag #LiveRichDieReady, he’s become a master of the urban narrative. After being arrested for drug trafficking and distribution in 2005, Peter Mack penned his first novel, HoodSweet (Seaburn Publishing Group, 2007) while in solitary confinement. He has gone on to author and publish 15 novels which span popular genres while canvassing the tapestry of his upbringing and exploring the dynamics of the relationships between men and women. Isiko counts Walter Mosley as one of his early influences for his topical narratives and varied styles of writing. Mr. Cooks is the 2015 PEN American Center book prize winner for his autobiographical novel, FILTHY. Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, Cooks worked as a former 2nd grade teacher and corporate professional. He is a father of one which he co-parents with international motivational speaker and author, Lisa Nichols. Despite his incarceration, Isiko has maintained a strong and tender bond with his son, Jelani, speaking with him weekly.  

Wednesday Reading Series Paolo Javier is the author of six chapbooks and four full-length collections of poetry, including Court of the Dragon (Nightboat Books, 2015). The former Queens Poet Laureate, he publishes 2ndavepoetry.com, and curates Queens Poet Lore, a roving series set across the borough. The (self-)translating author of more than twenty books, Nathanaël writes in English and French. Her recent works include an essay on untranslatability, Sotto l'immagine (2014), the bilingual score, Sisyphus, Outdone. Theatres of the Catastrophal (2012) and the book of polylingual talks, Asclepias: The Milkweeds (2015). The essay of correspondence, Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book) (2009) was first published in French as L'absence au lieu (2006). Nathanaël's work has been translated into Basque, Greek, Slovene, Spanish (Mexico), with book-length publications in Bulgarian and Portuguese (Brazil), including the imminent Cadernos do meio, after a cycle of French carnets, following their English-language iteration, The Middle Notebookes (2015). Nathanaël's extrinsic translations include works by Édouard Glissant, Catherine Mavrikakis, Danielle Collobert, Hervé Guibert and Hilda Hilst (the latter in collaboration with Rachel Gontijo Araújo). She has also translated a number of poets from the Americas into French, including Trish Salah, John Keene and Rachel Gontijo Araújo. The recipient of the Prix Alain- Grandbois, for …s'arrête? Je, Nathanaël's translation of Murder by Danielle Collobert was a finalist for a Best Translated Book Award. Her translation of The Mausoleum of Lovers by Hervé Guibert was recognized by fellowships from the PEN American Center and the Centre National du Livre de France. Having permanently relinquished her prior names (Nathalie and Stephens), Nathanaël lives in Chicago.

We are at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York at The Met Breuer, where the exhibition "Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible", is a springboard to explore the notion of things unfinished or incomplete. The concept of a work of art that is unfinished, the so called 'non finito' style, has been with us since the Renaissance. But it has taken on new meaning in modern art of the 20th and 21st Century. So how should we respond to a work which is unfinished whether it is a painting, a book, a piece of music, a film or a building? And, how does the idea of ‘unfinished' translate into an ever-changing historical and political context? Presenter Bridget Kendall is joined by Andrea Bayer, Jayne Wrightsman, Curator in The Met's Department of European Paintings and co-curator of "Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible" at The Met Breuer; Negin Farsad, a celebrated stand-up comedian, actor and film-maker of Iranian heritage; Kerry James Marshall, the internationally renowned American artist whose work will be the subject of a major exhibition at The Met Breuer this October 2016; Andrew Solomon, professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia University in New York, and an award-winning writer who is also president of PEN American Center. (Photo: The Met Breuer in New York. Credit: Ed Lederman)

Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, Peter Mack is the pen name of Isiko Cooks, CEO of Peter Mack Presents, LLC. He has been writing groundbreaking novels for over ten years, including his recent release, FILTHY, based on a true story and winner of a PEN American Center book award. Peter Mack writes with desire, motivation and dedication in pursuit of peace, power and position. To live rich and die ready is the path to it all.

What separates a good teacher from a great one? How are digital technologies challenging traditional teaching methods? And are there distinctions between top-notch science instructors and their counterparts in humanities or social science? Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky, Weisskopf Professor of Physics Alan Guth and MIT biology professor Hazel Sive–all honored teachers–will explore these issues with Literature professor and Communications Forum director emeritus David Thorburn. David Thorburn is an MIT Literature professor, director emeritus of the Communications Forum, and a past winner of MIT’s MacVicar award for exemplary contributions to undergraduate teaching. Robert Pinsky is a three-term US Poet Laureate. He is a recipient of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the PEN American Center. Alan Guth is MIT’s Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics, pioneer of the inflationary model of the universe and recipient of the MacVicar award for exemplary contributions to undergraduate teaching. Hazel Sive is a biology professor at MIT, a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and a recipient of the MacVicar award for exemplary contributions to undergraduate teaching.

Please join us for the roundtable discussion, Beyond Lolita: Literary Writers on Sex and Sexuality. The proceeds will benefit PEN American Center and its Writers' Emergency Fund. Joining us will be Robin Rinaldi, Wendy C. Ortiz, J. Ryan Stradal, and Julia Fierro. Moderated by Anna March, these events will be taking place in Boston, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland this coming November and January. Cheryl Strayed, Audrey Niffenegger, Rachel DeWoskin, Cathi Hanauer, Megan Stielstra, Benoit Denizet-Lewis, Elissa Schappell, Daniel Jones, Luis Urrea, Ashley Ford, Lidia Yuknavitch and many others are participating around the country. The events will be free but attendees will be encouraged to join and support PEN, and an additional $500 will be donated to PEN for each event to support its emergency fund for writers.Robin Rinaldi is a journalist and author of The Wild Oats Project: One Woman's Midlife Quest for Passion at Any Cost. Before she left her day job to write a book, Robin was executive editor at 7x7, a San Francisco city magazine. Prior to that she wrote an award-winning food column for Philadelphia Weekly. Robin has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Oprah Magazine, Yoga Journal, and others. Robin grew up in a small Pennsylvania town but has spent most of her life in California. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she writes, reads, cooks peasant-style meals, does a lot of yoga, listens to a lot of music, watches a lot of premium cable dramas, and plays with her scruffy little terrier named Tengo (after the protagonist in 1Q84).Wendy C. Ortiz is a Los Angeles native. She is the author of Excavation: A Memoir, Hollywood Notebook, and the forthcoming Bruja. Wendy holds an M.A. in Clinical Psychology and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. A Writer-in-Residence at Hedgebrook in 2007 and 2009, Wendy is also co-founder and curator of the Rhapsodomancy Reading Series. She has read and given talks at California State University Chico, University of California Santa Barbara, University of California Riverside's Low-Residency M.F.A. Program, and Lock Haven University. Wendy has been an adjunct faculty in creative writing and has also facilitated creative writing workshops with Los Angeles youth in juvenile detention facilities. While living in Olympia, Washington, she was a library worker, editor and publisher of 4th Street, a handbound literary journal, and an occasional mudwrestler. Wendy received a B.A. in Liberal Arts from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where she lived for eight years before returning to Los Angeles.She is at work on a book based on her Modern Love essay published in The New York Times, a short story collection, and other projects. Wendy is represented by Bridget Wagner Matzie of Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency. She parents and works as a registered marriage and family therapist intern in Los Angeles.J. Ryan Stradal’s first novel, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, was published by Viking / Pamela Dorman Books on July 28th, 2015, and reached the New York Times Hardcover Best Seller list at #19 on its third week of release. In November 2014, the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society awarded Kitchens of the Great Midwest first prize in their annual novel competition. In September 2015, Warner Bros. optioned the film/TV rights. A selection of his short stories, compiled under the title "Nerd & Whore are Friends," was a 2013 finalist in the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Competition. His short fiction has also been anthologized, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and named a finalist for the James Kirkwood Literary Prize. He works as the fiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown  and  as an editor-at-large at Unnamed Press in Los Angeles.  He was also editor of the 2014 California Prose Directory, an anthology of writing about California by California writers, published by Outpost19. He volunteers for & is on the advisory board of the educational non-profit 826LA. He also helps make products and materials for their affiliated store, the Echo Park Time Travel Mart. He likes books, wine, sports, root beer, and peas. Julia Fierro is the author of Cutting Teeth, which The New Yorker called “a comically energetic debut novel.” Her next novel, The Gypsy Moth Summer, will be published in 2017. Julia founded The Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop in 2002, and it has since grown into a creative home to over 2,500 writers. She lives in Brooklyn and Los Angeles.

In the News: Black atheists of Chicago, “Tea with Mr. Darwin,” Nonbelief-Relief, and National Day of Prayer protested with Dan’s song, “Get Off Your Knees and Get To Work.” We interview author Andrew Solomon (“Far From The Tree”), president of the PEN American Center, who this week awarded satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo its “Free Expression Courage Award."

This week's show features historian and journalist Jon Wiener, who was among hundreds of writers who signed a letter of protest against The PEN American Center's recognition of Charlie Hebdo with the 2015 Freedom of Expression Courage Award on Tuesday night. Also, Tom interviews Laila Lalami, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Moor's Account, and Tom, Laurie and Seth talk about the value of literary prizes in general.

Andrew Solomon is an author and one of five parents with four children in three states. Here he talks about finding peace with being gay, after a long and tortured period, becoming a father and discovering the greatest joy in his extended family. Andrew Solomon, Ph.D., is a writer and lecturer on politics, culture and psychology; winner of the National Book Award; and an activist in LGBT rights, mental health, and the arts. He is a Professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia University Medical Center, and President of PEN American Center. 5x15 brings together five outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each. Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

Why should you care about the right to free expression? Ask someone whose book was banned. (Published: August 28, 2013)

"The Fall 2008 Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College features Francine Prose, author of more than 20 books of fiction and nonfiction. Her works include the novels Blue Angel (nominated for a National Book Award) and A Changed Man (winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize), Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them, a book on gluttony, and another on the life of the painter Caravaggio. She has written books for children and young adults, and contributes to The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper's, where she is a contributing editor. A film of her novel Household Saints was released in 1993. Her latest novel, Goldengrove, was published in September 2008. The recipient of numerous grants and awards, she has taught at The New School, Harvard, the Iowa Writers Workshop, and as a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bard College. Prose is currently president of PEN American Center. Roslyn Bernstein, Director of the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program, makes the opening remarks. Jeffrey M. Peck, Dean of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, makes the welcoming remarks. John Brenkman, Distinguished Professor of English, introduces the speaker. The event takes place on October 21, 2008, at the Newman Conference Center, 7th floor."

"The Fall 2008 Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College features Francine Prose, author of more than 20 books of fiction and nonfiction. Her works include the novels Blue Angel (nominated for a National Book Award) and A Changed Man (winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize), Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them, a book on gluttony, and another on the life of the painter Caravaggio. She has written books for children and young adults, and contributes to The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper’s, where she is a contributing editor. A film of her novel Household Saints was released in 1993. Her latest novel, Goldengrove, was published in September 2008. The recipient of numerous grants and awards, she has taught at The New School, Harvard, the Iowa Writers Workshop, and as a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bard College. Prose is currently president of PEN American Center. Roslyn Bernstein, Director of the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program, makes the opening remarks. Jeffrey M. Peck, Dean of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, makes the welcoming remarks. John Brenkman, Distinguished Professor of English, introduces the speaker. The event takes place on October 21, 2008, at the Newman Conference Center, 7th floor."

Appiah discusses the work of the PEN American Center, a writer-centered organization whose goal is to defend literacy and human rights around the globe. PEN’s programs reach out to the world and into diverse communities within this country. They promote writing and literature at every level and are founded on the belief that free expression is an essential component of every healthy society.

Stop and Frisk, Jim Crow By Another Name? Join The Gist of Freedom Sunday June 10th at 8pm~ Listen to Constitutional Law Professor, Gloria Browne-Marshall as she lectures on Stop and Frisk and gives us an update on Zimmerman's latest arrest and Trayvon's Road to Justice.  On May 16, a federal judge granted class Action Lawsuit (certification in a lawsuit) challenging the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk practices as unconstitutional and racially discriminatory.  The ruling will allow all persons unlawfully stopped and frisked since January 2005 to be plaintiffs in the lawsuit. The plaintiffs are represented by the Center of Constitutional Rights (CCR), and the law firms of Beldock, Levine, and Hoffman and Covington & Burling, LLP.  Gloria J. Browne-Marshall received the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Justice Award for her work with civil rights and women's justice issues.  A former civil rights attorney, Browne-Marshall is an Associate Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY) teaching Constitutional Law, Race and the Law, and Evidence. She is a member of the Gender Studies faculty of John Jay College as well as a member of the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States. A free-lance journalist and an award-winning playwright, her most recent play is titled "Diversity" and examines marriage choices.  She is a member of the Dramatist Guild, Mystery Writers of America, National Association of Black Journalists, and PEN American Center. Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is the Founder/Director of The Law and Policy Group, Inc., 

The 2012 PEN World Voices Festival ended with a talk about censorship at the Cooper Union by novelist Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses). After the speech, the PEN festival founder had a conversation with writer Gary Shteyngart (The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Super Sad True Love Story). Peter Godwin, the president of PEN American Center, and Laszlo Jakab Orsos, PEN World Voices Director, introduced Rushdie before he gave the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture that traditionally wraps up the festival.   Listen to and download Rushdie's 17-minute talk by clicking the audio link above. Bon Mots: Rushdie on censorship: "If writing is Thing, then censorship is No-Thing. And as King Lear told Cordelia, 'Nothing will come of nothing.' Think again. Censorship changes the subject. It introduces a more tedious subject and creates a more boring world." Rushdie on liberty: "Liberty is the air we breathe...in a part of the world where, imperfect as the supply is, it is, nevertheless, freely available—at least to those of us who are not black youngsters wearing hoodies in Miami, and broadly breathable—unless, of course, we’re women in red states trying to make free choices about our own bodies." Rushdie on originality: "Great art, or, let’s just say, more modestly, original art is never created in the safe middle ground, but always at the edge ... Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes, disrespects sacred cows or other such entities. It can be shocking, or ugly, or, to use that catch-all term so beloved of the tabloid press, controversial." Watch a video of Rushdie speaking at the talk.

Join constistutional law professor Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, on The Gist of Freedom as she lectures on George Zimmerman's arrest and Trayvon's road to Justice.  Tune in Tuesday April 24th at 8:30 pm for Part II with Professor Brown and attorney actvist, Michael Coard. Gloria Browne-Marshalll received the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Justice Award for her work with civil rights and women's justice issues. Her forthcoming book is titled "Black Women: Salem Witch Trials to Civil Rights Activists - A Legal History."   A former civil rights attorney, Browne-Marshall is an Associate Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY) teaching Constitutional Law, Race and the Law, and Evidence. She is a member of the Gender Studies faculty of John Jay College as well as a member of the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States.   Active nationally and internationally, Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is a  free-lance journalist and an award-winning playwright, her most recent play is titled "Diversity" and examines marriage choices. Her other plays include the full-length drama on Alzheimer's disease "My Juilliard," one act plays "Jeanine" and "Waverly Place" as well as the full-length murder mystery "Killing Me Softly." She is a member of the Dramatist Guild, Mystery Writers of America, National Association of Black Journalists, and PEN American Center.   Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is the Founder/Director of The Law and Policy Group, Inc., a nonprofit organization. The Law and Policy Group, Inc. 

While diplomats and academics met at the General Assembly of the United Nations on the East Side of Midtown Manhattan, the Asia Society hosted "Voices from Burma," an event honoring the stories of Burmese refugees and political prisoners. Actor and playwright Wallace Shawn, actor Kathryn Grody, writers Amitav Ghosh and Deborah Eisenberg, and former political prisoner Law Eh Soe read from Nowhere to Be Home: Narratives from Survivors of Burma's Military Regime. Veteran journalist, educator, and current Director of the Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations Orville Schell opened and closed the event.   The stories in Nowhere to Be Home are first-hand accounts of refugees who have survived displacement within and across Burma's borders, who have witnessed the destruction of thousands of ethnic minority villages, and who witnessed their home become a country with one of the largest fleets of child soldiers in the world. The book is the seventh title in the McSweeney's non-profit Voice of Witness publication series, and executive director Mimi Lok helped curate the event. “It’s impossible not to be engaged and moved by these stories,” Lok said. “Hopefully people will be compelled to encourage the United Nations to make sure the work is being done to investigate these abuses.” The event concluded with a prayer by U Agga, a Theravada Buddhist monk and Burmese refugee. Facing the packed auditorium and joined by monks U Gawsita and U Pinyar Zawta, U Agga repeated three times: “May there be no deception of one another. May love and kindness envelope the world and may there be peace on earth.” The issue of human rights in Burma has been a long-standing debate at the U.N. Sixteen member states currently support a U.N.-led Commission of Inquiry to investigate crimes against humanity in Burma, including the United States, Australia, Canada, France and the United Kingdom. Others argue open political and economic engagement with Burma is a better strategy. Below listen to Amitov Ghosh and Deborah Eisenberg read the oral histories of Aye Maung and Fatima. Closing remarks by Orville Schell. Burmese refugee U Agga ends with his oral history narrative and Theravada Buddist prayer. Bon Mots: The words of survivor Khin Lwe on the complex beauty of Burma, read by actor Kathryn Grody: "One day when I was a child, I was playing with some fruit. My mom had never let me eat this fruit before, because she was worried I would choke on the seeds. But I accidentally broke the fruit open and I saw it was ripe, so I tasted it. It tasted so sweet. The situation in Burma is like that. The people don’t even know what the fruit is, but when they start to learn and become concerned about the issues in Burma, then they will start to understand how sweet the fruit can be." Survivor Hla Min remembers life before abandoning his post in the Burmese military. His words as read by Wallace Shawn: "While we were on the front line, our officers ordered us to completely destroy the local people. They told us that even the children had to be killed if we saw them. I saw soldiers abducting young girls, dragging them from their houses and raping them. At the time, I felt that those girls were like my sisters." Executive director of Voice of Witness Mimi Lok on publishing first-person narratives: "We approach the architecture of an oral history narrative in the same way we might approach a short story—but underpinned by our responsibility to journalistic integrity. So we make sure everything is fact checked and accurate." The Asia Society event was sponsored by the Pen American Center, the Open Society Foundations, Voice of Witness and the Magnum Foundation. Video work by Magnum photographers Chien Chi Chang and Lu Nan with James Mackay were presented throughout the evening. To watch a video from the event by Chien-Chi Chang, click here, or a video by Takaaki Okada, click here.

"World leaders need to answer to artists." This was the rallying cry of Natalia Kaliada, artistic director of the Belarus Free Theatre, at a benefit for the embattled dissident troupe organized by the PEN American Center that was held at Le Poisson Rouge on Wednesday. She added “politicians do not have steps; they have just words.” Belarus Free Theatre is the little theater company that could, and the media have been quick to pick up on its story. A few weeks ago the members of the company were either in jail or in hiding, the targets of a crackdown by Belarus’ government after recent election protests. Last week, they were in town for the Under the Radar festival at the Public Theater, but have used the trip as an opportunity to carry their battle into the public eye. The company spearheaded (not a lightly chosen verb) a protest rally at the U.N. Wednesday morning, and the PEN event was originally intended to celebrate the willingness of artists to join together to protest injustice, said Kaliada. But early that day, the group had received word, in the form of a terse text message, that the husband of one of the actors had been arrested. So it was a taut, tearful, and defiant face that they turned to an audience of supporters at Le Poisson Rouge’s cozy downstairs space. In times of trouble, we are counseled to find something to cheer about, noted Sir Tom Stoppard, the Czech-born playwright who hosted the evening’s event. For Stoppard, it was clearly the simple, unbelievable fact of the company’s existence. For the company, it may have been the warm support of the literary and theatrical community. For the event, put on at short notice (a more elaborate affair had been staged at The Public earlier in the week), resembled nothing so much as an old-fashioned jazz rent party, like the kind musicians used to put together when one of their number needed help meeting the bills.  In this case, the “session” started with some heartrending music by violinist and vocalist Iva Bittova, followed by readings of poems by imprisoned Belarussian poet Vladimir Neklyaev. Then, a scene from Stoppard’s disturbing “Cries From The Heart,” read by Billy Crudup and Margaret Colin, showed a government official training a lawyer in the delicate art of replacing all the words we recognize as dealing with torture, intimidation, cruelty, or repression with words for foods.  (“I want you to say,” taunts the chillingly reasonable official, “it’s not torture, it’s pizza.”)  Authors E.L. Doctorow and Don DeLillo read passages from books ("City of God," "Mao II") that touched on cruelty, war, or degradation. The evening concluded with a fierce performance by the Free Theater of the third part of a trilogy on life in Belarus called “Numbers.” Five actors moved through a rapid succession of scenes that enacted a range of damning statistics. The three cheerful men muttering hesitantly and throwing their arms up in confusion?  “70% of Belarussians have trouble expressing the idea of democracy.” The woman who gives birth to, and then pops, a balloon? The country has a high rate of abortion, stillbirths, and childhood diseases. The buckets full of empty shoes: “over 1,200 people vanish in Belarus each year.” As the demoralizing, often shocking, statistics succeeded one another on the video screen, the audience ought to have been left numb with despair on behalf of a country so defined by pain, loss, violence, and neglect. Instead, the performance—filled with a fierce energy and supple beauty—brought catharsis and epiphany, if the cheers and wild applause were anything to go by.  In Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” the work’s underlying nihilism is subverted by the sheer beauty of the language and the poignant souls of its characters. If you can write of the human condition, “Astride the grave and a difficult birth,” then you have already triumphed over death. In the case of the Belarus Free Theater, if your company’s brilliant work inspires others to stand for you and with you, in some sense no dictatorship can ever fully succeed. Click the link above to hear for selections from the benefit. (Unfortunately, much of “Numbers” was mimed and so is not featured here). Bon mots "We truly believe that the world leaders need to answer to artists...politicians do not have steps; they just have words."—Natalia Kaliada "If you believe in God's Judgement...then certain bacteria living in the anus of a particularly ancient hatchet fish at the bottom of the ocean are the recycled and fully sentient souls of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot."—E.L. Doctorow in "City of God." "I want you to say, it's not torture, it's pizza."—Tom Stoppard in "Cries from the Heart."

Film and music critic Hardy has been a juror at Sundance and other film festivals around the country.Ernest Hardy writes about film and music from his home base of Los Angeles. His criticism has appeared in numerous national publications and in reference books. He is the winner of the 2006 ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for excellence and the 2007 "Beyond Margins" award from the PEN American Center. A Sundance Fellow and a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, he has sat as a juror for the Sundance Film Festival and other film festivals around the country.His critically acclaimed book Blood Beats, Vol. I was published by RedBone Press in 2006; Blood Beats: Vol II is due out later this year.Recorded On: Wednesday, February 27, 2008