Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on June 10, 2009.
Eduardo Galeano, born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1940 is an essayist, journalist, historian, and activist. Galeano's books include the trilogy Memory of Fire; The Book of Embraces; We Say No; and Walking Words.
Galeano, who received the first Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom, has said, "I'm trying to create a synthesis of all different ways of expressing life and reality…I tried to find a way of recounting history so that the reader would feel that it was happening right now, just around the corner—this immediacy, this intensity, which is the beauty and the reality of history."
Galeano's Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (Espejos: una historia casi universal) will be published in English by Nation Books in the spring of 2009.
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Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on May 20, 2009.
Marge Piercy "is not just an author, she's a cultural touchstone. Few writers in modern memory have sustained her passion, and skill, for creating stories of consequence," says The Boston Globe. An accomplished poet and novelist, her books include, The Moon is Always Female, My Mother's Body, and Woman on the Edge of Time. Piercy's latest collection, The Crooked Inheritance, features poems on the U.S. occupation of Iraq , health care, "the poet as a young nerd", hospital hallways, and mangoes at the beginning of a new love affair. A popular public speaker, she has been a featured writer on Bill Moyers' PBS Specials, Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion, Terri Gross' Fresh Air, and many radio programs nationwide.
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Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on March 11, 2009.
Amiri Baraka, (née Everett LeRoi Jones) author of over 40 books of essays, poems, drama, and music history and criticism, is a poet icon and revolutionary political activist who has recited poetry and lectured on cultural and political issues extensively in the USA, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. With influences on his work ranging from musical artists such as John Coltrane and Thelonius Monk, to the Cuban Revolution, Malcolm X, and world revolutionary movements, Baraka is renowned as the founder of the Black Arts Movement in Harlem in the 1960s. His recent books include Somebody Blew Up America and Other Poems and Tales of the Out & The Gone.
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Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on February 11, 2009.
Eamon Grennan has said, "As far as I'm concerned, poetry is about elegy. Every poem is a memory of some kind, a celebratory elegy. Poems are like shells. Something is gone and that's why you write." His volumes of poetry include So It Goes, Still Life with Waterfall, The Quick of It, and the recently published Matter of Fact. He writes in both the ancient tradition of mournful remembrance in attention to the natural world and the modern impulse to seize and preserve the moment. Grennan returns to his native Ireland yearly for "voice transfusions" from his home in New York, where he teaches at Vassar College.
Pattiann Rogers is considered one of America's finest contemporary poets, writing densely detailed, thickly textured poems describing the natural world and one's place in it that are informed by a broad knowledge of science. In the tradition of Emerson, Whitman, and Oliver, Rogers's wise and complex poems read like a series of witty but deeply felt explorations of the physical world and the presence of the divine.
She is the author of fourteen books of poetry including her newest collection Wayfare. Firekeeper: Selected Poems (2005), Generations (2004), and Song of the World Becoming: New and Collected Poems, 1981-2001 are some of her others. Her awards include two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Award, the Tietjens Prize and the Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine, and four Pushcart Prizes. She lives with her husband, a retired geophysicist, in Colorado.
Major Jackson is the author of two collections of poetry, Hoops and Leaving Saturn, winner of the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. "Jackson knows the truth of black magic. It is a magic as simple as the belief in humanity that subverts racism, or the esoteric and mystical magic of making jazz, the music of hope and love," said poet Aafa Weaver.
Michael Silverblatt is the host of the literary talk show Bookworm, which he created in 1989 for KCRW 89.9 FM in Santa Monica. He has participated in numerous Readings & Conversations programs, interviewing Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, Salman Rushdie, and A.S. Byatt, among others. Bookworm airs locally on KSFR 101.1FM every Sunday at 1:30pm.
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Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on January 21, 2009.
Junot Díaz is the author of Drown, a collection of ten stories that move from the barrios of the Dominican Republic to the struggling urban communities of New Jersey. His recent novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, described by The New York Times as "a wondrous, not-so-brief first novel that is so original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets Star Trek meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West." His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, and four volumes of Best American Short Stories.
On language and writing he has said, "I have a sense of the Dominican…it's not much of a theory, more a collection of words, a dot dot dash code that I use to […] decipher a larger code, which is the Dominican experience, the Dominican diasporic experience, and the American experience, all hooked together. I always lived in a situation of simultaneity." His many awards and honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Award for best novel of 2007, and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Díaz is the fiction editor at the Boston Review and an associate professor in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on November 19, 2008.
Jonathan Schell is the author of 13 books, the most recent being The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of the Nuclear Danger. He was a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine from 1967 to 1987 and is now a visiting lecturer at Yale University. Schell's other books include The Fate of the Earth, which first appeared in three parts in The New Yorker, became a bestseller and was hailed by The New York Times as "an event of profound historical moment," and The Unconquerable World, which the Times called "the most impressive argument ever made that there exists a viable and desirable alternative to a continued reliance on war."
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Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on October 29, 2008.
Lester Brown, whom The Washington Post called "one of the world's most influential thinkers," has authored or co-authored over 50 books, thoroughly investigating a variety of issues around global agriculture and economic and environmental sustainability. His most recent book is Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum called it, "A great book which should wake up humankind!" In 2001 Brown founded the Earth Policy Institute to provide a vision and a road map for achieving an environmentally sustainable economy. He is the recipient of several awards including a MacArthur Fellowship and the 1994 Blue Planet Prize for his "exceptional contributions to solving global environmental problems."
Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on October 15, 2008.
Tony Hoagland explores the spiritual bereftness of American satisfaction, creating poetry that is scathing, funny, rich, and refreshing. The American Academy of Arts and Letters praised his work, stating, "Tony Hoagland's imagination ranges thrillingly across manners, morals, sexual doings, kinds of speech both lyrical and candid, intimate as well as wild." His books include Sweet Ruin and What Narcissism Means to Me, as well as a collection of essays about poetry called Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft. Hoagland received the 2005 Mark Twain Award, given by the Poetry Foundation in recognition of his contribution to humor in American poetry.
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Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on September 24, 2008.
Isabel Allende was born in Peru and raised in Chile. Her acclaimed first novel, The House of Spirits, was called "Nothing short of astonishing," by the San Francisco Chronicle. She is the author of eight novels, most recently Inés of My Soul, mapping the early years of the conquest of the Americas through the experiences of Inés Suárez, a seamstress condemned to a life of toil, who flees Spain to seek adventure in the New World. Allende has also written a collection of stories, four memoirs, and a trilogy of children's novels. Her most recent memoir, The Sum of Our Days, recalls the last 13 years of family life in the wake of her daughter's tragic death.
Allende uses feminist terms to describe her history of the California Gold Rush. Her writing has always been a stand against patriarchy, her characters the people marginalized by American history: women, Hispanics, Native Americans and Asians.
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Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on June 4, 2008.
Annie Proulx's books include the novels The Shipping News and That Old Ace in the Hole; and the story collections Close Range: Wyoming Stories; and its sequel, Bad Dirt. Through Proulx's knowledge of the history of Wyoming and the West, her interest in landscape and place, and her sympathy for the sheer will it takes to survive, we see the seared heart of the rugged people who live in our least populated state. Her novel The Shipping News and her short story "Brokeback Mountain" have both been adapted into celebrated feature films. The Los Angeles Times says Proulx, "has a wry sense of humor rather like Mark Twain's."
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