Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on 22 February, 2012.

Brian Jones is a teacher, actor and activist. His commentary and writings have appeared on MSNBC and GritTV and in The Huffington Post and the International Socialist Review. Jones is featured in the new film The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman. He also has lent his voice to several audiobooks, including Wallace Shawn’s Essays and Noam Chomsky’s Hopes and Prospects. He lives in New York City and teaches in the public school system there.

Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922 - January 27, 2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. His classic book, A People’s History of the United States, has been called “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those who have been exploited politically and economically and whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories.”

Zinn grew up in Brooklyn in a working-class, immigrant household. At 18 he became a shipyard worker and then flew bomber missions during World War II. These experiences helped shape his opposition to war and his passion for history. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a PhD in history from Columbia, he taught at Spelman College, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by the college for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988.

Zinn was the author of many books, including an autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train and Passionate Declarations: Essays on War and Justice. He received a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction and the Eugene V. Debs award for his writing and political activism.

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Length: 1:15:51; Size: 36.5 MB

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Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on February 15, 2012.

Michael Ondaatje, poet, novelist, and noted editor and filmmaker, was born in Sri Lanka in 1943, spent his teenage years in England, and moved to Canada in 1962 where he graduated from the University of Toronto and then Queen’s University, Ontario. He taught English Literature at York University, Toronto, from 1971 to 1990. While mostly known and admired as a novelist, due in part to the worldwide success of The English Patient that was awarded the Booker Prize in 1992 and was later made into the Academy Award-winning film, Ondaatje first won critical acclaim as a poet. Numerous collections include The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-Handed Poems (1970), There’s a Trick With a Knife I’m Learning To Do: Poems, 1963-1978 (1979), both of which won the Canadian Governor General’s award; The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems (1989); and Handwriting (1998).

Ondaatje has written six novels including Coming Through the Slaughter (1976) which won the Canada First Novel Award, Anil’s Ghost (2000) and Divisadero (2007) both of which received the Governor General’s Award, and his recently released The Cat’s Table (2011). Recognition of his work has been universal and includes the Giller Prize, (Canada), the Prix Medicis, (France), the Kiriyama Prize, (U.S.), The Irish Times International Fiction Prize, (Ireland), and the Booker Prize, (England).

With his wife, Linda Spalding, and others, Ondaatje founded and continues to co-edit Brick, A Literary Journal, and he has been poetry editor of Toronto’s independent small press, Coach House Books, for over forty years.

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Length: 1:31:14; Size: 44 MB

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Recorded at the James A. Little Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on January 24, 2012.

David Shirk received his PhD in political science at the University of California, San Diego, and joined the Political Science Department at the University of San Diego in 2003. He serves as the director of the Trans-Border Institute (TBI) and conducts research and publishes on topics related to Mexican politics, U.S.-Mexican relations, and law enforcement and security issues along the U.S.-Mexican border.

Shirk is the principal investigator for TBI’s Justice in Mexico Project, a bi-national research initiative focused on criminal justice and the rule of law in Mexico. He has been a fellow at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies and at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Recent publications include Shared Responsibility: U.S.-Mexico Policy Options for Combatting Organized Crime (2010); Police and Public Security in Mexico (2009); Contemporary Mexican Politics (2008); Reforming the Administration of Justice in Mexico (2007) and Mexico’s New Politics: The PAN and Democratic Change (2005).

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Length: 1:40:26; Size: 48.3 MB

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Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on January 18, 2012.

John Sayles, born in upstate New York in 1950, has a storied career as an independent filmmaker, screenwriter, and writer of fiction and nonfiction. He has written and directed many films including Return of the Secaucus Seven, Lone Star, Passion Fish, The Secret of Roan Inish, and Matewan.  Writing scripts for others—he has a long list of credits as screenwriter—has generated the funds to support the production of most of his own films.

Sayles’ first novel, Pride of the Bimbos, was published in 1975 and was followed in 1977 by the novel Union Dues and a story collection, The Anarchist’s Collection, in 1979. Los Gusanos, his sweeping tale of Cuban expatriates in Miami, followed in 1991, and his most recent novel, A Moment in the Sun, was released this year by McSweeney’s and clocks in at 900+ pages. The novel is “a brutal picaresque complete with melancholy whores, militaristic robber barons, desperate cut-throat prospectors, and puppet soldiers…” according to William Vollmann, that looks at the United States discovering its own size and wealth and taking giant first steps at imperialism in the late 19th century.

Besides numerous awards and nominations for his film work and screenwriting including a Lifetime Achievement Award from The Writer’s Guild of America, literary recognition for Sayles has come in the form of an O. Henry Award for his first published story and nominations for both a National Book Award and the National Book Critics Award for the novel Union Dues. In 1985 he received a MacArthur Fellowship for his work in both film and writing.

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Length: 1:19:11; Size: 39 MB

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Recorded at the James A. Little Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on December 6, 2011

Norman Finkelstein received his doctorate in 1988 from the Department of Politics at Princeton University. For many years he taught political theory and has written and spoken publicly on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Finkelstein is the author of six books that have been translated into more than 40 foreign editions: This Time We Went Too Far: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion; Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History; The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering; Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict; A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (with Ruth Bettina Birn); and The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Years. Finkelstein has also published several pamphlets, most recently, Goldstone Recants. He is currently working on a new book entitled Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Love Affair with Israel is Coming to an End.

Finkelstein currently writes and lectures. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Length: 2:08:14; Size: 61.6 MB

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Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on November 16, 2011.

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. In 1980 he immigrated to the United States with his mother and sister, joining his father, who had fled the communist revolution in Ethiopia two years before.  A graduate of Georgetown University and of Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction, Mengestu has written for many publications. He recently reported stories for Harper’s, The Wall Street Journal, and Jane magazine, where he profiled a young woman who was kidnapped and forced to become a soldier in the brutal war in Uganda, and for Rolling Stone on the tragedy in Darfur.

His first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (titled Children of the Revolution in Britain), won The Guardian First Book Award in the U.K. and the Prix Femina Étranger in France, and earned him a place as one of the U.S. National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” for 2007. The novel has been translated into numerous other languages. He is also the recipient of a 2006 fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Lannan Fiction Fellowship in 2007. Mengestu’s second novel, How to Read the Air, was released in October 2010 and earlier that year Mengestu was selected as one of The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” writers of 2010.

He lives with his wife and two young children in Paris.

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Length: 1:17:42; Size: 37.3 MB

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Recorded at the James A. Little Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on September 13, 2011.

Tariq Ali is a writer and filmmaker. Exiled from Pakistan in the 1960s for his activism against the military dictatorship, Ali has gained a reputation as one of today’s most forceful political thinkers, speaking out consistently against imperialism, religious fundamentalism and the Anglo-American “war on terror.” He has written more than 20 books on world history and politics, including Pirates of the Caribbean; Bush in Babylon; The Clash of Fundamentalisms and his latest, The Obama Syndrome—Surrender at Home, War Abroad. He has also authored five novels in his Islam Quintet series and writes scripts for the stage and screen.

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Length: 1:43:42; Size: 47.6 MB

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Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on September 13, 2011.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie burst onto the literary scene with her remarkable debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, hailed by critics as "one of the best novels to come out of Africa in years" (Baltimore Sun), with "prose as lush as the Nigerian landscape that it powerfully evokes" (The Boston Globe).

Her award-winning second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, illuminates a seminal moment in African history: Biafra's struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s.

"We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers. She is fearless, or she would not have taken on the intimidating horror of Nigeria's civil war. Adichie came almost fully made." Chinua Achebe

"An immense achievement. As well as freshly re-creating this nightmarish chapter in her country's history, she writes about the slow process by which love, if strong enough, may overcome."  The Observer (London)

In her most recent book, That Thing Around Your Neck, Adichie turns her penetrating eye on not only Nigeria but America, in 12 stories that explore the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977 and grew up in the university town of Nsukka, where she briefly studied medicine and pharmacy. She then moved to the United States to attend college, graduating from Eastern Connecticut State and later earning Masters degrees in creative writing from Johns Hopkins and in African Studies from Yale University. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, The New Yorker, and The Iowa Review among other journals.

She divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.

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Length: 1:10:32; Size: 37.5 MB

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Recorded at the James A. Little Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on September 13, 2011.

Richard Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and currently a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School in New York. He also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in New York City. He has a PhD in economics from Yale University, a history degree from Harvard University, and an economics degree from Stanford University. He has authored or co-authored 10 books, over 50 scholarly articles, and 75 popular articles.

Wolff's recent work has concentrated on analyzing the causes and alternative solutions to the current global economic crisis. His documentary film on that crisis, Capitalism Hits the Fan, can be previewed at www.capitalismhitsthefan.com. He has also published Capitalism Hits the Fan: the Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It.

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Length: 1:36:34; Size: 53.3 MB

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Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on May 18, 2011.

Joe Sacco is one of the world's foremost cartoonists and is widely hailed as the creator of war-reportage comics. He is the author of Palestine, which received the American Book Award, and Safe Area Goražde, which was named a New York Times Notable Book. After completing a degree in journalism at the University of Oregon, Sacco set out to crisscross the globe, producing comics along the way. In the early 1990s he spent two months in Israel and the occupied territories, traveling and taking notes. When he returned to the U.S. he recorded what he had witnessed and heard during his Middle Eastern travels, combining the techniques of eyewitness reportage with the medium of comics storytelling to explore this complex, emotionally weighted situation. Palestine, the resulting book, set new standards for the use of the comic book as a documentary medium, and was the first nonfiction graphic novel to invite serious comparison with Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus. In 2000, Sacco finished Safe Area Goražde: The War In Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995: a 240-page exploration of a small Muslim enclave in Bosnia called Goražde. Sacco's most recent major work is a book about the southern Gaza Strip, called Footnotes in Gaza, published by Metropolitan Books in early 2010. Joe Sacco is a citizen of Malta and currently resides in Portland, Oregon.

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Length: 1:21:22; Size: 28 MB

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