Recorded in Los Angeles, CA on October 8, 1996.

Sandra Cisneros, the author of The House on Mango Street and Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, is a poet and fiction writer. Self described as a "terrorist," "anarchist," and a "Chicana feminist," she has said, "I’m trying to write stories that haven’t been told. I feel like a cartographer. I’m determined to fill a literary void." Ms. Cisneros, who received a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, read the story "Eleven" and from work in progress on October 8, 1996. Ms. Cisernos was interviewed by poet, novelist, and essayist Dorothy Allison, whose books include Cavedweller and Bastard out of Carolina.

You may learn more about this and other events on the Lannan website.

Right click here to download.
Length: 30:40; Size: 352 MB

Recorded in Los Angeles, CA on October 8, 1996.

Sandra Cisneros, the author of The House on Mango Street and Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, is a poet and fiction writer. Self described as a "terrorist," "anarchist," and a "Chicana feminist," she has said, "I’m trying to write stories that haven’t been told. I feel like a cartographer. I’m determined to fill a literary void." Ms. Cisneros, who received a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, read the story "Eleven" and from work in progress on October 8, 1996. Ms. Cisernos was interviewed by poet, novelist, and essayist Dorothy Allison, whose books include Cavedweller and Bastard out of Carolina.

You may learn more about this and other events on the Lannan website.

Right click here to download.
Length: 26:50; Size: 307 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on January 20, 2010.

Nicholson Baker's recently published Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization is a chronological juxtaposition of discrete moments from 1892 to December 31, 1941, based on accounts from contemporary reports of Britain's terror campaign of repeatedly bombing German cities even before the London blitz. Known for his original approach to a subject, his first novel, The Mezzanine, recounts one afternoon in the life of a man riding an escalator on his way to buy a shoelace and his second, Room Temperature, is about a father feeding a bottle to his six-month-old daughter, while Vox transcribes a long telephone conversation between two people who meet over a phone-sex call-in line.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website.

Right click here to download.
Length: 1:34:17; Size: 21.72 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on November 18, 2009.

"In dancing with the enemy one follows his steps even if counting under one's breath."
A native of South Africa, Breyten Breytenbach is a distinguished painter, activist, and prolific writer, and is widely recognized as the finest living Afrikaner poet. A staunch opponent of apartheid, he was a political prisoner in South Africa, serving solitary confinement from 1975 to 1982. While incarcerated, Breytenbach wrote 'n Seisoen in die Paradys (A Season in Paradise). Other prison writings were published as Mouroir: Bespieelende notas van 'n roman (Mouroir: Mirrornotes of a Novel) in 1983 followed by The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist. His latest book, All One Horse, is a haunting journey through Breytenbach's kaleidoscopic imagination, combining philosophical and lyrical prose pieces with his surreal paintings. The title is a nod to Chuang Tzu, and the writings are infused with glimmers of Eastern thought. His article "Obamandela" appeared in Harper's earlier this year. Today Professor Breytenbach is a Global Distinguished Professor of creative writing at New York University.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website

Right click here to download.
Length: 0:57:15; Size: 13.2 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on May 22, 2002.

Scott Russell Sanders is the author of the nonfiction books The Force of Spirit, The Country of Language, Hunting for Hope, Writing from the Center, and Staying Put.

His fiction works include The Invisible Company, The Engineer of Beasts, Bad Man Ballad, and Terrarium.

Mr. Sanders, who teaches at Indiana University, in Bloomington, received the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction in 1995.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website

Right click here to download.
Length: 1:25:33; Size: 30.4 MB

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.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website

Right click here to download.
Length: 1:21:34; Size: 30.8 MB

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.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Right click here to download.
Length: 1:19:38; Size: 27.4 MB

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.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website.
Additional photos from this event are available on Flickr.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Right click here to download.
Length: 1:31:32; Size: 42 MB

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."

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website.
Additional photos from this event are available on Flickr.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Right click here to download.
Length: 1:35:22; Size: 33 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on January 16, 2008.

Mike Davis was born in Fontana, California, 60 miles east of Los Angeles in 1946, and is a veteran of 1960's civil rights and anti-war movements. From his first book, Prisoners of the American Dream (1986), about unionism in the United States, to his most recent, Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (2007), Davis' fearless writing in 18 books shines a fresh light on economic, social, environmental, and political injustice. Some of his other books include City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Magical Urbanism, Planet of Slums, Dead Cities, In Praise of Barbarians, and No One is Illegal. He is currently working on a book about climate change, water, and power in the U.S. West and northern Mexico. A former meat cutter and long-distance truck driver, Davis has been a fellow at the Getty Institute and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1998. He teaches at the University of California, Irvine.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website.
Additional photos from this event are available on Flickr.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Right click here to download.
Length: 0:57:39; Size: 13.8 MB