Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on May 30, 2007.

Terry Tempest Williams has been called "a citizen writer," a writer who speaks and speaks out eloquently on behalf of an ethical stance toward life. A naturalist and fierce advocate for freedom of speech, she has consistently shown us how environmental issues are social issues that ultimately become matters of justice. Known for her impassioned and lyrical prose, Terry Tempest Williams is the author of the environmental literature classics, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field; Desert Quartet; Leap; Red - Patience and Passion in the Desert; and The Open Space of Democracy. Her new book, Mosaic: Finding Beauty in a Broken World, will be published in 2008.

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

Right click here to download.
Length: 1:20:25; Size: 55.3 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on May 9, 2007.

Gore Vidal is the author of twenty-two novels, five plays, many screenplays, more than two hundred essays, and the critically lauded, Palimpsest: A Memoir. Vidal's United States (Essays 1952-1992) won the 1993 National Book Award. In its "American Masters" series PBS said "Vidal's lineage in American literature may be traced back to Henry James, the sophisticated American from the upper echelons of society who mingles with European sophisticates, and Mark Twain, the raw humorist and critic of American empire."

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

Right click here to download.
Length: 1:10:28; Size: 48.4 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on April 25, 2007.

Dave Eggers is the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, of which the Washington Post said, “Eggers evokes the terrible beauty of youth like a young Bob Dylan, frothing with furious anger.” He is also the author of You Shall Know Our Velocity!, and How We Are Hungry. In 1998, he founded McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house now located in San Francisco.

Vendela Vida is the author of Girls on the Verge, a journalistic study of female initiation rituals. She is also the author of a novel, And Now You Can Go, which begins with its narrator, 21 year old Ellis, being forced at gunpoint to sit and talk with a man in a New York City park as he contemplates a murder/suicide. She is the coeditor of the Believer magazine and the editor of The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers.

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

Right click here to download.
Length: 1:57:20; Size: 80.59 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on April 11, 2007.

Denis Johnson's story "Homeless and High" begins, "I arrived penniless in Berkeley in February of 1973, at night, dropped off on Telegraph Avenue by a woman driving around in her commune's Volvo." He is the author of the celebrated collection of stories Jesus' Son, which was made into a feature film by the same name in 1999. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and McSweeney's. His recent novel, Angel, tells the story of a fleeing housewife toting two kids and an ex-Navy, ex-con who all meet on a Greyhound bus.

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

Right click here to download.
Length: 1:20:16; Size: 55.1 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on March 14, 2007.

Charles Simic has published over sixty books of poetry as well as many translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian poetry. He was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and moved with his family to the United States in 1953. His poetry first appeared in The Chicago Review . The poet Seamus Heaney describes Simic's work as, "Surrealist, and therefore comic, but with a specific gravity in his imagining that manages to avoid the surrealist penalty of weightlessness."

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

Right click here to download.
Length: 1:13:59; Size: 50.83 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on February 28, 2007.

B. H. Fairchild's poetry has appeared in The Paris Reveiw, The New Yorker, and The Yale Review. He grew up in small towns in Texas, Oklahoma, and southwest Kansas. His books include The Arrival of the Future, The Art of the Lathe, and most recently, Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest: Poems. He is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Lannan Foundations, and a National Book Critics Circle Award.

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

Right click here to download.
Length: 1:22:42; Size: 37.9 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on January 31, 2007.

Lawrence Weschler was for over twenty years a staff writer at The New Yorker where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies.  His books of political reportage include The Passion of Poland and A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers. His most recent work is Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences . Weschler, awarded a Lannan Award for Nonfiction in 1999, is currently director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU.

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

Right click here to download.
Length: 30:44; Size: 14.1 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on January 17, 2007.

Deborah Eisenberg is the author of five collections of short stories, All Around Atlantis, The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg, Under the 82nd Airborne, Transactions in a Foreign Currency, and the most recent, Twilight of the Super Heroes: Stories. Eisenberg is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, in 2003, a Lannan Literary Fellowship. She is a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.

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

Right click here to download.
Length: 1:17:03; Size: 35.3 MB

Featuring Toi Derricotte, Cornelius Eady, Terrance Hayes, Patricia Smith, and Frank X Walker.

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on November 15th, 2006.

Toi Derricotte, co-founder of Cave Canem, is the author of five books. Her books of poetry include Natural Birth, Captivity, and Tender.

Cornelius Eady is the author of six books of poetry including You Don’t Miss Your Water, The Autobiography of a Jukebox, and Brutal Imagination, and is co-founder of Cave Canem.

Terrance Hayes is the author of Hip Logic, Muscular Music and most recently, Wind in a Box.

Patricia Smith’s latest poetry book is Teahouse of the Almighty. She is also the author of Life According to Motown.

Frank X Walker was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship in 2005. His poetry books include Buffalo Dance:The Journey of York and the Black Box.

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

Right click here to download.
Length: 2:10:36; Size: 59.8 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on November 1st, 2006.

Caryl Phillips was born in St. Kitts, brought up in Leeds, England, and now lives in New York City. He is the author of three works of non-fiction and eight novels, as well as the editor of two anthologies. His latest novel, Dancing In The Dark, re-imagines the remarkable, tragic, little-known life of Bert Williams (1874-1922), the first black entertainer in the United States to reach the highest levels of fame and fortune. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Fellowship.

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

Right click here to download.
Length: 1:08:26; Size: 31.4 MB