Terry Tempest Williams is one of the most knowledgeable and elegant voices of the American West. She brings to her writing, in the words of the poet W.S. Merwin, "the dedicated observation of a naturalist and the abiding innocence and excitement of an open heart." Williams is a Naturalist-In-Residence at the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City. A member of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, Williams is committed to protecting Americas Red Rock Desert. She is a recipient of a 1993 Fellowship for Nonfiction from the Lannan Foundation. Among her books are An Unnatural History of Family and Places and An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field.

This program was produced as part of the 1997 season of Racing Toward the Millennium: Voices from the American West in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Kathleen Norris is the author of the 1993 bestseller Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. Her newest book, The Cloister Walk, is structured around two nine-month residencies at a Benedictine monastery. In it, she links the disparate worlds of 4th-century desert monks and modern-day Benedictines to epiphanies in the tiny South Dakota town where she and her husband moved in 1974. Renowned author Dr. Robert Coles lauded Norris's work in The New York Times Book Review: "Her writing is personal and epigrammatic—a series of short takes that ironically addresses the biggest subject matter possible: how one ought to live life and with what purposes in mind." Norris's narrative and lyrical poems have appeared in The New Yorker and the Paris Review.

This program was produced as part of the 1997 season of Racing Toward the Millennium: Voices from the American West in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Anne Lamott is the author of five novels, most recently Crooked Little Heart (1997). In addition, she wrote the bestseller Operating Instructions (1993), a highly personal account of life as a single mother during her son's first year; and Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, "a candidly drawn map of a writer's home terrain: dazzling peaks and weird, dark cellars." Lamott has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and has taught writing at U.C. Davis and at many writing conferences around the United States. She lives in the Bay Area.

This program was produced as part of the 1997 season of Racing Toward the Millennium: Voices from the American West in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

In 1997, Sherman Alexie had just been named one of America's "Best Young Novelists" by GRANTA Magazine and had won the American Book Award. Alexie's work resonates with the collision between white and Native American cultures and while his subjects are serious, Alexie himself is often scathingly funny. In his work Indian Killer, Alexie creates a rich, panoramic portrayal of contemporary Seattle using a mystery story to tell some uncomfortable truths about Indian-white relations and racism in all its forms. A member of the Spokane/Coeur d'Alene tribe, Alexie lives in Seattle, Washington.

This program was presented as part of the 1997 series of Racing Toward the Millennium: Voices from the American West.

David Mas Masumoto is a third-generation Japanese-American peach and grape farmer. His book Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm is a chronicle of family, farm travails, and his struggle to market an old variety of peach. In addition to being a writer and farmer, Masumoto is a farm activist and a member of the California Council for the Humanities. His book was awarded the Julia Child Cookbook Award for best book in the Literary Food Writing category. He lives in Del Rey, California.

This program as presented as part of the 1997 season of Racing Toward the Millennium: Voices from the American West in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Bernard Cooper writes eloquently about the difficult landscape of memory as it pertains to sexuality, loss, AIDS, and family. He is the author of the collection of memoirs Maps to Anywhere, the novel A Year of Rhymes, and a recent collection of memoirs, Truth Serum. He received the 1991 PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award and a 1995 O. Henry Prize. He has taught at Antioch/Los Angeles, for the Masters of Professional Writing program at USC, at the UCLA Writer’s Program, and he has been a core faculty member in the MFA Writing Program at Bennington College. Of Truth Serum, playwright Tony Kushner has written, "One of the most beautiful and moving memoirs I've ever read... Reading Bernard Cooper is like reading Chechov, and he's really that good."

This program was originally produced as part of the 1997 season of Racing Toward the Millennium: Voices from the American West, in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

You know Cheech as half of the comedy duo Cheech & Chong, and you know him for his memorable roles in Up in Smoke, Born in East L.A., Desperado, The Lion King, and Jane the Virgin, to name a few. But did you know that Cheech—which is not his real name—is also the owner of the most renowned collection of Chicano art in the world? Did you know that before he became a face of the recreational drug movement, he grew up the son of a cop? Did you know that he crushed Anderson Cooper on Celebrity Jeopardy!? In his long-awaited memoir, this counterculture legend writes candidly about coming-of-age as the wisecracking kid in 1960s Los Angeles, resisting the draft as a young man, and many other surprising journeys along the way of creating one of the most successful comedy acts of all time. Join us for a spirited evening as Cheech reflects on his incredible career spanning over 45 years, in conversation with L.A.’s own Marisol Hernandez, lead singer of the GRAMMY award-winning La Santa Cecilia.

Taking from essays on depression she has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, Daphne Merkin’s new memoir This Close to Happy is the rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression. In trying to sort out the root causes of her affliction, Merkin reflects on her childhood, her mother, her life as a writer, her marriage, and the birth of her child as she discusses in poignant detail various therapists, treatments, and hospitalizations for depression along the way. In an intimate conversation on her lifelong battle with depression and her search for release, Merkin is joined by Jill Soloway, the Emmy-winning creator of Transparent.

Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and UCLA Professor Emeritus Saul Friedländer returns to memoir to recount a tale of intellectual coming-of-age on three continents. In Where Memory Leads: My Life, a sequel to Friedländer’s poignant first memoir, Where Memory Comes, published forty years ago and recently reissued with a new introduction from Claire Messud, he bridges the gap between the ordeals of his childhood during the German Occupation of France and his present-day towering reputation in the field of Holocaust studies. Reflecting on the wrenching events that induced him to devote sixteen years of his life to writing his masterpiece, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945, Friedländer discusses this book and his life’s work with historian Steven J. Ross.