History/Bio

LAPL ID: 
6

The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic

In conversation with Warren Olney
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
01:08:04
ALOUD
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Episode Summary
The author of the prophetic national bestseller \"Blowback,\" offers a vivid look at the new caste of professional warriors who have infiltrated multiple branches of government, for whom the manipulation of the military budget is of vital interest. In conversation with journalist WARREN OLNEY (\"To the Point\").
Participant(s) Bio
Warren Olney is the award-winning journalist and host of "Which Way L.A?" and "To the Point" on KCRW-FM.

Chalmers Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He is a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times and The Nation. His previous books include MITI and the Japanese Miracle.

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Solider

In conversation with Louise Steinman
Co-presented with Human Rights Watch Young Advocates
Thursday, April 5, 2007
01:08:23
ALOUD
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Episode Summary
At age twelve, Beah (now twenty-five), fled attacking rebels in his native Sierra Leone and was picked up by the government army. What is war like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop?
Participant(s) Bio
Ishmael Beah was born in Sierra Leone in 1980. He moved to the United States in 1998 and finished his last two years of high school at the United Nations International School in New York. In 2004 he graduated from Oberlin College with a B.A. in political science. He is a member of the Human Rights Watch Children's Rights Division Advisory Committee and has spoken before the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities 9CETO) at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, and many other NGO panels on children affected by the war. His work has appeared in Vespertine Press and LIT magazine.

Louise Steinman is curator of the award-winning ALOUD series for the Library Foundation of Los Angeles and Co-Director of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC. She is the author of two books, most recently, The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father's War, awarded the Gold Medal in Autobiography from ForeWord Magazine and the selection of several all-city and all-freshman reads programs.

Ziggurat

In conversation with Hovig Tchalian
Monday, November 22, 2010
01:20:13
ALOUD
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Episode Summary
Balakian's new collection of poems explore the aftermath of 9/11 through layered perspectives of myth, history, and personal memory; a panoramic work of contemporary witness in a new age of American uncertainty.
Participant(s) Bio
Peter Balakian is the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor in Humanities and professor of English at Colgate University. He is the author of five books of poems and three prose works, including The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response, a New York Times best seller, and Black Dog of Fate, a memoir.

Hovig Tchalian is the co-founder of Critics' Forum-a group of writers, critics and academics with an interest in English-language Armenian art and culture in the diaspora. He teaches writing and professional communication at the University of Southern California, in the business and engineering schools.

Phantom Noise: An evening with Solider-Poet Brain Turner

In conversation with Louise Steinman
Thursday, November 18, 2010
01:15:05
ALOUD
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Episode Summary
Turner's poems reflect his experiences as a soldier--seven years in the US Army, including a year as infantry team leader in Iraq--with penetrating lyric power and compassion.
Participant(s) Bio
Brian Turner is a soldier-poet whose debut book of poems, Here, Bullet, won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award, the New York Times "Editor's Choice" selection, the 2006 Pen Center USA "Best in the West" award, and the 2007 Poets Prize, among others. Turner served seven years in the US Army, to include one year as an infantry team leader in Iraq. Prior to that, he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000. Turner's poetry has been published in many reviews and in the Voices in Wartime Anthology published in conjunction with the feature-length documentary film of the same name.

Louise Steinman is curator of the award-winning ALOUD series for the Library Foundation of Los Angeles and Co-Director of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC. She is the author of two books, most recently, The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father's War, awarded the Gold Medal in Autobiography from ForeWord Magazine and the selection of several all-city and all-freshman reads programs.

Cleopatra: A Life

In conversation with Robin Swicord
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
01:03:39
ALOUD
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Episode Summary
A Pulitzer-Prize willing biographer boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the queen from her own hazy legend, subtly and originally probing classical sources to yield a fresh, thrilling account of a remarkable woman.
Participant(s) Bio
Stacy Schiff is the author of Saint Exupery, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), for which she received a Pulitzer in 2000; and most recently, A Great Improvisation, winner of the George Washington Book Prize. A Guggenheim Fellow, Schiff has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a contributor to The New Yorker, New York Times, and other publications.

Robin Swicord is known for her work as a screenwriter for "Memoirs Of A Geisha", "Little Women" (co-producer), "Matilda" (co-written and co-produced with Nicholas Kazan) and "Shag" (shared). In 2009 she received an Oscar nomination for her contribution to "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." She recently presented a talk at USC's Institute for the Humanities on "Reviving Cleopatra", in which she contrasted the historical Cleopatra with portrayals handed down over the next 2,000 years through images, plays and other entertainments.

Must you Go? My Life with Harold Pinter

In conversation with Howard Rodman
Monday, November 8, 2010
01:09:47
ALOUD
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Episode Summary
The acclaimed historian offers a love story, an intimate account of the life of a major artist, and an exercise in self-revelation, based on thirty-three years of marriage.
Participant(s) Bio
Antonia Fraser is the author of many internationally bestselling historical works, including Love and Louis XIV, Marie Antoinette, which was made into a film by Sofia Coppola, The Wives of Henry VIII, Mary Queen of Scots, and Faith and Treason: the Gunpowder Plot. She has received the Wolfson Prize for History, the 2000 Norton Medlicott Medal of Britain's Historical Association, and the Franco-British Society's Enid McLeod Literary prize.

Howard A. Rodman wrote Savage Grace, nominated for best screenplay at the 2009 Spirit Awards, and August, starring Josh Hartnett and David Bowie. He also wrote Joe Gould's Secret, the opening night film of Sundance 2000. He is a professor of screenwriting at USC's School of Cinematic Arts; serves on the Board of the Writers Guild of America, West; and has been Artistic Director of the Sundance Screenwriting Labs. Rodman is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and of the Los Angeles Institute of the Humanities.

Writing in Latino: A National Conversation/ Escribir en Latino: Una Conversacion Nacional

Moderated by Ilán Stavans
Thursday, October 21, 2010
01:12:51
ALOUD
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Episode Summary

What is Latino literature? Who writes it? Who reads it? Explore a rich literary tradition of five centuries of writing from two continents and 10 countries, from letters to the Spanish crown, to U.S. urbanites who grow up speaking Spanglish. Join this national conversation about the contribution of Latino writing to American culture.

Participant(s) Bio

Ilán Stavans, a native of Mexico City, is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. An award-winning writer and public television host, his books include Growing Up Latino, The Hispanic Condition and Spanglish. The Washington Post has described him as "Latin America's liveliest and boldest critic and most innovative cultural enthusiast." He is the recipient of numerous honors-including an Emmy nomination, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Latino Literature Prize, the Antonia Pantoja Award, and Chile's Presidential Medal. For many years he was host of the PBS show La Plaza: Conversations with Ilán Stavans.

Susana Chávez-Silverman grew up bilingually and biculturally in California, Spain and México. Her work is at home in both Spanish and English and the space(s) in-between. She has published Killer Crónicas: Bilingual Memories (2004) and Scenes from la Cuenca de Los Angeles y otros Natural Disasters (2010). She has published numerous essays on U.S. Latin@ authors and Spanish-language poetry, and is co-editor of Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad (1997), and Reading and Writing the Ambiente: Queer Sexualities in Latino, Latin American and Spanish Culture (2000). She teaches at Pomona College in Claremont, CA

Rubén Martínez is an author, teacher and performer. He is the author of a trilogy of books on immigration and globalization: The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City and Beyond; Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail and The New Americans: Seven Families Journey to Another Country. He holds the Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature & Writing at Loyola Marymount University. He has been active in the spoken word and performance scenes for over two decades, and as a musician has recorded with such acts as Los Illegals, Concrete Blonde and The Roches.

Luis Rodriguez, an accomplished Chicano poet, is also known for Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., a memoir that explores the motivation of gang life and cautions against the death and destruction that claim its participants. Always Running earned a Carl Sandburg Literary Award and was designated a New York Times Notable Book; it has also been named by the American Library Association as one of the nation's 100 most censored books. Luis has also published childrens' books in both English and Spanish. He was one of 50 leaders worldwide selected as "Unsung Heroes of Compassion," presented by the Dalai Lama. Luis is currently working on a new memoir.

Blood Dark Track

In conversation with David Kipen
Thursday, October 14, 2010
00:59:17
ALOUD
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Episode Summary
O'Neill, a former barrister and PEN/Faulkner award-winning author of the novel Netherland has written a brilliant inquiry propelled by the unexplained incarcerations of both his grandfathers (one Irish, one Turkish) during the Second World War.
Participant(s) Bio
Joseph O'Neill was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1964 and grew up in Mozambique, South Africa, Iran, Turkey, and Holland. For many years, he worked as a barrister in London. His works include the novels This is The Life, The Breezes, and Netherland (2006), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. He also wrote Blood-Dark Track, a memoir about his grandfathers who were both imprisoned during World War II, which was a New York Times Notable Book.

David Kipen is author of The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History, and translator of Cervantes' The Dialogue of the Dogs. Until January 2010, he was the Literature Director of the National Endowment of the Arts, where he directed the Big Read and the Guadalajara Book Festival initiatives. He also served from 1998 to 2005 as book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. His introductions to the WPA Guides to Los Angeles and San Francisco are forthcoming. In July of 2010 he opened a lending library/used bookstore in the Jewish-turned-Latino neighborhood of Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, called Libros Schmibros.

By Nightfall

Tuesday, October 12, 2010
01:03:17
ALOUD
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Episode Summary
Set among the mid-forties denizens of Manhattan's SoHo-the new novel by the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Hours takes a deep look at the meaning of beauty and the place of love in our lives.
Participant(s) Bio
Michael Cunningham is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award & Pulitzer Prize), and Specimen Days.

Tony Valenzuela is a longtime community activist and writer whose work has focused on LGBT civil rights, sexual liberation and gay men's health. He wrote, produced and performed his acclaimed one-man show, "The (Bad) Boy Next Door." He is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program of the California Institute of the Arts. Currently he is Executive Director of the Lambda Literary Foundation.

National Lampoon: Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead

Monday, October 4, 2010
01:28:27
ALOUD
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Episode Summary
Join us for a mind-boggling multi-media tour through the early days of an institution whose alumni left their fingerprints all over popular culture: Animal House, Caddyshack, Saturday Night Live, Ghostbusters, SCTV, Spinal Tap, In Living Color, Ren & Stimpy, and The Simpsons. Long before there was The Onion and Comedy Central, there was the National Lampoon.
Participant(s) Bio
Ted Mann was the most uninhibited and unpredictable of all the people who ever worked at the Lampoon. And he was a good writer of tough, smart prose. He had serious issues on his mind, but first he and Tod Carroll created "O. C. and Stiggs," and he was one of the writers of Disco Beaver from Outer Space. Ted has since written and produced for Miami Vice, NYPD Blue, Judging Amy, John from Cincinnati, and Deadwood.

Rick Meyerowitz believes he is the most prolific contributor of illustrated articles to the National Lampoon magazine. He painted the poster for Animal House and was the creator of the magazine's trademark visual, "The Mona Gorilla." Shortly after 9/11, Rick and Maira Kalman cre­ated the most talked-about New Yorker cover of this century, "NewYorkistan." Rick is also the author of Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great.

Ellis Weiner is droll and cerebral. He says he lived in a state of constant fear that he wouldn't understand what the other Lampoon editors were talk­ing about. Ellis writes for television and has written or cowritten numerous books, among which are Drop Dead, My Lovely; The Joy of Worry (with Roz Chast); Yid­dish with Dick and Jane; and Oy! Do This Not That!: 100 Simple Swaps That Could Save Your Life, Your Money, or Your Mother from a Heart Attack, God Forbid. Ellis is a regular and very funny blogger on the Huffington Post.

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