Hisham Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo, and has lived most of his adult life in London. His debut novel, In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award and won numerous international prizes, including the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, a Commonwealth First Book Award, the Premio Flaiano, and Premio Gregor von Rezzori. His second book, Anatomy of a Disappearance, published in 2011, was named one of the best books of the year by The Guardian and the Chicago Tribune. His work has been translated into twenty-nine languages. He lives in London and New York.

Louise Steinman is the curator of the award-winning ALOUD series and co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC. She is the author of three books: The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War; The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance; and The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation. She was a 2015 Fellow at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Florida. Her work appears, most recently, in The Los Angeles Review of Books and on her Crooked Mirror blog.

Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, illustrator, historian, and naturalist and an affiliated research scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses. She also worked as a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge. She is the author of the bestselling H Is for Hawk, as well as a cultural history of falcons, titled Falcon, three collections of poetry, and the monthly "On Nature" column for the New York Times Magazine. As a professional falconer, she assisted with the management of raptor research and conservation projects across Eurasia.

Louise Steinman is the curator of the award-winning ALOUD series and co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC. She is the author of three books: The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War; The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance; and The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation. She was a 2015 Fellow at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Florida. Her work appears, most recently, in The Los Angeles Review of Books, and on her Crooked Mirror blog.

Jane Hirshfield is the author of six collections of poetry, including After, Given Sugar, Given Salt, The Lives of the Heart, and The October Palace, as well as a book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. She edited and co-translated The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi & Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan, Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, and Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems. In 2004, Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets, an honor formerly held by such poets as Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop. In 2012, she was elected Chancellor of the Academy. Her newest work, published spring of 2015, is a volume of poetry titled The Beauty and a book of essays titled Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World.

Louise Steinman is the curator of the award-winning ALOUD series and co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC. She is the author of three books: The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War; The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance and The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation. She will be a spring 2015 writer-in-residence at the Warsaw Bauhaus. Her work appears, most recently, in The Los Angeles Review of Books and on her Crooked Mirror blog.

Louise Steinman is the curator of the award-winning ALOUD series and co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC. She is the author of three books: The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War; The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance; and The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation. She was a recent fellow at the Robert Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, FL. Her work appears, most recently, in The Los Angeles Review of Books, and on her Crooked Mirror blog.

Jack Miles is a Senior Fellow for Religious Affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy and a Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies, at the University of California, Irvine. A MacArthur Fellow (2003-2007), Miles won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for God: A Biography, which has since been translated into sixteen languages. He is currently the general editor of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of World Religions.

Jonathan Kirsch is the author of 13 books, including The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God; God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism; and The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible. His new book is The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat and a Murder in Paris. Kirsch is a lawyer specializing in intellectual property issues, the book editor of The Jewish Journal, and an adjunct professor on the faculty of the Professional Publishing Institute at New York University. He is a three-time president of PEN U.S.A.

Louise Steinman is the curator of the award-winning ALOUD series and co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC. She is the author of three books: The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War; The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance; and The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation (fall, 2013). She was a recent fellow at the Robert Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, FL. Her work appears, most recently, in The Los Angeles Review of Books, and on her Crooked Mirror blog.

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and author of three books of short stories: The Question of Bruno; Nowhere Man, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Love and Obstacles. He was the recipient of a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship and a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation. His new memoir is The Book of My Lives.

Louise Steinman is the curator of the award-winning ALOUD series and Co-Director of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC. She is the author of three books: The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War; The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance; and The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Jewish-Polish Reconciliation (forthcoming, fall, 2013). Her work appears, most recently, in The Los Angeles Review of Books and on her Crooked Mirror blog.

John Ashbery (Poet/Author) has won nearly every major American award for poetry since his second volume, Some Trees, was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1956. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. Ashbery began writing about art in 1957, serving as executive editor of Art News (1965-72), and art critic for New York Magazine (1978-80) and Newsweek (1980-85). A selection of his art writings was published in 1989 as Reported Sightings.

Director's Statement: Since its publication in 1975, I've been reading John Ashbery's long poem Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, gradually encompassing its modulated proceedings and always surprised at its further depths and gorgeous highlights. The work is ostensibly a description and meditation of Francesco Parmigianino's Mannerist masterpiece, and my exploration of the poem has led me to a similar exploration of the painting.

I decided to set the poem for six voices with projected text and images, as a way of arraying its juxtapositions, embodying its tonal shifts in different voices and keeping Parmigianino's painting in view as the poem proceeds, that it might offer some further illumination of the work.

Jim Paul (Director) is a poet and writer, author of several books, including Medieval in LA and Elsewhere in the Land of Parrots. He teaches in the English Department at Hunter College in New York and is House Manager of the Ancram Opera House, where this Ashbery work was first produced in 2009.

Joan Arnold (Reader) is a teacher of yoga and the Alexander Technique with a private practice in NYC. She has written essays and features for New York Woman, American Photo, Self, New Age Journal and others. Joan is Executive Director of the Ancram Opera House.

http://www.ancramoperahouse.com/

Tom Curwen (Reader) is an award-winning staff writer and editor at the Los Angeles Times. He was editor of the Outdoors section, a writer for the features section and deputy editor of the Book Review. He has a master's degree in Creative Writing from USC and was a recipient of a 1991 Academy of American Poets prize. In 2002, he received a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for mental health journalism.

David Kipen (Reader), 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, and before that book editor, for the San Francisco Chronicle. His introductions to the WPA Guides to Los Angeles and San Francisco are forthcoming.

Louise Steinman (Reader) is curator of the ALOUD series for the Library Foundation of Los Angeles. She is the author of two books and performed for many years with her own theater company, SO&SO&SO&SO and toured internationally with Ping Chong and the Fiji Company.

http://www.louisesteinman.com/

Beth Thielen (Technical Director) is known for her one-of-a kind artist books. She has worked as artist and educator with at-risk populations. Her work is in the Library of Congress, the Getty Museum of Art and various collections and museums.

Terry Wolverton (Reader) is author of seven books: including Embers, a novel in poems, which she is adapting as a jazz opera; Insurgent Muse: life and art at the Woman's Building, a memoir; The Labrys Reunion and Bailey's Beads, novels; and three collections of poetry. She has also edited fourteen literary anthologies, including Mischief, Caprice, and Other Poetic Strategies. She is the founder of Writers At Work, a creative writing center in Los Angeles.

http://www.terrywolverton.xbuild.com/