Lannan Center Podcast

Keynote Speech by Melody C. Barnes: "In Search of an Inclusive America: Culture, Politics, and the Narratives That Define Us" on March 22, 2022.About Melody C. BarnesMelody Barnes is executive director of the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy. She is also the J. Wilson Newman Professor of Governance at the Miller Center of Public Affairs and a senior fellow at the Karsh Center for Law & Democracy.Ms. Barnes was Assistant to the President and director of the White House Domestic Policy Council during the Administration of President Barack Obama. Prior to her tenure in the Obama Administration, she was executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress and chief counsel to the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Barnes is narrator and host of the podcast, LBJ and the Great Society and co-editor of Community Wealth Building & The Reconstruction of American Democracy.  Ms. Barnes earned her B.A. from the University of North C

Clips taken from past event The View From Abroad: “What Can America Learn from the Experience of Other Nations at a Time of Crisis?” held on Crowdcast on March 18, 2021.Music: Soundside (royalty free music) — "Violin Inspiration" — Provided by Jamendo.

Clips taken from past event "Is There Such a Thing as American Exceptionalism?” held at Beyond Borders Scotland on August 29, 2021.Music: AudioInfinity — "Inspirational Piano" — Provided by Jamendo.

On February 8th, 2022, the Lannan Center presented a reading and talk featuring poets Mark Nowak. Moderated by Carolyn Forché.About Mark NowakMark Nowak is the author of four poetry collections: Social Poetics (Coffee House Press, 2020), Coal Mountain Elementary (2009), Shut Up Shut Down (2004), and Revenants (2000). Also a playwright, essayist, social critic, and labor activist, Nowak’s writing documents the hardships and injustices faced by the global working class. Nowak is the recipient of the Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism from Split This Rock and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has taught at St. Catherine University and Washington College, where he also worked as director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House. He has also led poetry workshops for workers and trade unions in Belgium, the Netherlands, the U.K., the U.S., and South Africa. He is currently Professor of English at Manhattanville College and the founding director, in collaboration with PEN America, of the Worker Writers School.Music: Q

On January 25th, 2022, the Lannan Center presented a reading and talk featuring poets Valzhyna Mort and Michael Prior. Moderated by Carolyn Forché.About Valzhyna Mort Valzhyna Mort is a poet and translator born in Minsk, Belarus. She is the author of three poetry collections, Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press 2008), Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press 2011) and, mostly recently, Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG, 2020). Mort is a recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Amy Clampitt residency, and the Civitella Raineri residency. Her work has been honored with the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry and the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, New Yorker, Poetry, Poetry Review, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, Granta, Gulf Coast, White Review, and many more. With Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris, Mort co-edited Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems and Prose. Mort teaches at Cornell University and writes in English and Belarusi

On November 30th, 2021, the Lannan Center presented a reading and talk featuring author Tope Folarin Introduction by Aminatta Forna.About Tope FolarinTope Folarin is a Nigerian-American writer based in Washington, D.C. He won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2013 and was shortlisted once again in 2016. He was also recently named to the Africa39 list of the most promising African writers under 40. Folarin was educated at Morehouse College and the University of Oxford, where he earned two Masters degrees as a Rhodes Scholar. He is the author of A Particular Kind of Black Man (Simon & Schuster, 2019), and is currently the Lannan Creative Writing Visiting Lecturer at Georgetown University and Director of the Institute for Policy Studies.From A Particular Kind of Black ManShe told me I could serve her in heaven.She accompanied me to school each day. School was about a mile away, and a few hundred feet into my trek, just as my family’s apartment building drifted out of view behind me, she would appear at

On November 9th, 2021, the Lannan Center presented a reading and talk featuring author Aminatta Forna and editor John Freeman. Introduction by David Gewanter.About Aminatta FornaAminatta Forna was born in Scotland, raised in Sierra Leone and Great Britain and spent periods of her childhood in Iran, Thailand and Zambia. She is the award-winning author of the novels Happiness, The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones, and a memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water, and most recently the essay collection, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion. Forna is the recipient of a Windham Campbell Award from Yale University, has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award 2011, a Hurston Wright Legacy Award the Liberaturpreis in Germany and the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, and was made OBE in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours 2017. She is currently Director and Lannan Foundation Chair of Poetics of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University. About John FreemanJohn Free

On October 26th, 2021, the Lannan Center presented a reading and talk featuring Douglas Stuart and Maureen Corrigan. Introduction by Aminatta Forna.About Douglas StuartDouglas Stuart is a Scottish-American author. His debut novel, Shuggie Bain, won the Booker Prize. It is published by Grove Atlantic in the US and Picador in the UK, and is to be translated into thirty-four languages. He wrote Shuggie Bain over a ten year period and is currently at work on his second novel, to be published in 2022. His short stories, Found Wanting, and The Englishman, were published in The New Yorker magazine. His essay, Poverty, Anxiety, and Gender in Scottish Working-Class Literature was published by Lit Hub. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, he has an MA from the Royal College of Art in London and since 2000 he has lived and worked in New York City.About Maureen CorriganMaureen Corrigan is The Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism in the Department of English. She is an expert in the wo

On October 12th, 2021, the Lannan Center presented a reading and talk featuring poet Jericho Brown. Introduction by Carolyn Forché.About Jericho BrownJericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of the collection The Tradition (2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Time, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies. He is the Charles Howard C

On September 21st, 2021, the Lannan Center presented a reading and talk featuring Sofi Oksanen. Moderated by Lannan Center Director, Aminatta Forna. Cosponsored by the Georgetown Medical Humanities Initiative, the Georgetown Humanities Initiative, the Global and Comparative Literature Program, the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics,  the Women's and Gender Studies Program, and the Women's Center at Georgetown University.About Sofi OksanenSofi Oksanen is a Finnish-Estonian novelist and playwright. She has received numerous prizes for her work, including the Swedish Academy Nordic Prize, the Prix Femina Étranger, the Budapest Grand Prize, the European Book Prize, and the Nordic Council Literature Prize. She lives in Helsinki. Translated from the Finnish by Owen Witesman.About Aminatta FornaAminatta Forna is the award-winning author of the novels Happiness, The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones, and a memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water, and most recently the essay col

On April 20, 2021, we held a virtual reading and conversation with Irenosen Okojie, winner of the 2020 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing. Moderated by Prof. Lahra Smith, Director of African Studies Program.Irenosen Okojie is a Nigerian-British writer. She is the winner of the 2020 AKO Caine Prize For Fiction for her story, “Grace Jones.” Her debut novel Butterfly Fish won a Betty Trask award and was shortlisted for an Edinburgh International First Book Award. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Observer, the Guardian, the BBC and the Huffington Post amongst other publications. Her short stories have appeared internationally in publications including Salt’s Best British Short Stories 2017, Kwani? and The Year’s Best Weird Fiction. She was named at the London Short Story Festival by Booker Prize winning author Ben Okri OBE as a dynamic writing talent to watch and featured in the Evening Standard Magazine as one of London’s exciting new authors. Her short story collection Speak Gigantular, pu

On April 13, 2021 the Lannan Center presented a Crowdcast webinar featuring  Carolyn Forché. Moderated by Penn Szittya of the Lannan Foundation.Carolyn Forché's first volume of poetry, Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, was followed by The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, and Blue Hour. In March, 2020, Penguin Press published her fifth collection of poems, In the Lateness of the World. She is also the author of the memoir What You Have Heard Is True (Penguin Press, 2019), a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Juan E. Mendez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America. She has translated Mahmoud Darwish, Claribel Alegria, and Robert Desnos. Her international anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice.” In 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award for her human rights advocacy and the

On March 18, 2021 the Lannan Center presented a Crowdcast webinar on the subject The View From Abroad: "What Can America Learn from the Experience of Other Nations at a Time of Crisis?" This was the launch event of "Beyond Identity: Reimagining the American Narrative," the Lannan Seminars at Georgetown University, and featured Aleksandar Hemon, Monica McWilliams, Ebrahim Rasool, and Elif Shafak. This event was moderated by BBC's Razia Iqbal. Hosted in association with Beyond Conflict and Beyond Borders Scotland. Cosponsored by the Conflict Resolution Program, the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, and the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics.About the Series “Beyond Identity: Reimagining the American Narrative”Present-day America is suffering from an identity crisis. Americans are raised to believe that democracy, freedom, and opportunity are the values deeply embedded in the nation’s character and practice. Yet, millions of Americans who have spent centurie

On March 18, 2021 the Lannan Center presented a Crowdcast webinar featuring author Salman Rushdie, as part of "THIS LAND" the 2021 Lannan Center Symposium. Moderated by BBC's Razia Iqbal.About Salman RushdieSalman Rushdie is the author of fourteen novels, most recently Quichotte, The Golden House, and Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. His book Midnight’s Children was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981 and the Best of the Booker in 2008. He is also the author of a book of stories, East, West, and four works of non-fiction – Joseph Anton – A Memoir, Imaginary Homelands, The Jaguar Smile, and Step Across This Line. A Fellow of the British Royal Society of Literature, Rushdie has received, among other honors, the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel (twice), the Writers’ Guild Award, the James Tait Black Prize, and a U.S. National Arts Award. He holds honorary doctorates and fellowships at six European and six American universities, is an Honorary Professor in the Humanities at M.I.T, and Uni

On March 16, 2021 the Lannan Center presented a Crowdcast webinar featuring Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, as part of "THIS LAND" the 2021 Lannan Center Symposium. Moderated by poet Carolyn Forché.About Joy HarjoIn 2019, Joy Harjo was appointed the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold the position. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Harjo is an internationally known award-winning poet, writer, performer, and saxophone player of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation. Harjo’s nine books of poetry include An American Sunrise, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, and She Had Some Horses. Harjo’s memoir Crazy Brave won several awards, including the PEN USA Literary Award for Creative Non-Fiction and the American Book Award. She is the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Prize from the Poetry Foundation for Lifetime Achievement, the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets for proven mastery in the art of poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Will

On February 9, 2021  the Lannan Center presented a Crowdcast webinar featuring  Shane McCrae and Vievee Francis. Introductions by Lannan Fellows Joshua Kim and Renny Simone. Moderated by Carolyn Forché.Shane McCrae is the author of seven books of poetry, including Sometimes I Never Suffered (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020); In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015), winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.Vievee Francis was born in West Texas. She earned an MFA from the University of Michigan in 2009, and she received a Rona Jaffe Award the same year. She is the author of Forest Primeval (TriQuarterly Books, 2015), winner of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award; Horse in the Dark (Nor

On January 26, 2021 the Lannan Center presented a Crowdcast webinar featuring Javier Zamora and Natalie Scenters-Zapico. Introductions by Lannan Fellows Dennese Mae Javier and Nohora Arrieta Fernandez. Moderated by Carolyn Forché.Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador in 1990. His father fled El Salvador when he was a year old; and his mother when he was about to turn five. Both parents’ migrations were caused by the US-funded Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992). In 1999, Javier migrated through Guatemala, Mexico, and eventually the Sonoran Desert. After a coyote abandoned his group in Oaxaca, Javier managed to make it to Arizona with the aid of other migrants. His first full-length collection, Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), explores how immigration and the civil war have impacted his family. About Natalie Scenters-ZapicoNatalie Scenters-Zapico is a poet, educator, and activist from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, USA and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, México. She is the author of Lima :

On November 17, 2020, the Lannan Center presented a Crowdcast webinar featuring Carmen Giménez Smith and José Olivarez. Introduced by Aminatta Forna and moderated by  English Department Chair Ricardo Ortíz and Professor Elizabeth Velez. Carmen Giménez Smith is most recently the author of Be Recorder (2020), which was shortlisted for both the National Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award. Her 2013 collection Milk and Filth, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a Professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, VA.José Olivarez's debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/ Jean Stein Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. It was named a top book of 2018 by The Adroit Journal, NPR, and the New York Public Library. In 2019, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" —

On October 20, 2020, the Lannan Center presented a Crowdcast webinar featuring Valeria Luiselli in conversation with Aminatta Forna. Introduced by Lakshmi Krishnan. Valeria Luiselli's recent novel, Lost Children Archive was a finalist for the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and long-listed for the 2019 Booker Prize, and has been named a best book of 2019 by Entertainment Weekly, Vanity Fair, Vulture, and Time. Lost Children Archive sits beside Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions, Luiselli’s ground-breaking book-length essay that has become a touchstone text for those looking to facilitate meaningful and informed conversations around the immigration crisis. Luiselli is also the author of the novels The Story of My Teeth and Faces in the Crowd, and Sidewalks, an essay collection. She is the recipient of a 2019 Macarthur “Genius Grant” and her works have been recognized by the National Book Critics Circle, The National Book Foundation, The New York Times, NPR, The Guardian, Publisher’s Weekly, Kirku

On September 29, 2020 the Lannan Center presented a Crowdcast webinar featuring Susan Choi in Conversation with Maureen Corrigan. Introduction by Aminatta Forna.Susan Choi is most recently the author of Trust Exercise (2019), which won the National Book Award for fiction, and her first book for children, Camp Tiger (2019). Her first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction.  Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award.  In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lammy Award. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she teaches fiction writing at Yale and lives in Brooklyn.Maureen Corrigan is The Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism in the Department of English at Georgetow