A Public Radio International Program Hoseted by Kurt Anderson, featuring Damian Woetzel, Anna Deavere Smith, Elizabeth and the Catapult, and Edward P. Jones.
Some of the most inspired and provocative thinkers, writers, artists, business people, teachers and other leaders drawn from myriad fields and from across the country and around the world all gathered in a single place - to teach, speak, lead, question, and answer at the 2006 Aspen Ideas Festival. Throughout the week, they all interacted with an audience of thoughtful people who stepped back from their day-to-day routines to delve deeply into a world of ideas, thought, and discussion.
Bio
Kurt Andersen
Author, editor, cultural critic; host, PRI’s Studio 360 Kurt Andersen is author of the novel "Turn of the Century", a New York Times Notable Book of 1999 that Times reviewers called "wickedly satirical" and "outrageously funny" and "the most un-clichéd novel imaginable," and that The Wall Street Journal called a "smart, funny and excruciatingly deft portrait of our age." He is now at work on his second novel.
Kurt Andersen began his career in journalism at Time, where he was an award-winning writer on national affairs and criminal justice, and then for eight years the magazine's architecture and design critic. Returning to Time in 1993 as editor-at-large, he wrote a weekly column on entertainment and media, and from 1996 through 1999 he was a cultural columnist for The New Yorker. His journalism and essays have also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and Architectural Record, among other publications.
Andersen was a co-founder of Inside.com, and editor-in-chief of both New York and Spy magazines, the latter of which he co-founded.
Edward P. Jones
Edward P. Jones is a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer and novelist. Jones’ first collection of short stories, Lost in the City, was published in l992 and won the PEN/Hemingway Award, was short-listed for the National Book Award, and was the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Award. His new collection of short stories, All Aunt Hagar’s Children, was published in September 2006. Jones’ first novel, The Known World, received the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In addition, it won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and won the international IMPAC Dublin Literary award and the Lannan Literary award. Jones was named a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow for 2004. He has had stories published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Callaloo. He has taught creative writing at the University of Virginia, George Mason University, the University of Maryland, and Princeton University.
Anna Deavere Smith
Anna Deavere Smith is an actor, playwright, teacher, and author. Known for her distinct brand of documentary-theater, she wrote and performed Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities which was the runner-up for the 1993 Pulitzer Prize and earned her an Obie and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 which received two Tony Award nominations, an Obie, and numerous other awards.
Currently a professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Smith was the Ford Foundation's first artist-in-residence as well as a MacArthur Fellow. As of July 2009 she is the artist in residence with the Center for American Progress. Smith is also the founder of the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue and has received honorary degrees from several universities. In 2006, Smith was the first Aspen Institute Harman-Eisner Artist-in-Residence. She also received the 2008 Matrix Award from the New York Women in Communications, Inc. and a Fellow Award in Theater Arts from United States Artists in 2009.
Damian Woetzel
Damian Woetzel is director of the Aspen Institute's arts program and Harman-Eisner Artist-in-Residence Program. A former principal dancer with New York City Ballet, Woetzel is also the artistic director of the Vail International Dance Festival, the founding director of the Jerome Robbins Foundation's New Essential Works Program, and he works with Yo-Yo Ma and his Silk Road Connect Program in the New York City public schools. He is active as a director and producer, and among his recent projects, Woetzel was the director of the first performance of the White House Dance Series hosted by First Lady Michelle Obama and an arts salute to Stephen Hawking at Lincoln Center for the World Science Festival. Woetzel has been a visiting lecturer at Harvard Law School. In 2009, President Obama appointed Woetzel to the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities.
Elizabeth Ziman
Elizabeth wrote her first song at age six, banging out melodies on an old upright in a Greenwich Village laundry room. A born romantic, Elizabeth transformed the music of Debussy, molding it to the driving rhythms of the washer and dryer. With Debussy and Bach on her left and the Beatles just to her right, Elizabeth quickly developed a sound all her own. Her "Baroque" pop songs have frequently been compared to those of Rufus Wainwright, Fiona Apple and Laura Nyro. Elizabeth has performed extensively with her band, The Catapult (Dan Molad, Pete Lalish and Matt Wigton) around NYC.
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