2008-09 Lecture Series
Presenting Sponsor: Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Series Sponsor: Glant Textiles

Richard Russo - Wed, September 17, 2008
Terry Tempest Williams - Tues, October 7, 2008
John Updike - Wed, November 12, 2008
Michael Pollan - Mon, January 12, 2009
Junot Díaz - Tues, February 24, 2009
Mira Nair - Tues, April 28, 2009

Click here to order tickets for these lectures.

More information on Lecture Series tickets.

All Lecture Series events begin at 7:30pm in the S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium at Benaroya Hall.

Media Sponsors: Seattle Magazine, KCTS 9, and KUOW 94.9 FM Puget Sound Public Radio

Hotel Sponsor: W Seattle

Richard Russo
Novelist Richard Russo’s stories are set in the small towns of America’s Northeast, places where the mills and factories that created them and a middle class life for their residents, have shut down. Russo says, “what’s disappeared more and what’s more harmful to America is the loss of the pride that came with those jobs. My fictional small towns have become places where people are hanging onto hope and hanging onto pride, and hanging on by a thread that seems to me now…much more slender than it was when my father’s generation came home at the end of the Second World War.” His novel Empire Falls was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; other books include The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool, and last year’s Bridge of Sighs. He is retired from the faculty of Colby College.

Terry Tempest Williams
Terry Tempest Williams has been called a “citizen writer,” a writer who speaks out eloquently on behalf of an ethical stance toward life. A naturalist and fierce advocate for freedom of speech, she consistently shows how environmental issues are social issues that become matters of justice. She is the author of the environmental classic Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place as well as An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field; Desert Quartet; and the forthcoming Finding Beauty in a Broken World, which begins in Ravenna, Italy, returns to the American Southwest, and ends in a small town in Rwanda, where she has helped to build a memorial to the victims of the 1994 genocide. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Robert Marshall Award from The Wilderness Society, and Lannan and Guggenheim fellowships. She teaches in the Environmental Humanities Program at the University of Utah.

John Updike
John Updike has described his subject as the American small town and the Protestant middle class. He is known for his superb craftsmanship, detailed descriptions, and prolific writing. He has published 22 novels, more than a dozen short story collections, poetry, literary criticism, and children’s books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker since the 1950s. Updike received a National Book Award in 1963 for The Centaur, and is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest. His most recent book is Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism; The Widows of Eastwick is due out in late October 2008.

Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan is a non-fiction writer who has addressed environmental issues, trends in American agriculture, and the American diet. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” These words are Pollan’s simple answer to the complex question of what people should eat. First presented in a New York Times Magazine feature article, his advice is expanded in the recent In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, which links ecology and tradition. Pollan is a contributor to The New York Times and the Knight Professor in Science and Environmental Journalism at UC Berkeley. He formerly served as executive editor of Harper’s magazine. He has received the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, and the James Beard Award for best food writing. He was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.

Junot Díaz
Junot Díaz writes about the duality of the immigrant experience. He was born in the Dominican Republic where he lived until the age of six, when his family immigrated to New Jersey. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. His debut book of short stories, Drown, met with great acclaim and earned him a PEN/Malamud Award. His second book, and first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, won the National Book Critics Circle award in 2007, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008. He teaches creative writing at MIT and is a fiction editor for the Boston Review. He is a founding member of the Voices of Writing Workshop, a writing workshop focused on writers of color.

Mira Nair
Mira Nair is an India-born, New York-based film director. Her debut feature film, Salaam Bombay! won the Golden Camera award at the Cannes Film Festival, and was followed by Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding, which was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival in 2001, Vanity Fair, based on Thackeray’s novel, and last year’s The Namesake, adapted from the novel by Jhumpa Lahiri. She is currently shooting Shantaram, starring Johnny Depp, on various locations around the world. Nair is an adjunct professor in the Film Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia University; has her own production company, Mirabai Films, and her latest project is Maisha, a film lab headquartered in Kampala, Uganda, that teaches filmmaking to East Africans and South Asians.