In the waning days of the Obama era, artists and young people are shaping our discussion about race through activism, social media, film, and art. Author Jeff Chang’s newest book Who We Be: The Colorization of America remixes comic strips and contemporary art, campus protests, and corporate marketing campaigns for a fresh look at America’s racial divide. Director Justin Simien's Dear White People film taps into the unease of "post-racial" hype among college students of color. Join Chang and Simien in a talk about how art and writing are speaking to this moment and what happens next when the Obamas leave, and the White House goes back to being a white house.

Lee, a deeply influential writer about race, class, and immigrant life in America sets his gripping and fiercely imagined new novel in a chilling dystopia, where abandoned post-industrial cities have been converted into forced labor colonies populated with immigrant workers. The fate of the world may lay in the hands of one nervy girl named Fan, a beautiful fish tank diver, who jolts the labor colony by running away. Join Lee and the story-bending author Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe for a conversation on alternate realities and the power of a riveting story to change the way we see the world.

When artists and artisans can’t make a living, we all pay the price. Scott Timberg’s original and important  new book, Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class, examines the roots of a creative crisis that has put booksellers, indie musicians, architects and graphic designers out of work and struggling to afford healthcare, stable housing and educational opportunities for their kids. This panel of creative thinkers and doers convenes to examine this urgent issue and explore what we can do to change course.

One of the most influential and celebrated musicians of our time, Carlos Santana, will sit down with L.A.'s own Cheech Marin to share the story of his life—from his humble childhood in Mexico to his emergence in the 1960s rock underground in San Francisco and the explosion of his musical career. In his new memoir The Universal Tone, Santana’s authentic voice and the unparalleled story is delivered with a level of passion and soul equal to the legendary charge of his guitar. From collaborations with other greats like Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock to Juanes, Pitbull and Lila Downs, hear the remarkable life story from a musician Rolling Stone has rated as one of the greatest guitarists of all time.

The comprehensive new Norton Anthology of World Religions, under the editorial direction of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jack Miles, assembles primary texts from six major world religions in the religious equivalent of a giant "family album." Miles questions whether religion can be defined, and considers how, sometimes, the supposedly ancient turns out to be quite recent, and the truly ancient turns out to be surprisingly modern. Three religious traditions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—loom especially large in the lives of Americans; listen in on a discussion that promises to unveil many other surprises as these three religious "cousins" flip through the album together.

In her new book, Thornton, best-selling author of Seven Days in the Art World, uses a structure of richly linked, cinematic scenes that allow us access to understanding a dazzling range of artists—including Cindy Sherman, Gabriel Orozco, Marina Abramović, Ai Weiwei, and Christian Marclay, among many others. In this conversation with the Hammer’s Allison Agsten, Thornton discusses her research—how she rummaged through artists’ bank accounts, bedrooms, and studios and witnessed their crises and triumphs—as well as the wildly different answers—and non-answers—she received to the question, “What is an artist?”

In her years of research, Lepore—Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer—has uncovered an astonishing trove of documents, including the never-before-seen private papers of Wonder Woman’s creator, William Moulton Marston. Marston, who also invented the lie detector—lived a life of secrets, only to spill them onto the pages of Wonder Woman comics. Lepore discusses this riveting story about the most popular female superhero of all time, illustrating a crucial history of twentieth century feminism.

From Madame Bovary to Hedda Gabler, some of literature’s most passionate heroines find themselves under the fire of their times. In Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary, the Irish novelist took on nothing less than the mother of Christ. In his masterful new novel, Nora Webster, he portrays a fiercely compelling young Irish widow and mother of four navigating grief and fear and struggling for hope. Rachel Kushner (The Flamethrowers) joins Tóibín for a discussion about creating characters that erupt off the page in novels where the political and the personal are locked in a deep and fascinating embrace.

One of our greatest American writers returns to the small Iowa town of Gilead—the setting of her earlier Pulitzer Prize-winning novel—in the unforgettable story of a girlhood lived on the fringes of society in fear, awe, and wonder. Hear Robinson read and reflect on this masterpiece of prose, where the small town of Gilead becomes as quintessential to the rich fabric of American life as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.

When we ask young men and women to go to war, what are we asking of them? When their deployments end and they return—many of them changed forever—how do they recover some facsimile of normalcy? MacArthur award-winning author David Finkel discusses the struggling veterans chronicled in his deeply affecting book, Thank You for Your Service with Skip Rizzo, Director for Medical Virtual Reality at the Institute for Creative Technologies at USC—who has pioneered the use of virtual reality-based exposure therapy to treat veterans suffering from PTSD.

Presented in association with The L.A. Odyssey Project.