Best Of: Groundbreaking Conductor Marin Alsop / Poet Ocean Vuong

In 2007, Alsop became the first woman to lead a major American orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony. But on the way to great success, she faced plenty of rejection. "Girls can't do that," Alsop recalls her violin teacher told her at age nine, of becoming a conductor. "I'd never heard a phrase like that," Alsop says. "You know, it never occurred to me that there was something that girls couldn't do." Alsop was mentored by Leonard Bernstein, and has conducted major orchestras around the world.

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Finally, Vuong is author of the acclaimed novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. His novel was published in 2019, the same year he won a MacArthur "genius" grant. It was also the same year his mother died. "Ever since I lost her, I've felt that my life has been lived in only two days," Vuong tells Tonya Mosley. "There's the today where she is not here, and then the vast and endless yesterday where she was." Vuong has a new poetry collection called Time Is a Mother, which he describes as "a search for life in the aftershocks of death."