Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference

In this episode of BEYOND THE PAGE, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with Pulitzer Prize-winning authors MARK STEVENS and ANNALYN SWAN about their landmark biography Francis Bacon: Revelations.

MARK STEVENS is the former art critic of New York magazine. He has been the art critic for The New Republic and Newsweek and has also written for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times.

ANNALYN SWAN is the former arts editor of Newsweek and an award-winning music critic. She teaches biography at the Graduate Center of CUNY as well as at the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English. Stevens and Swan won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for their biography, de Kooning: An American Master. They live in New York.

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In this episode of BEYOND THE PAGE, former United States Ambassador to the United Nations, human rights activist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author SAMANTHA POWER – interviewed in the lead-up to her pending US Senate confirmation vote to be President Biden’s new administrator of USAID – discusses her distinctly American journey from immigrant to war correspondent to one of America’s leading foreign policy voices. Power transports us from her childhood in Dublin to the streets of war-torn Bosnia to the White House Situation Room and the world of high-stakes diplomacy, offering a compelling and deeply honest look at navigating the halls of power while trying to put one’s ideals into practice. Along the way, she lays bare the searing battles and defining moments of her life, shows how she juggled the demands of a 24/7 national security job with raising two young children, and makes the case for how we each can advance the cause of human dignity.

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In this episode, the host of American Public Media’s award-winning radio show The Splendid Table shares with us a few unforgettable food stories from his childhood, along with some of his current thoughts about the social experience of food during these pandemic times, the struggles and future of restaurants, and how certain tastes become identity markers for life.

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On today's episode of Beyond the Page, John Burnham Schwartz speaks with David Eagleman, who not only teaches neuroscience at Stanford University, but is also CEO and co-founder of New Century, a company that develops devices for sensory substitution.

Eagleman is the author most recently of Live Wired: The Inside Story of the Ever Changing Brain, as well as The Brain, The Story of You, and many other books. He's the host of the new Netflix documentary, The Creative Brain. And not only all that, but his short story collection, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, inspired producer Brian Eno to write 12 new pieces of music, which they performed together at the Sydney Opera House.

In the conversation, we explore how Eagleman is a spirited and enlightening guide to so many important biological and moral issues underpinning our lives and behaviors from QAnon and cults to the wiring of Trump's brain, to the relationship between identity, personality, biology, empathy, legal culpability and much, much more.

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On Christmas morning, 2020, the writer BARRY LOPEZ died in Eugene, Oregon, surrounded by his family, after a long battle with prostate cancer.

Widely honored as one of our greatest writers about the natural world – in non-fiction classics such as “Of Wolves and Men,” “Arctic Dreams,” and “Horizon” – for half a century Barry traveled the globe – High Arctic to Antarctica, Oregon to Kenya – bringing back stories etched in luminous prose that explored our profound connections to the diverse, fragile planet we inhabit. 

Two weeks before his death, Barry received the first Sun Valley Writers’ Conference WRITER IN THE WORLD PRIZE, given to a writer whose work expresses that rare combination of literary talent and moral imagination, helping us to better understand the world and our place in it.

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In this episode of BEYOND THE PAGE, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with novelist and classicist MADELINE MILLER, author of THE SONG OF ACHILLES and CIRCE, about why Homer’s wisdom has never been more relevant, and why she decided to finally give a witch who changes men into pigs the starring role in her own drama.

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Join us for a conversation with ROGER MCNAMEE, the noted tech venture capitalist, early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook investor, who went from being a founding supporter of the world’s biggest and most profitable social media company to becoming one of its most influential critics. There is nothing the charismatic McNamee won’t discuss about Facebook's business model and practices, including his own adventures at the birth of Big Tech. 

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In this episode, internationally beloved author ISABEL ALLENDE, sits down virtually with her good friend, PBS/NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown, to discuss her latest novel “A LONG PETAL OF THE SEA.” Along the way, she brings us closer to the upheavals of the Spanish Civil War; Chile during Pinochet’s military dictatorship; the stories of refugees known and imagined; and, of course, the art of fiction.

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In this episode of Beyond the Page, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with Ayad Akhtar, the new president of PEN America and author of Homeland Elegies, about the uncanny experience of writing his latest novel.

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In this episode of BEYOND THE PAGE, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with SUSAN ORLEAN, longtime New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author of The Library Book and The Orchid Thief, about libraries and memory, about the eccentric nature of curiosity, and about the journalistic surprises and personal satisfactions of finally writing her own story.

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