BOMBLive!

Robert Polito's most recent books are the poetry collection Hollywood & God and The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber (forthcoming August 2009). His other books include Doubles, A Reader’s Guide to James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, and Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, which received the National Book Critics Circle award in biography. He is the founder and Director of the New School Graduate Writing Program, and is completing a new book, Detours: Seven Noir Lives.

David Trinidad's most recent book, The Late Show, was published by Turtle Point Press in 2007. With Jeffery Conway and Lynn Crosbie, he co-wrote Phoebe 2002: An Essay in Verse (Turtle Point, 2003), a mock-epic based on the 1950 film All About Eve. His other books include Answer Song (High Risk Books, 1994), Hand Over Heart: Poems 1981-1988 (Amethyst Press, 1991), Pavane (Sherwood Press, 1981), and Plasticville (Turtle Point, 2000), a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets. With Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton, he edited Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (Soft Skull Press, 2007). Trinidad teaches poetry at Columbia College Chicago, where he co-edits the journal Court Green.

Award-winning authors A.M. Homes and Francine Prose discuss the overlap where memoirs, histories, and novels meet in this conversation presented by BOMB's Editor-in-Chief Betsy Sussler. Part of the 2nd Annual Brooklyn Book Festival, Fall 2007

“The Figure in Narrative” series paired a prominent writer with an acclaimed visual artist for a discussion about the creative process. Painter Dana Schutz was interviewed by writer Mei Chin in Manhattan on November 2, 2005. The New York Academy of Art co-sponsored the event.

Though Ned Smyth is best known for his public art projects, his studio work has been highly acclaimed since he began showing in the 1970s. He continues to produce both public and studio work today. His forthcoming public project, The Next Generation, will be installed at Lehman College in the Bronx. His recent show at Salomon Contemporary featured primal, found objects—such as stones, twigs and cast concrete—composed for private spaces.

Fellow sculptor Keith Sonnier, known for his work with neon, visited Smyth at his Shelter Island studio early last summer. The two discussed their early days as artists in the SOHO scene in the '70s as well as the development of, and tension between, their public and studio art.

Anita Glesta’s Gernika/Guernica, shown in Lower Manhattan in Spring 2007, juxtaposed the provocative abstraction of Picasso's infamous painting with survivor accounts of the 1937 bombing of a Basque village. Ellen Driscoll's sculpture Revenant, a bridge made from hundreds of number 2 plastic bottles, was recently installed at the Nippon Ginko Bank in Hiroshima, Japan, one of the few structures to survive the atomic blast. The two artists discuss the power of memory and storytelling in this second BOMBLive! installment of “In the Open: Art and Architecture for Public Spaces” Series, recorded at Proteus Gowanus in Brooklyn.

The recipient of a 2007 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Peter Cole is the author of three books of poetry, most recently, Things on Which I’ve Stumbled. He has translated widely from Hebrew and Arabic, and has received numerous awards for his work, including the PEN Translation Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His anthology The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492 received the university press book of the year award from the American Publishers Association. Co-founder and publisher of Ibis Editions, he divides his time between Israel and the U.S.

Cole was interviewed by MacArthur Fellow Edward Hirsch, President of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and author of over ten books of poetry and prose, including the national bestseller How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry.

Filmed live in front of an audience at the Brooklyn Public Library.

Nathan Englander's story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, became an international bestseller, and earned him a PEN/Faulkner Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Englander was selected as one of 20 Writers for the 21st Century by The New Yorker. He was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, in 2004, he was a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. The Ministry of Special Cases is his first novel.

Rivka Galchen was raised in Norman, Oklahoma, went to Princeton, and then received her MD at the Mount Sinai School of medicine. She then received her MFA from Columbia where she now teaches. Her first novel is entitled Atmospheric Disturbances and was named as a finalist for the 2008 Governor General’s Award, one of Canada's most prestigious literary prizes.

Young Jean Lee, a New York City–based playwright with her own internationally-touring company—Young Jean Lee's Theater Company—won the 2007 OBIE Award for an emerging playwright. Her shows include The Shipment, Church, and Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven. Known for her provocative, disorienting spin on familiar subjects, she has taken on topics ranging from Asian-American identity politics to Evangelical Christianity. Describing her process, Lee has written, When starting a play, I ask myself, What’s the last play in the world I would ever want to write? Then I force myself to write it. Lee has recently won grants from the Jerome Foundation, the Rockefeller MAP Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Lee is interviewed by Richard Maxwell, one of New York City's most active and discussed playwrights. His postdramatic plays have been considered by the New York Times to be hilarious and trenchant looks at American passivity. The author and/or director of some 15 plays, his most recent work is Ode to the Man Who Kneels. Maxwell was interviewed in BOMB’s Fall 105 issue.