Conversations with Allan Wolper

Joanna Wolper, an Emmy Award winning writer and documentary filmmaker, has uncovered the true identity of Santa Claus. She writes about her discovery in a children's book called The Man Who Could Be Santa, based on a true family adventure. Joanna Wolper's book has a web site, at www.themanwhocouldbesanta.com, featuring the real children in the story. Original music written and performed by Gabrielle Gewritz. Click above to hear the entire podcast.

In 1973, Arthur Browne became a copy boy at the Daily News. Now 44 years later he is the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of New York City’s home town newspaper. In the past four decades, Browne has covered the city’s most compelling stories…as a reporter, a columnist, editorial page editor and editor, investigative editor, managing editor, and now editor-in-chief and publisher. Politico calls Browne the “tortured heart and soul” of the newspaper. In 2007, he won a Pulitzer Prize for editorials

Bill and Hillary Clinton celebrated their birthdays there. Former New York Yankee baseball great Bernie Williams often stops by and bestselling author James Paterson made Jimmy Parker and Red Hat on the Hudson characters in his books. Former film producers, Jimmy Parker, and his wife, Mary Beth Dooley used their cinematic background to create one of the most visually exciting restaurants on the East Coast, one that sits right alongside the Hudson River in Irvington, New York. The New York Times,

Helen Benedict is a professor in The Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, a writer, and a journalist, whose work has won the attention and admiration of both the Pentagon and the White House. Her latest novel Wolf Season , the second book of her trilogy about the Iraq War, will be released next month. The book is a sequel to Sand Queen . It is being published by Bellevue Press. Professor Benedict’s book, The Lonely Soldier: The Private Life of Women in the Military, paints a

Dr. Michael Crane treats the selfless 911 responders who came to New York City from all over America to help the victims of the horrific attack on the World Trade Center that cost 2996 people their lives. Dr. Crane, who directs the World Trade Center Health Program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, says the religious and moral lessons he learned growing up was behind his desire to counsel and help those first responders. It was what he thought about when he first saw the towers

Aracelis Lucero was born and raised in the South Bronx, won a scholarship to Middlebury College, received a Masters Degree in International Affairs from Columbia University and became a Wall Street executive. But as immigration became a major issue in America, she gave up her career in finance to devote her life to helping Mexican children and their families, both documented and undocumented. Lucero is now executive director of Masa-MexEd, a nonprofit organization that focuses on educating and

For 25 years, Layla Fanucci, taught music at St. Helena Catholic School in California. But her life turned around when she bought paint and an art board at a Ben Franklin arts and crafts store. Today, Layla, who never took an art class, has had her cityscapes shown at galleries and museums in Paris, Morocco, San Francisco, and New York City. “It all happened by accident,” she said in a May, 2009 interview on Conversations with Allan Wolper. “I wanted a piece of art that was big and bold, had a

Lisa Bloom is an activist civil rights attorney who has won a national reputation by representing clients whose cases are on the cutting edge of woman’s issues. She appears on The Today Show, MSNBC, The Situation Room, and was a former host of Lisa Bloom Open Court on Court TV. She says she received her early training at home listening to her mother, Gloria Allred, a celebrity attorney who is often involved controversial cases involving woman’s issues. Lisa Bloom believes lawyers sometimes need

V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai received a United States Copyright in 1982 crediting him with being The Inventor of EMAIL, a title he earned as a 14-year-old research scholar at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark, New Jersey. He said he received a copyright certificate on August 30, 1982 , rather than a patent, because patents were not awarded to software discoveries at the time. However, he says he has been forced to defend his creation in a series of high profile court cases and high

The Poetry Foundation calls Gregory Pardlo, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, “a different kind of Derek Jeter.” Pardlo is the second African American male poet to win the Pulitzer and the sixth African American poet overall to capture the highly coveted honor. Pulitzer judges praise Pardlo’s prize winning book, “Digest” as literature that is “rich with thought and ideas” and provides readers with a clear vision of the 21st Century. Pardlo’s prose also debunks the theory that African