Dialogue with Marcia Franklin

Host Marcia Franklin talks with author Kalani Pickhart about her debut novel, "I Will Die in a Foreign Land." Based on the Maidan uprising in Ukraine in 2013 and 2014, the book's publication coincidentally occurred a few months before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Pickhart talks about what that's been like, and why she was drawn to write about Ukraine.

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Originally Aired: 11/25/2022

The interview is part of Dialogue's series "Conversations from the Sun Valley Writers' Conference" and was taped at the 2022 conference. Since 1995, the conference has been bringing together some of the world's most well-known and illuminating authors to discuss literature and life.

Marcia Franklin talks with Yale Professor of History Joanne Freeman about her book The Field of Blood. In it, Freeman illustrates how the U.S. Congress leading up to the Civil War was a more violent body than previously thought. Franklin asks her about parallels to current tensions in Congress. Freeman also discusses her next book, "Hunting for Hamilton," and the value of studying history.

Don't forget to subscribe, and visit the Dialogue website for more conversations that matter.

Originally Aired: 11/8/2019

The interview is part of Dialogue's series "Conversations from the Sun Valley Writers' Conference" and was taped at the 2019 conference. Since 1995, the conference has been bringing together some of the world's most well-known and illuminating authors to discuss literature and life.

Host Marcia Franklin talks with author Kali Fajardo-Anstine about her short story collection, "Sabrina & Corina," which was a finalist for a National Book Award, and her novel, "Woman of Light." Both draw on her own multicultural history to tell stories set in Colorado.

Originally Aired: 11/11/2022

The interview is part of Dialogue's series, "Conversations from the Sun Valley Writers' Conference," and was taped at the 2022 conference. Since 1995, the conference has been bringing together some of the world's most well-known and illuminating authors to discuss literature and life.

Sarah Broom unpacks her National Book Award-winning memoir, "The Yellow House," which chronicles the devastating effects that decades of neglect and bureaucratic amnesia have had on her childhood neighborhood of New Orleans East. The book also pays homage to the house she and her 11 siblings grew up in, which was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina, but which lives on in Broom's prose.

Originally Aired: 12/24/21

The interview is part of Dialogue's series, "Conversations from the Sun Valley Writers' Conference," and was taped at the 2021 conference. Since 1995, the conference has been bringing together some of the world's most well-known and illuminating authors to discuss literature and life.

Marcia Franklin talks with author Rebecca Donner about "All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days," which chronicles the life of Mildred Harnack, her great-great-aunt. Harnack and her husband helped found one of the largest resistance groups against the Nazis. They were both discovered, however, and killed. Mildred is the only known American woman to be executed on the direct orders of Hitler.

Don't forget to subscribe, and visit the Dialogue website for more conversations that matter!

Originally Aired: 11/4/2022

The interview is part of Dialogue's series, "Conversations from the Sun Valley Writers' Conference," and was taped at the 2022 conference. Since 1995, the conference has been bringing together some of the world's most well-known and illuminating authors to discuss literature and life.

Marcia Franklin talks with author Patricia Nelson Limerick about her books about the American West. Limerick shares her views that the West has been overly romanticized and that history has ignored the contributions of women and people of color in settling the West.

Originally aired: 04/17/1997

Marcia Franklin talks with maritime writer and historian Nathaniel Philbrick, the speaker at the 2013 Idaho Humanities Council Distinguished Humanities Lecture. Philbrick is the author of numerous books, including most recently "Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution," which looks at the deadliest battle of the American Revolution and how it influenced the birth of our country.

A sailor, Philbrick is also known for his book, "In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex," which introduced readers to the true story behind Herman Melville's Moby Dick. It won the National Book Award in 2001, and was the basis for an American Experience documentary on PBS in 2011.

Originally aired: 10/18/2013

Journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eliza Griswold talks with host Marcia Franklin about her book Amity and Prosperity, which investigates the effects of fracking in a southwestern Pennsylvania community. The two discuss how Griswold researched the book and the rural-urban divide in American politics. Griswold also talks about her forthcoming book of poetry.

Don't forget to subscribe, and visit the Dialogue website for more conversations that matter.

Originally Aired: 11/9/2018

The interview is part of Dialogue's series "Conversations from the Sun Valley Writers' Conference" and was taped at the 2018 conference. Since 1995, the conference has been bringing together some of the world's most well-known and illuminating authors to discuss literature and life.

Dialogue host Marcia Franklin talks with historical novelist Lois Leveen about two of her works: The Secrets of Mary Bowser, about a former slave who was a spy in the Confederate White House, and Juliet's Nurse, which imagines the life of the nurse in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Franklin asks Leveen about how she researches her ideas and what she hopes readers will glean from her works.

Originally Aired: 02/13/15

As the United States heads for what portends to be a raucous convention season, Dialogue host Marcia Franklin talks with Eric Liu, the founder of Citizen University in Seattle, about whether it's even possible in a seemingly fractured society to have a civil discussion about politics. Liu, also the executive director of the Citizenship and American Identity Program at the Aspen Institute, is trying to reclaim civic education from the doldrums and encourage Americans to act on their rights. His TED Talk on the subject has more than a million and a half views.

Franklin and Liu discuss the "tectonic" demographic shift in the country and what it potentially means for governing, how Americans from diverse backgrounds are still bound together by a common creed, and what he describes as a "third Reconstruction Period" in the United States. Liu, an attorney, is the author of more than a half-dozen books, including "Gardens of Democracy," "Guiding Lights," "The True Patriot," and "The Accidental Asian."

Originally aired: 07/15/2016