Lannan Center Podcast

On Thursday, March 27th, the Lannan Center welcomed actress and activist Susan Sarandon to begin the final night of the center's annual symposium, this year entitled "Writing Climate", with a reading from Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. The reading was followed by a conversation with biologist Dr. Dino J. Martins, moderated by author Aminatta Forna. 

Dr. Dino J. Martins is internationally respected for his evolutionary biology and entomological research, biodiversity conservation work, and natural history writing, and he is widely known as one of Kenya’s leading biological scientists. Dr. Martins graduated with a B.A. in Anthropology from Indiana University in 1999 and worked on his M.Sc. in Botany at the University of KwaZulu Natal in 2004. He earned his Ph.D. in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University in 2011 before joining TBI as a postdoctoral fellow at Stony Brook University. Dr. Martins has taught in the TBI Origins field school every semester it has been offered since Spring 2011.

Dr. Martins' research in the Turkana Basin has included the description of new species of bees, including some of the most ancient lineages of bees known and the discovery of genera previously not recorded from Africa. Dr. Martins is also a Co-PI of the Turkana Genome Project, which brings together dozens of international scientists to look at the complex interactions among human genes, the environment, and adaptation in a world that is increasingly mismatched between our biology and technology/culture. Dr. Martins is actively building links and collaborations globally to expand the scientific frontiers of research at TBI. This includes building on the excellent fundamental research around human origins and evolution, to other disciplines that intersect with the fields of evolution and ecology, climate change, and the future of sustainable human existence and development.

Aminatta Forna was born in Scotland, raised in Sierra Leone and Great Britain and spent periods of her childhood in Iran, Thailand, and Zambia. She is the award-winning author of the novels Happiness, The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones, and a memoir, The Devil that Danced on the Water, and most recently the essay collection, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion. Forna is the recipient of a Windham Campbell Award from Yale University, has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award 2011, a Hurston Wright Legacy Award, the Liberaturpreis in Germany, and the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, and was made OBE in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours 2017. She is currently Director of the Lannan Center at Georgetown University. 

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Thursday, March 27th, the Lannan Center welcomed award-winning author and journalist Omar El Akkad for a conversation with New York Times contributor Aida Alami as part of the center's annual symposium, this year entitled "Writing Climate".

Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager, and now lives in the United States. The start of his journalism career coincided with the start of the war on terror, and over the following decade, he reported from Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and many other locations around the world. His work earned a National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists.

His fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ, and many other newspapers and magazines. 

His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, Washington Post, GQ, NPR, Esquire, and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 novels that changed our world.

His short story “Government Slots” was selected for the Best Canadian Stories 2020 anthology. His newest novel, What Strange Paradise, won the 2021 Giller Prize and the Pacific Northwest Book Award.

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Wednesday, March 26th, the Lannan Center welcomed human rights and environmental justice activist Kumi Naidoo for a conversation with Climate Rights International Founder Brad Adams as part of the center's annual symposium, this year entitled "Writing Climate".

Kumi Naidoo is a prominent South African human rights and environmental justice activist. At the age of fifteen, he organized school boycotts against the apartheid educational system in South Africa. His courageous actions made him a target for the Security Police, leading to his exile in the United Kingdom, where he remained until 1990. Upon his return to South Africa, Kumi played a pivotal role in the legalization of the African National Congress in his home province of KwaZulu Natal.

Currently, Kumi serves as a Senior Advisor for the Community Arts Network (CAN). He holds the position of distinguished visiting lecturer at Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and is a Professor of Practice at the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University. Additionally, he continues to represent global interests as a Global Ambassador for Africans Rising for Justice, Peace, and Dignity. He also holds positions as a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University and an Honorary Fellow at Magdalen College.

Kumi has authored and co-authored numerous books, the most recent being Letters To My Mother (2022), a personal and professional memoir that won the HSS 2023 non-fiction award by the National Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Brad Adams was the Executive Director of the Asia division at Human Rights Watch from 2002-2022. In this position, he oversaw investigations, advocacy, and media work in twenty countries, including China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Myanmar, Japan, and North Korea.

He worked on issues such as attacks on environmental and human rights defenders, land rights, labor rights, the protection of civil society, freedom of expression, refugees, women’s rights, impunity, and international justice. He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, the Guardian, Foreign Affairs, and the Wall Street Journal, among others. He has regularly appeared on the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and other major media.

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, March 25th, the Lannan Center welcomed award-winning author Amitav Ghosh for a conversation with journalist Razia Iqbal as part of the center's annual symposium, this year entitled "Writing Climate".

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria and is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and The Ibis Trilogy, consisting of Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire. The Great Derangement; Climate Change and the Unthinkable, a work of non-fiction, appeared in 2016. Gun Island was released in September 2019. Ghosh’s first-ever book in verse, Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban, was published in February 2021. His latest books, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, was released in October 2021, and Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories was released in February 2024.

The Circle of Reason was awarded France’s Prix Médicis in 1990, and The Shadow Lines won two prestigious Indian prizes the same year, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Puraskar. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke award for 1997, and The Glass Palace won the International e-Book Award at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2001. In January 2005, The Hungry Tide was awarded the Crossword Book Prize, a major Indian award. His novel, Sea of Poppies (2008) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, 2008 and was awarded the Crossword Book Prize and the India Plaza Golden Quill Award.

Amitav Ghosh’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and he has served on the juries of the Locarno and Venice film festivals. His essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The New York Times. They have been anthologized under the titles The Imam and the Indian (Penguin Random House India) and Incendiary Circumstances (Houghton Mifflin, USA). The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, a work of non-fiction, was given the inaugural Utah Award for the Environmental Humanities in 2018.

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, February 25th, the Lannan Center welcomed award-winning poet Dana Levin for a reading, hosted by Carolyn Forché. 

Dana Levin is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Now Do You Know Where You Are (2022), a New York Times Notable Book and NPR “Book We Love.” Her first book, In the Surgical Theatre, was chosen by Louise Glück for the 1999 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and went on to receive numerous honors, including the 2003 PEN/Osterweil Award. Copper Canyon Press brought out her second book, Wedding Day, in 2005, and in 2011, Sky Burial, which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.” Banana Palace, published in 2016, was a finalist for the Rilke Prize.

Levin’s poetry and essays have appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The American Poetry Review, The Nation, and Poetry. Her fellowships and awards include those from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the Library of Congress, as well as the Lannan, Rona Jaffe, Whiting, and Guggenheim Foundations. With Adele Elise Williams, she co-edited Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master (2023) for the Unsung Masters Series.

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, February 4th, the Lannan Center welcomed renowned poet, essayist, professor of Classics, and translator Anne Carson for a reading, hosted by Carolyn Forché.

Anne Carson was born in Toronto, Ontario, on June 21, 1950. She attended St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto and, despite leaving twice, received her BA in 1974, her MA in 1975 and her PhD in 1981. Since bursting onto the international poetry scene in 1987 with her long poem “Kinds of Water,” Carson has published numerous books of poetry, including Wrong Norma (New Directions, 2024), a finalist for the National Book Award and long-listed for the National Books Critics Circle Award; Float (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016); Red Doc> (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013); The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; Autobiography of Red (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998); and Short Talks (Brick Books, 1992).

Also a Classics scholar, Carson is the translator of Electra (Oxford University Press, 2001), If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Knopf, 2002), and An Oresteia (Faber and Faber, 2009), among others. She is also the author of Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton University Press, 1986).

Her awards and honors include the Lannan Literary Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the MacArthur Fellowship. She was also the Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany.

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, January 21st, the Lannan Center presented a reading featuring poets Eduardo C. Corral and Tyree Daye, hosted by Carolyn Forché.

Eduardo C. Corral is the son of Mexican immigrants. He’s the author of Guillotine, published by Graywolf Press, and Slow Lightning, which won the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. He’s the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. He teaches in the MFA program at Washington University at St. Louis.

Tyree Daye was raised in Youngsville, North Carolina. He is the author of the poetry collections a little bump in the earth (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), Cardinal (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), and River Hymns (American Poetry Review, 2017), winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. A Cave Canem fellow and a Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellow, Daye is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, a Kate Tufts Award finalist, and a 2021 Paterson Prize finalist. He was the 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-In-Residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and received an Amy Clampitt Residency. Daye is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, October 22nd, the Lannan Center presented an evening with award-winning author Aleksandar Hemon, hosted by Rabih Alameddine, Lannan Visiting Chair.

Aleksandar Hemon is most recently the author of The World and All That It Holds (2023). He is also the author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, and three collections of short stories: The Question of Bruno; Nowhere Man, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Love and Obstacles. His other works include two books of nonfiction, My Parents: An Introduction and The Book of My Lives, the novel The Making of Zombie Wars, journalism, screenplays, and content for the Netflix original show Sense8. Born in Sarajevo, Hemon visited Chicago in 1992, intending to stay for a matter of months. While he was there, Sarajevo came under siege, and he was unable to return home. Hemon wrote his first story in English in 1995. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004. Hemon is currently Professor of Creative Writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. 

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, October 1st, the Lannan Center presented an evening with Booker Prize winner Shehan Karunatilaka, hosted by Tope Folarin, Lannan Creative Writing Visiting Lecturer.

Shehan Karunatilaka is a Sri Lankan author from Colombo. He is the author of two novels: Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew (2010), which won the Commonwealth Book Prize, the DSC Prize, and the Gratiaen Prize, and The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Sort of Books, 2022), which won the Booker Prize. His works have been translated into 26 languages. Karunatilaka is also the author of several children’s books, dedicated and inspired by his own children.

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, September 24th, the Lannan Center presented a reading by Duncan Wu, Raymond Wagner Professor in Literary Studies, from his debut collection of poems Origin Myths (Shearsman, 2024).

Duncan Wu began his career as a Fellow by Special Election at St Catherine's College, Oxford, and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the British Academy, in 1991. In 1995 he was appointed Reader in English Literature at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, where he became Professor of Romantic Studies in 1999. In 2000 he was appointed University Lecturer in English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, and Tutorial Fellow in English at St Catherine's College.  In January 2008, he left Oxford and came to Georgetown as a Professor of English. He has authored or edited a number of books, principally in the areas of Romantic Studies and Contemporary British Drama. These include Romanticism: An Anthology (four editions, 1994, 1998, 2007, 2012); A Companion to Romanticism (1998); Wordsworth's Reading 1770-1815 (2 vols., 1993, 1995); Wordsworth: An Inner Life (2000); Selected Writings of William Hazlitt (9 vols., 1998); and Making Plays: Interviews with Contemporary British Playwrights and Directors (2000). Over the years he has written for British newspapers, including The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, the TLS, and Times Higher Education. He is President of The Charles Lamb Society and former Vice-Chairman of The Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, a founder member and former Chairman of The Hazlitt Society, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.