This week, our guest is poet Natalie Diaz in conversation with essayist and author Hilton Als.  Natalie Diaz is an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian community and is the director of the Fort Mojave Language Recovery Program, where she works with the last remaining speakers of the Mojave language. Language and loss are explored throughout Diaz’s poetry, in collections including When My Brother Was an Aztec and Postcolonial Love Poem, which won her the Pulitzer Prize.

Hilton Als is another writer whose work explores American identity, in theater reviews, articles, and essays for The New Yorker, where he’s contributed since 1989. Als received the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, “for bold and original reviews that strove to put stage dramas within a real-world cultural context.”  His writing explores race, sexuality, class, art, and American identity provocatively, exploding the boundaries of the genre in which it is contained.  His most recent book is a memoir, My Pinup.

On February 9, 2023, Natalie Diaz and Hilton Als came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an onstage conversation, during which Diaz read from her work.

Natalie Diaz and Hilton Als

Since 1980, City Arts &amp; Lectures has presented onstage conversations with outstanding figures in literature, politics, criticism, science, and the performing arts, offering the most diverse perspectives about ideas and values. City Arts &amp; Lectures programs can be heard on more than 130 public radio stations across the country and wherever you get your podcasts. The broadcasts are co-produced with KQED 88.5 FM in San Francisco. Visit CITYARTS.NET for more info. 

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Matthew Desmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University and the principal investigator at The Eviction Lab, a research group that published the first-ever dataset of evictions in America, going back to 2000.  His Pulitzer-Prize-winner book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City quickly made Desmond one of America’s most important thinkers and activists. His new book, Poverty, By America, broadens the scope of his research, demonstrating how wealthy Americans keep poor people poor. On March 27, 2024, Matthew Desmond came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an on-stage conversation with Bernice Yeung, the managing editor of Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program. Her first book, In a Day’s Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America’s Most Vulnerable Workers, was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize.

Matthew Desmond

Our guest today is Angela Davis, one of the world’s most important voices for justice. The philosopher and activist came to prominence in the 1960s. Six decades later, Davis is still on the front lines fighting for equality and freedom on a range of issues from prison abolition to racial justice to gender rights. On March 20, 2024, the iconic activist and scholar came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk about her new book "Abolition, Volume 1" with Hilton Als, New Yorker staff writer and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Angela Davis

Our guest today is award-winning novelist Tommy Orange. Orange’s debut novel, There There, centered on a Native American experience that is less commonly featured in US literature - the lives of urban Native Americans. It was one of 2019’s most critically acclaimed books, and now, he’s written a followup. It’s called Wandering Stars. This new book features many of the same characters, while tracing the traumatic legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and government-run boarding schools, like the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. On February 27th, 2024, Orange came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk to author Dave Eggers. Hundreds of students and teachers attended - and among other things, Orange talked about what it’s like to have his book as assigned reading in schools.

Tommy Orange

Our guest today is Tariq Trotter, also known as Black Thought. He’s a founding member of the seminal hip hop band, The Roots and the author of the memoir The Upcycled Self. Trotter’s released more than a dozen albums and these days, he can be seen every week on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon.  In his new memoir, Trotter paints a riveting portrait of his childhood in South Philadelphia and life as a young artist, from meeting Questlove in high school to finding his own path in the music industry.  On February 24, 2024, Trotter came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk to Jelani Cobb, Dean of the Columbia Journalism School.

Tariq Trotter

Our guest is Calvin Trillin.  The journalist, humorist, poet, and novelist started his professional career in the early 1960’s at Time Magazine, and soon after became a staff writer for The New Yorker, where he continues to contribute.  He also writes for The Nation.  He is the author of 32 books, including memoir, novels, verse, and food writing.  His new book,“The Lede: Dispatches From A Life in the Press”, collects writings about journalism and its practitioners.  This conversation with writer Steven Winn was recorded at the studios of KQED in San Francisco on February 22, 2024.

This was hardly Trillin’s first appearance on City Arts & Lectures - he’s been on our stage more than any other guest, a total of 19 times since his first appearance in 1982.  So we close out this hour with excerpts from three of those programs that showcase some of Trillin’s many talents beyond serious journalism. 

Calvin Trillin began writing about regional food specialties during his travels as a reporter, and then in books like “American Fried” and “Alice, Let’s Eat”. In 2008, Trillin was joined by two distinguished women of the culinary world, former Gourmet magazine editor Ruth Reichl. and the founder of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse, Alice Waters - to discuss one of his obsessions – Buffalo chicken wings.  

Calvin Trillin also developed a journalistic sideline that he describes as “Deadline Poet” and in 2012, he explained how that got started to Steven Winn.

And finally, no Calvin Trillin City Arts & Lectures program would be complete without the story of the tic-tac-toe-playing chicken of New York’s Chinatown.  In a 1998 appearance, Trillin introduced the chicken to actor and comedian Robin Williams and interviewer Wendy Lesser.

Natalie Diaz and Hilton Als

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