Politics and Prose Presents

The local news crisis in the U. S. is at a turning point. The bad news is that too many local newspapers are continuing to shrink or disappear, and understaffed television and radio stations cover too little of their communities. The good news is that some newspapers have been saved, and hundreds of non-profit digital local and state news media have sprouted across the country, nurtured by national and local philanthropy. And students at a growing number of universities are covering state and local news for growing audiences. Former Washington Post executive editor Len Downie, now a Washington-based professor for Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, will discuss his timely report on this accelerating transformation of local news coverage and what it means for news consumers.

Downie is in conversation with Sarabeth Berman. Berman is the Chief Executive Officer of the American Journalism Project (AJP), the first venture philanthropy dedicated to local news. AJP makes grants to nonprofit local news organizations across the country, supporting the successful launch of new enterprises and partnering with existing news organizations to grow and sustain their businesses. Since launching in 2019, AJP has raised more than $200 million and built a portfolio of 50 nonprofit local news organizations. Fast Company recognized AJP as one of the most innovative companies of 2023 for its work building a future for local news. Berman joined the AJP team in 2020, serving as the organization’s first CEO. Previously, she was Global Head of Public Affairs at Teach For All, a network of social enterprises in more than 50 countries, where she led communications and marketing, public-sector partnerships, and research and evaluation. Before joining Teach For All, she spent seven years in China, where she helped build Teach For China and managed a Chinese contemporary dance company. She was a 2006 Henry Luce Scholar based in Hong Kong. A graduate of Barnard College, she and her husband, journalist Evan Osnos, live in Washington, DC, and have two children. Berman serves on the boards of Capital B and the Mark Morris Dance Group.

The Boys in the Light follows the parallel journeys of Company D and Eddie Willner, the author's father, as they are caught up on two sides of World War II.

At sixteen, Eddie Willner was among the millions of European Jews rounded up by Hitler's Nazis. He was forced into slave labor alongside his father and his best friend, Mike, and spent the next three years of his life surviving the death camps, including Auschwitz. Meanwhile, in the United States, boys only a few years older than Eddie were joining the army and heading toward their own precarious futures. Once farmers, factory workers, and coal miners, they were suddenly untested soldiers, thrust into the brutal conflicts of WWII.

A company of 3rd Armored Division tankers, led by 23-year-old Elmer Hovland, quickly became battle-hardened and weary, constantly questioning whether the war was worth it. They got their answer when two emaciated boys stepped out of the woods with their tattooed arms raised.

The Boys in the Light is a testament to survival against all odds, the strength of the bonds forged during war and the resilience of the human spirit. This extraordinary true story is a must-read for fans of Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown, and Erik Larson's The Splendid and the Vile. 

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Nina Willner is the author of Forty Autumns, which Publishers Weekly called "a thrilling and relevant read," and which is still being feverishly read by book clubs eight years post-publication. Prior to her writing career, Nina was a U.S. Army intelligence officer who served in Berlin during the Cold War. Following her career in intelligence, Nina worked in Moscow, Minsk, Prague, Ottawa, and Istanbul promoting human rights, children's causes, and the rule of law for the U.S. government, nonprofits, and a variety of charities. She is married, has three grown children, and after a life living abroad, has settled in Washington, DC. Her father, Eddie Willner, survived the Holocaust, and this is his story.

The excoriating stories in Mark Doten's brilliant first collection dissect the pathological narratives that shape our culture and country. Narrated by a crosscutting array of White people, Doten's stories spotlight the self-serving logic through which their characters struggle to make sense of, and take control of, the narrative of our time. They run the political spectrum from "well-intentioned" liberals and newly woke CEOs to Trump appointees, QAnon adherents, and believers in replacement theory. There is an anti-vax nursing home employee, an anti-woke billionaire, a nonbinary sneaker podcaster turned January 6 insurrectionist, a nonprofit LA housing president dubbed "WORST KAREN EVER," an elderly Republican in denial of his COVID-19 diagnosis, teenage YouTubers responding to a shooting at their suburban Minnesota school, a demonically possessed cookie manufacturer drafting a BLM statement with his new Black employee, and a gay White supremacist figure who may be a joke on 4chan, but will have his revenge.

While their identities and allegiances differ, all of them are united by a ferocious belief in themselves, certain that everything they've done can be justified, if you'll just hear them out. In Whites, Doten has written a relentless book that confirms their standing as one of the great satirists of their generation.

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Mark Doten is the author of Trump Sky Alpha and The Infernal. One of Granta's 2017 Best of Young American Novelists, they are an editor at Soho Press and have taught at Princeton University and Columbia University. They live in Princeton, New Jersey, and Mexico City.

Doten is in conversation with Shannon Sanders. Sanders is the author of the linked short story collection Company, which won the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prize's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her short fiction has appeared in One Story, Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She lives in Silver Spring with her husband and three sons.

On May 17, 1954 the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education determined that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional. Heralded as a massive victory for civil rights, the decision's goal was to give Black children equitable access to educational opportunities and clear a path to a better future. Yet in the years following the ruling, schools in predominantly Black neighborhoods were shuttered or saw their funding dwindle, Black educators were fired en masse, and Black children faced discrimination and violence from their white peers as they joined resource-rich schools that were ill-prepared for the influx of new students.

Award-winning interdisciplinary scholar of education and Black history Noliwe Rooks weaves together sociological data and cultural history to challenge the idea that integration was a boon for Black children. She tells the story of her grandparents, who were among the thousands of Black teachers fired following the Brown decision; her father, who was traumatized by his experiences at an almost exclusively-white school; her own experiences moving from a flourishing, racially diverse school to an underserved inner-city one; and finally her son and his Black peers, who over half-century after Brown still struggle with hostility and prejudice from white teachers and students alike. She also shows how present-day discrimination lawsuits directly stem from the mistakes made during integration.

At once assiduously researched and deeply engaging, Integrated tells the story of how education has remained both a tool for community progress and a seemingly inscrutable cultural puzzle. Rooks' deft hand turns the story of integration's past and future on it's head, and shows how we may better understand and support generations of students to come.

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 Noliwe Rooks is the L. Herbert Ballou University Professor of Africana Studies, and the chair of Africana Studies at Brown University. Her work explores how race and gender both impact and are impacted by popular culture, social history, and political life in the United States. She studies the cultural and racial implications of beauty, fashion, and adornment; race, capitalism and education, and the urban politics of food and cannabis production. Rooks has received research funding from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson School among others. She is the author of five books, and a regular contributor to outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, TIME, and NPR.

Rooks is in conversation with Adam Harris, a senior fellow with the Education Policy program at New America and the author of The State Must Provide: Why America’s Colleges Have Always Been Unequal—and How to Set Them Right. Before joining New America, he covered higher education and national politics for six years on staff at The Atlantic, where he is now a contributing writer. He was previously a reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education, focusing on federal education policy and historically black colleges, and the social editor at ProPublica. He served as the 2022-2023 writer-in-residence at North Carolina A&T University. In 2021, Adam was a National Fellow at New America and was named to that year's Forbes "30 Under 30" list. He is currently working on his second book, Is This America?, a history of the South’s role in politics and how the region shapes us as a nation—but not always in the ways we assume it does, which will be published by Pantheon.

Politics and Prose is pleased to announce the third in a series of discussions meant to keep our community informed and engaged during this exceptional period in our nation’s political history. 

As millions across our region and country suffer from the Trump Administration’s evisceration of federal government services, disregard for the rule of law, and attacks on democratic institutions, states are on the front lines fighting back. Leading the charge are Democratic governors, none more so than Maryland Governor Wes Moore. A rising star in national politics, the first-term chief executive has shown resilience, compassion, and creativity in protecting his state and his constituents from Trump’s policies. Mass firings of federal employees and unprecedented cuts to scientific research, education, public safety, SNAP, Medicaid, and other vital social services have disproportionately impacted Maryland and Marylanders. With a state that’s home to hundreds of thousands of federal workers and an economy dependent on federal labs and facilities, Governor Moore is in the eye of the storm, as Trump continues to dismantle government institutions.  

Governor ​​Moore believes that government has a responsibility to answer society’s most vexing problems with clear solutions that make people’s lives better and help deliver results. It’s a mindset he developed throughout his career, from deploying overseas with the 82nd Airborne division to writing best-selling books on the fragile nature of success in America to running one of the largest poverty-fighting organizations in the country. Governor Moore’s reliance on data, evidence, and facts, along with a determination to serve all the people of his state, has made Maryland a bulwark against the harmful tactics of the Trump-Vance Administration. 

To help our community better understand the draconian changes sweeping our country, Politics and Prose has been offering a series of events this year featuring leaders from different fields sharing their expertise and offering ways to educate, mobilize, organize, and resist. We are calling these events “Teach-Ins,” inspired by similar community gatherings in the 1960s that provided a foundation for education and tools for action during the civil rights and anti-war movements.  

We are proud and honored that Governor Moore will lead our next Teach-In to explain what he and other Democratic governors are doing in response to the second Trump presidency and the vital role that states play in protecting society’s most vulnerable populations–to build a country that, in Governor Moore’s own words, “leaves no one behind.”  

We hope you will join us.  

Wes Moore is the 63rd Governor of the state of Maryland. He is Maryland’s first Black Governor in the state’s 246-year history, and is just the third African American elected Governor in the history of the United States.

Born in Takoma Park, Maryland, on October 15, 1978, to Joy and Westley Moore, Moore’s life took a tragic turn when his father died of a rare, but treatable virus when he was just three years old. After his father’s death, his family moved to the Bronx to live with Moore’s grandparents before returning to Maryland at age 14.

In 2005, Moore deployed to Afghanistan as a lieutenant with the 82nd Airborne Division, leading soldiers in combat. Immediately upon returning home, Moore served as a White House Fellow, advising on issues of national security and international relations.

In 2010, Moore wrote “The Other Wes Moore,” a story about the fragile nature of opportunity in America, which became a perennial New York Times bestseller. He went on to write other best-selling books that reflect on issues of race, equity, and opportunity, including his latest book Five Days, which tells the story of Baltimore in the days that followed the death of Freddie Gray in 2015.

Over a decade ago, Katie Simon began seeking out stories of people who faced sexual challenges after sexual trauma--just as she did. Simon interviewed dozens of survivors, and her investigation yielded diverse responses from people of all backgrounds, ultimately confirming that there is no single path toward healing.

Simon's research led her to life-changing findings that sexual assault survivors most want to know about: coping with trauma triggers and traumatic stress symptoms such as anxiety, depression, physical pain, and flashbacks. From embodied consent to self-pleasure, sexual regret, break-ups and beyond, you'll find answers to all your questions about how sexual trauma affects sex and relationships within these pages, in stories told by survivors who've actually been there.

Millions of survivors across the United States are treated as irreparably broken. Simon offers a positive approach to healing based on empathy and community--and the understanding and tools to navigate trauma and cultivate the sex lives we desire and deserve. The narratives Simon has gathered break down the potential obstacles to rebuilding post-assault, and offer multiple paths forward with optimistic, new approaches to sex after sexual assault. Packed with insights, stories, and advice, this invaluable guide reimagines what sex can look like--not only for survivors, but for all of us.

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Katie Simon is a sexuality journalist whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Lily, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, Tin House, The Rumpus, Health, BUST, Lifehacker, Business Insider, The Independent, Women's Health, Hippocampus, and elsewhere, including the anthology Anatomy of Silence. A student in the Memoir Incubator at Grub Street in Boston, MA, she earned a BA in Contemporary Storytelling at New York University, an MA in Biography and Creative Nonfiction Writing at University of East Anglia and studied Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. She lives in Texas and can be found online at KatieWSimon.com.

Simon is in conversation with Leslie Morgan Steiner. Steiner is an author, consultant and thought leader on women’s leadership, work-life balance, inspirational parenting, overcoming adversity and surviving violence against women. She lives in Washington, DC. She recently completed her fourth nonfiction work,The Naked Truth, a memoir which explores female aging and sexuality after motherhood and divorce. Her corporate experience includes The Washington Post, Johnson & Johnson, Leo Burnett and Seventeen Magazine. Follow her on Facebook or LinkedIn via Leslie Morgan Steiner, or via @lesliebooks on Instagram and Twitter,

On April 7, 1928, Maria Lani blew into Paris claiming to be a famous German actress and proceeded to seduce the cultural elite with her undeniable charisma and strangely enticing enigmatic aura. She persuaded fifty artists --Pierre Bonnard, Marc Chagall, André Derain, Henri Matisse, Georges-Henri Rouault, Fernand Léger and Suzanne Valadon among them-- to immortalize her in paintings and sculptures, which would appear as an important plot device in a forthcoming film. Unveiled as an exhibition in New York, the art works traveled to Chicago, London, Berlin, Rotterdam, and Paris. But, in 1931, as legend eventually had it, she and her husband Max Abramowicz vanished without a trace, and so did the art. The film was never made.

The Woman With Fifty Faces is about uncovering as much of the truth about Maria Lani as possible. The images that cascade through the book are stunningly beautiful, deeply compassionate, and farcically grotesque, capturing the essence of Lani's life. From Poland's antisemitic pogroms to the vulgar glamour and decadence of 1920s Paris to the Nazi occupation of France in the '40s, the tumultuous Europe Lani traverses becomes nearly as much of a character as Lani herself. Jonathan Lackman spent two decades researching Lani's life and Zachary J. Pinson spent 5,000 hours putting pen to paper. The result is a masterful collaboration about identity and the power and limits of reinvention.

PURCHASE BOOK: https://politics-prose.com/book/9798875001116?ic_referral=stmY-kvHtqjTuDGMRN7L2Rsl9XIWvRBEFwxguf8-f2wwM6F3UhH7c-XASKW7DYQixWjL7ePzPkNKw1IZeTFUjlUwTzQ2xvgFWu2VU2XXmNVwunWDzxpqNjeu-nsNWMJcoWC3URk

Jonathan Lackman first wrote about Maria Lani for Art in America and has written for The New York Times, Harper's, The New Yorker, Slate, ARTnews, and Wired. He has completed a PhD in art history from NYU and a fiction fellowship at the MacDowell Colony.

Zachary J. Pinson has spent the last two decades weaving in and out of comics, painting, and underground music. His paintings have been shown in galleries in New York, New England and Paris.

Lackman and Pinson are in conversation with Alex Hart, a novelist and short story writer who recently moved to Paris. Before turning to fiction, she worked for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times as an editor and reporter. She has been deeply involved with this project from its inception. If you see her shining today, it is from happiness and pride: The book is here, it's real and its beautiful. And she sees clearly a future Fifty Faces film and also a museum exhibiting scores of the original Maria Lani portraits. Also, a gallery show of Zack's original art. Stay tuned!

In "Machine City," a college student's role in a friend's movie causes lines to blur between his character and his true self. In "Slide to Unlock," a man comes to terms with his life, via the passwords he struggles to remember in a moment of extremis. And in "Weird Menace," a director and faded movie star discuss science fiction, memory, and lost loves on a commentary track for a film from the '80s that neither seems to remember all that well.

In Ed Park's utterly original collection, An Oral History of Atlantis, characters question the fleetingness of youth and art, reckon with the consequences of the everyday, and find solace in the absurd, the beautiful, and the sublime. Throughout, Park deploys his trademark wit to create a world both strikingly recognizable and delightfully other. All together, these sixteen stories have much to say about the meaning--and transitory nature--of our lives. And they are proof positive that Ed Park is one of the most insightful and imaginative writers working today.

Ed Park is the author of the novels Same Bed Different Dreams, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, was named a Top Ten Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly and was a New York Times Notable Book; and Personal Days, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney's, Vice, Harvard Review, and other periodicals and anthologies, and he writes regularly for The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The Atlantic, Bookforum, and elsewhere. Ed was a founding editor of The Believer and the former literary editor of The Voice Literary Supplement, and has also worked in publishing. Born in Buffalo, he lives in Manhattan with his family, and currently teaches writing at Princeton University. 

Park will be in conversation with Angie Kim, the New York Times bestselling author of Happiness Falls, a GMA and B&N book club pick, Virginia Literary Award winner, and Oprah Daily’s #1 novel of 2023. Her debut, Miracle Creek, was an Edgar winner and one of Time’s 100 best mysteries and thrillers of all time. A Korean immigrant who moved to Baltimore in middle school, Kim attended Stanford University and Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.  

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Introduction to Afrofuturism delivers a fresh and contemporary introduction to Afrofuturism, discussing key themes, understandings, and interdisciplinary topics across multiple genres in Black literature, film, and music. From Afrofuturism's origins to the present, this critical volume features scholarly works, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction which illuminates on the contributions of notable Afrofuturists such as Octavia Bulter, Sun Ra, N.K. Jemisin, Janelle Monáe, Nnedi Okorafor, Saul Williams, Prince, and more. The volume highlights the impact of films such as Black Panther (2018, 2022), The Woman King (2022), and They Cloned Tyrone (2023) and covers a variety of essential topics giving students a comprehensive view of the legacy of storytelling and the tradition of "remixing" in Black literature and arts. This volume makes connections across academic subject areas and is an engaging reader for pop culture and media film studies, women's, gender, and sexuality studies, Black and Africana studies, hip-hop studies, creative writing, and composition and rhetoric.

DuEwa Frazier is a poet, scholar, children’s author, program leader, speaker, consultant, and digital storyteller. She is the author of several volumes of poetry, stories for young readers, and the editor of scholarly volumes, including Introduction to Afrofuturism: A Mixtape in Black Literature & Arts (Routledge). DuEwa is the founder of DuEwa World Digital and Black Scholars in Podcasting. She is the creator and host of digital podcasts, Nerdacity and Afrofutures Pod featuring poets and writers.

Alan King is a Caribbean American poet, whose parents emigrated to the U.S. from Trinidad and Tobago in the early ‘70s. He’s a father, husband, and author of two collections of poetry: Point Blank (Silver Birch Press, 2016) and Drift(Aquarius Press, 2012). King’s poetry caught the attention of US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo who said: “Alan King is one of my favorite up-and-coming poets of his generation. His poems are not pop and flash, rather more like a slow dance with someone you’re going to love forever.” K

Victoria Moten is a Professional Track faculty member at the University of Maryland, Department of English. She is a doctoral student in the English Department at Howard University with a major focus in African American Literature and a minor focus in Women’s Studies. She received her M.A. in Language in Literature at Clark Atlanta University completing her thesis on the works of James Baldwin. Victoria’s research interests lie in the speculative fiction works of Black women writers, from Hurston to Butler, and what their prose presents about the importance of the human connection to nature–particularly the connection to place. She’s presented on panels at the National Council for Black Studies, College English Association, and the American University in Paris James Baldwin Conference on this subject. Her writing on this subject can be found in Introduction to Afrofuturism: A Mixtape in Black Literature & Arts (Routledge 2024). A Hurston/Wright Fellow, her creative writing ranges from poetry to short fiction.

Christian M. Hines is an Assistant Professor of Reading and Literacy at Texas State University. She is a former high school English teacher and Blerd (black nerd) and teacher educator whose work centers on the use of diverse young adult literature and multimodal texts in the secondary classroom. She leans into comics and graphic novels, specifically diverse teen superhero narratives as a way for students and practitioners to understand the intersectional lived experiences of youth and the impact that youth has on society and enacting resistance.

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For centuries, monuments have telegraphed the values and origin myths of dominant culture in public space and on massive scale. They have signaled both who is part of a culture and who is not, often overlooking histories that complicate the stories they tell. Yet in the last 50 years in the United States, the role of monuments has changed significantly. Numerous historical monuments have been removed or toppled, bringing to the fore a long-repressed conversation about the relationship between the monumental landscape and national identity. In Monumental, Cat Dawson takes up the social, political, and art historical causes and ramifications of this important shift.

Examining the conditions that have led to and define this new era, Dawson reveals that these interventions are as indebted to the monumental tradition as they are to representational strategies that grew out of twentieth-century social justice efforts, from the Civil Rights movement to queer organizing during the AIDS crisis.

Since 2014, a new generation of artists has established a groundbreaking role for monuments, calling into question the very notion of what a monument is through novel investigations of how symbolic structures can be made and what stories they can tell. This book tells the important story of that sea change.

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Cat Dawson works at the intersection of art history and feminist, queer, and trans studies. They are currently Visiting Assistant Professor in Art History and the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Smith College and University Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

Dawson is in conversation with Charlotte Ickes. Art historian Charlotte Ickes joined the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in 2019. As curator of time-based media art and special projects, she stewards the museum’s growing time-based media art collection and organizes exhibitions of contemporary art