Story in the Public Square

Pandemic, social unrest–Americans of every age are coping with the mental health consequences of this era.  Dr. Gayani DeSilva cautions that the challenges of being a child or adolescent currently poses special health risks.

DeSilva has been a psychiatrist for 15 years and focusses on enhancing the mental health of children and adolescents and their families.  Much of her work addresses the complex array of needs with adolescent and young adult criminal and violent offenders to understand the interplay between mental illness, societal factors, and interpersonal issues.  She is the author of “A Psychiatrist’s Guide: Helping Parents Reach Their Depressed Tween,” and “A Psychiatrist’s Guide: Stop Teen Addiction Before It Starts.”  DeSilva obtained her medical training at Albany Medical College and completed her internship at Brown University, and her residency at Harvard University.  She holds numerous awards and citations, and currently is on volunteer faculty at the University of California-Irvine and is Medical Director of Behavioral Health at Inland Empire Health Plan.  DeSilva also co-hosts the podcast, “Chat and Chai,” which consists of 13 episodes, including “A Candid Conversation on Racism,” “A Discussion on Suicide, Warning Signs, Myths and More,” and “COVID-19 & Loneliness.”

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COVID-19 has put America’s top doctors on the frontlines of a battle to save lives.  Dr. Megan Ranney spends her days at the front, working in an urban emergency room where her training in public health and emergency medicine give her unique insights about the pandemic and the nation’s response.

Ranney is a practicing emergency physician and researcher, focusing on the intersection between digital health, violence prevention, and public health.  She is the current Warren Alpert Endowed Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Rhode Island Hospital/Alpert Medical School of Brown University.  Ranney is also the founding Director of the Brown-Lifespan Center for Digital Health and Chief Research Officer for the American Foundation for Firearm Injury Reduction in Medicine, the country’s only non-profit committed to using the public health approach to reduce firearm injury.  She a founding partner of GetUsPPE.org, dedicated to matching donors to health systems in need of protective equipment.  She completed her internship and residency in Emergency Medicine, Master of Public Health, and fellowship in Injury Prevention Research at Brown University.

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Americans took to the streets after the murder of George Floyd, rejecting racism in all its forms. Tricia Rose explains that structural racism has a long history in the United States—and so do the efforts to combat it.

Rose is Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. She also holds the Chancellor’s Professorship of Africana Studies and serves as the Associate Dean of the Faculty for Special Initiatives. A graduate of Yale and Brown University, Rose authored “Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America,” “Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk about Sexuality and Intimacy,” and “The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop and Why It Matters.” She sits on the Boards of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, Color of Change, and Black Girls Rock, Inc.. Focusing on issues related to race in America, mass media, structural inequality, popular culture, gender and sexuality and art and social justice, Rose engages widely in scholarly and popular audience settings. She co-hosts the weekly “The Tight Rope” podcast with Dr. Cornel West, covering a range of topics from pop culture and art and music, to the contours of systemic racism, philosophy, the power of Socratic self-examination.

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The artist’s role in society is to challenge us, to shine a mirror on our strengths and to expose our weaknesses.  Through a remarkable body of work—poetry, visual arts, rigorous scholarship on race and society, as well as ground breaking work in comic books, Eve Ewing does just that.

Ewing is an Assistant Professor in the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration.  She is a qualitative sociologist of education whose work is centered around two primary issues.  First, how racism and other large-scale structures of social inequality impact the everyday lives and experiences of young people, and second, the ways public school systems serve to interrupt or perpetuate these social problems, and the role educators, policymakers, families, community members, and young people themselves play in understanding, acknowledging, and disrupting them.  Ewing’s scholarship, community work, and classroom teaching are aimed at expanding the ways that urban school stakeholders, other researchers, and the broader public can be equipped to understand, respond to, and ultimately dismantle white supremacy, and to make school systems institutions of liberation, rather than oppression.  Ewing is the author of “Electric Arches,” which received awards from the Poetry Society of America and the American Library Association and and was named one of the year’s best books by NPR and the Chicago Tribune. She is also author of “Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side,” “1919” and the co-author of “No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks.”

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Journalists often have a front row seat as history unfolds. Over the last 30 years, David Shuster has witnessed a scandal in Arkansas that reverberated in Washington, the attacks of 911, America’s Wars and every presidential campaign in between.

Shuster is an Emmy award winning broadcast journalist who is best known for his work at NBC News and MSNBC where he hosted his own news shows and served as the primary backup host for “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” and “Hardball with Chris Matthews.”  Shuster anchored the channel’s prime time coverage of breaking news stories including politics, natural disasters, and the death of Michael Jackson.  As a field correspondent, his assignments included the Iraq war, the selection of a Pope, and Hurricane Katrina.  Shuster was an evening news anchor for Al Jazeera America, where he guided the network’s political coverage.  He most recently served as Anchor and Managing Editor for i24News, where he co-anchored prime time shows with Tal Heinrich.

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While national media coverage often swoops in to cover local stories with national significance, local reporters are typically there from the beginning.  They know the details.  They know the sequence of events.  And they know the community in which they are reporting.  Noelle Crombie knows Portland as well as anyone and she’s been reporting on the protests and violence in that beautiful city.

Crombie is a senior staff writer at The Oregonian. She writes extensively about criminal justice issues in Oregon. She was the lead reporter on “Ghosts of Highway 20,” a narrative series and 5-part documentary that won 5 regional Emmys and Oregon’s top investigative journalism award.  Crombie led a 10-month investigation into sexual abuse allegations against a founder of Mercy Corps, an international humanitarian relief organization based in Portland.  The Oregonian’s reporting prompted the immediate resignation of the organization’s CEO, one of its top lawyers and a veteran board member.  The series won two regional Emmys and captured a top prize in the prestigious Pictures of the Year International competition.  Previously, she worked as a reporter for The Day in New London, Connecticut.

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Empathy is a recurring theme on “Story in the Public Square,” because it is central to the crafting of compelling stories—whether set in fiction or non-fiction.  Paul Tremblay uses empathy to draw readers in to the strange and often terrifying worlds that he imagines. 

Tremblay is one of the best writers of horror and psychological thrillers today.  He is the author of “The Cabin at the End of the World,” “Disappearance at Devil’s Rock,” “A Head Full of Ghosts,” the crime novels “The Little Sleep and No Sleep ‘Till Wonderland,” and the short story collection, “Growing Things and Other Stories.”  His latest book is “Survivor Song,” set in a pandemic plagued world.  He has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and currently serves a member of the board of directors of the Shirley Jackson Awards.  His essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly online, and numerous years’ best anthologies.  

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If you grew up in a household that prized reading, you probably recall a book from childhood that shaped your view of the world.  Candace Fleming writes those books with an unflinching honesty about the subjects she presents. 

Candace Fleming is an educator, and speaker and author, who writes both fiction and non-fiction.  She has written more than twenty books for children and young adults, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize honored “Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of the Russian Empire,” Boston Globe/Horn Book Award-winning biography, “The Lincolns,” the bestselling picture book, “Muncha! Muncha! Muncha!,” and the beloved “Boxes for Katje.”

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The history of the American presidency is full of accomplishments and compromises, successes and failures.  Robert Dallek argues that the giants from both parties in the last 120 years draw a sharp contrast with the characteristics of the Trump presidency. 

Robert Dallek is the author of several bestselling presidential histories, including “Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power; An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963,” and the classic two-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, “Lone Star Rising” and “Flawed Giant.”  His latest book is “How Did We Get Here? From Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump.”  Dallek has taught at Columbia, Oxford, UCLA, Boston University, and Dartmouth, and has won the Bancroft Prize, among numerous other awards for scholarship and teaching.

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Whether you love them or hate them, beauty pageants continue to play a significant role in American popular culture.  Hillary Levey Friedman argues that their evolution is wrapped up in the history of feminism in the United States. 

Hilary Levey Friedman is a sociologist and expert on beauty pageants, childhood and parenting, competitive afterschool activities, and popular culture.  She is Visiting Assistant Professor of Education at Brown University.  Her new book, “Here She Is: The Complicated Reign of the Beauty Pageant in America, uses beauty pageants to trace the arc of American feminism from the 1840s to the present.  Her first book, “Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture,” followed families with elementary school-age children involved in chess, dance, and soccer covering the history of the activities, what they mean to parents and children, and implications for inequality and gender in the educational system.  Levey Friedman is the President of the Rhode Island chapter of the National Organization for Women (RI NOW).  She also serves on the Public Policy Committee of the United Way of Rhode Island and is a volunteer Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA).  She holds degrees from Harvard University, Princeton University, and the University of Cambridge. 

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