Story in the Public Square

“Story in the Public Square” began as an annual, academic conference at Salve Regina University.  When we honored Danny Strong with the 2014 Pell Center Prize for Story in the Public Square, his acceptance speech was so moving, so incisive, and so eloquent about the power of story that a public television executive in the audience asked if she could broadcast it.  She did, and the rest is history.

Danny Strong is one of today’s most prolific TV and big-screen talents with almost 50 acting credits, 11 screenwriting credits, eight producer credits and three directing credits. For screenwriting, he is best known for “Recount,” “Game Change,” Lee Daniels’ “The Butler,” and “Mockingjay,” the two-part “Hunger Games” finale.  Strong is also known for the 2019 TV series “Proven Innocent” and the 2017 film “Rebel in the Rye,” both of which he directed.  His most notable acting roles include appearances as characters on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Gilmore Girls,” “Mad Men,” “Justified,” and “Billions.” He is co-creator and executive producer of the smash-hit “Empire.”

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Poems provide readers with frames of reference, a lens through which to see the world. Maggie Smith shares the inspiration, personal experience, and context behind her award-winning poems, including her most-recent collection, Good Bones, which was published to critical acclaim. 

Smith is the author of three books of poetry: Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017); The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison(2015); and Lamp of the Body (Red Hen Press, 2005). Her poems are widely published and anthologized, appearing in many publications, including: Best American Poetry, the New York Times, Tin House, The Paris Review, Ploughshares,Virginia Quarterly Review. In 2016 her poem “Good Bones” went viral internationally and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. Public Radio International called it “the official poem of 2016.”

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Editorial cartoonists occupy the space between writing and drawing—capturing truth and big ideas with seemingly simple illustration and an economy of words.  Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Adam Zyglis uses evocative images to connect with readers while conveying layers of meaning in a few words.

Zyglis has produced cartoons for The Buffalo News since 2004. His cartoons are internationally syndicated and have appeared in many publications around the world, including The Washington Post, USA Today, The New York Times and Los Angeles Times.  In 2013, he won the Clifford K. and James T. Berryman Award, given by the National Press Foundation. In 2007, 2011 and 2015 he won a National Headliner Award, sponsored by the Atlantic City Press Club. Additionally, in 2015 Zyglis was awarded the Grambs Aronson Cartooning with a Conscience award and the Pulitzer Prize.

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Ep 601 | Original Air Date: July 8, 2019

An estimated 5.6 million Americans live with Alzheimer’s today. Another 100,000 are living with ALS—or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Lisa Genova is a brain scientist whose best-selling novels describe not what it’s like to die from these diseases, but what it means to live with them. 

Dr. Genova is a Harvard trained neuroscientist who broke into the public’s consciousness with her novel, Still Alice. Likened to Oliver Sacks and Michael Crichton, her fiction combines her mastery of brain science and her insights into the human condition. Her other novels are Left Neglected, Love Anthony, Inside the O’Briens, and, most recently, Every Note Played.

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Ep 523 | Original Air Date July 1, 2019

The British colonies in the New World, and later the United States, were built on land taken from native populations. Philip Deloria explores the interplay of Native Americans and the development of America’s national identity.

Deloria is the first tenured professor of Native American history in the long history of Harvard University. His first book, Playing Indian (1998), explores the tradition of white Americans dressing up as “Indians” from the Boston Tea Party to today. His current book, Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract, places Native American artist Mary Sully among the greats of American art.

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Ep 522 | Original Air Date June 24, 2019

It is almost taken for granted that technology is changing America.  Whether we’re talking about job losses, election meddling, or the role of big-data in healthcare, technology is everywhere.  Helen Schulman, through her remarkable fiction, warns that technology is changing our personal relationships and our families, too. 

Schulman, a novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and non-fiction author, is the chair of Fiction for the MFA Creative Writing Program at The New School in Manhattan, and this spring, she was named a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow for her fiction writing. Her most recent work is the novel, Come with Me.

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Mikhail Gorbachev is one of the most important figures of the 20th century.  A child of the Soviet Union, and a fast rising star in the Communist Party, Gorbachev was also a democratizer whose reforms led to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.  William Taubman has authored the definitive biography of the last Soviet leader. 

William Taubman is the Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science, Emeritus, at Amherst College.  A winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Nikita Khrushchev, he’s latest book is a biography of former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev titled, simply, Gorbachev.

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Ep 520 | Original Air Date June 10, 2019

The super-heated rhetoric over immigration and border security in the United States today is part of a long tradition of anti-immigration hysteria.  Julie Keller puts our recent panic in a sociological context—exploring changes in who works on American dairy farms, and how they traveled from Latin America to farms in the upper-Mid-West. 

Julie C. Keller is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Rhode Island. She earned her doctorate in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013 and is the author of Milking in the Shadows: Migrants and Mobility in America’s Dairyland.

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Ep 519 | Original Air Date June 3, 2019

Local journalism is one of the key-stones of American democracy. There’s no substitute for an experienced, local reporter—not just to get a story, but to share it with the insight and perspective that only comes from living in the community in which they report. Alexandra Watts is one of 13 fellows with Report for America, a new effort to put reporters on the ground in communities across America.

Watts is a reporter with Mississippi Public Broadcasting, living and working in the Mississippi Delta where she focuses on under-reported issues. She is a graduate of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

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Ep 518 | Original Air Date May 27, 2019

In April 2014, officials in Flint, Michigan, switched the source of the city’s water from the Detroit water supply to the Flint, River.  It was a cost-saving move, but it touched the lives of citizens across that city.  Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha helped blow the story open.  With science and determination, she proved the decision was poisoning the children of Flint. 

An associate professor of pediatrics and human development at Michigan State University, Dr. Mona is also the founder and director of the Michigan State University and Hurley Children’s Hospital Pediatric Public Health Initiative, a model program to mitigate the impact of the Flint water crisis so that all Flint children grow up healthy and strong. She is also the author of What the Eyes Don’t See, a memoir of her role in exposing the Flint water crisis, which was the Rhode Island Center for the Book’s selection for Read Across Rhode Island, it’s annual state-wide read.

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