Episodes
Vocalist, composer and instrumentalist Esperanza Spalding fell in love with music as a little girl in Portland, Oregon. She first drew acclaim as a child violinist before discovering the upright bass as a teenager. Within months she was playing in local clubs, exploring pop, rock, hip-hop and especially jazz. By age 20 she was an instructor at Boston's prestigious Berklee College of Music, and was performing with singer Patti Austin and a stellar roster of jazz greats. Her 2008 album...
Published 02/22/19
What It Takes is a podcast series featuring intimate, revealing conversations with towering figures in almost every field: music, science, sports, politics, film, technology, literature, the military and social justice. These rare interviews have been recorded over the past 25 years by The Academy of Achievement. They offer the life stories and reflections of people who have had a huge impact on the world, and insights you can apply to your own life. Subscribe to the What It Takes podcast...
Published 09/15/15
Hailed as the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world, South Africa's Athol Fugard has won international praise for creating theater of "power, glory, and majestic language." In more than 20 plays, written over six decades, he has chronicled the struggles of men and women of all races for dignity and human fulfillment. Born and raised in the Eastern Cape, he founded a multiracial theater company in the 1950s in defiance of the South African government's apartheid system. When...
Published 09/13/14
The most successful and admired female songwriter in the history of pop music, Carole King proves that one woman alone at the piano can be more powerful than a four-piece rock band or a 30-piece orchestra. She grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where her mother was a teacher and her father a firefighter. She learned to play the piano at age four and formed her first band in high school. At age 18, she scored her first Number One hit record ’Ŭ the first of 118 pop hits on the Billboard charts,...
Published 02/13/14
This autumn, Natasha Trethewey took up her duties as United States Poet Laureate, the 19th poet to serve since Congress created the position in 1985. Also known as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the Laureate is responsible for all the public poetry programs of the Library, as well as an annual lecture and reading. With her appointment as Poet Laureate, Trethewey crowns a career steeped in the complexities of American history. The marriage of her white,...
Published 10/27/12
Published 10/27/12
Louise Glück is “a strong and haunting presence” among America’s greatest living poets. Her work is distinguished by a rare ability to deploy ostensibly simple language to evoke powerful emotion. While many of her poems clearly address the challenges of life and love in the contemporary world, they are at times informed by the themes and landscapes of classical mythology. She has published 12 volumes of verse to date, including The Seven Ages, Vita Novo, Triumph of Achilles and Averno. Her...
Published 10/27/12
With the release of his debut album in 1972, Jackson Browne joined the elite rank of American singer-songwriters who shaped the musical ethos of an era. He captured the mood of the 1970s with the introspective songs on his albums Late For the Sky and The Pretender, as well as his greatest success, the classic road album Running On Empty. At the end of the decade he emerged as a highly visible social activist, co-founder of MUSE (Musicians for Safe Energy). His interest in global issues of the...
Published 01/15/11
His words are music to our ears. For over 60 years, Hal David has written the words America loves to sing. His career has spanned the decades from the swing era to the age of hip-hop and has taken him from Hollywood to Broadway to Nashville. He wrote his first hit song in 1947 and continued to score hits throughout the 1950s, writing for artists as varied as Marty Robbins, Perry Como and Sarah Vaughan. In the 1960s, his partnership with composer Burt Bacharach produced an...
Published 05/14/10
America's greatest living chronicler of men at war, Rick Atkinson draws on an intimate knowledge of the soldier's life. The son of a career army officer, he was born in Germany and grew up on military posts. He developed his mastery of research -- along with his powerful prose style and keen eye for the telling detail -- as a reporter for The Kansas City Times and The Washington Post. In 1982, he was honored, along with the rest of the Kansas City newsroom team, with a Pulitzer Prize for...
Published 03/24/10
America's greatest living chronicler of men at war, Rick Atkinson draws on an intimate knowledge of the soldier's life. The son of a career army officer, he was born in Germany and grew up on military posts. He developed his mastery of research -- along with his powerful prose style and keen eye for the telling detail -- as a reporter for The Kansas City Times and The Washington Post. In 1982, he was honored, along with the rest of the Kansas City newsroom team, with a Pulitzer Prize for...
Published 03/24/10
To date, Alexander McCall Smith has written more than 60 books, including everything from children's stories to legal textbooks, but he is best known for his delightful series, No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, featuring the African sleuth, Precious Ramotswe. The series has now been translated into 39 languages and has sold over 7 million copies worldwide. McCall Smith was born in what is now Zimbabwe, and educated there and in Scotland. He returned to Africa to establish a new law school at...
Published 07/03/09
To date, Alexander McCall Smith has written more than 60 books, including everything from children's stories to legal textbooks, but he is best known for his delightful series, No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, featuring the African sleuth, Precious Ramotswe. The series has now been translated into 39 languages and has sold over 7 million copies worldwide. McCall Smith was born in what is now Zimbabwe, and educated there and in Scotland. He returned to Africa to establish a new law school at...
Published 07/03/09
Born and raised in South Africa, Nadine Gordimer published her first short story in a children's magazine at the age of 15. She left college without a degree and continued publishing short fiction in South African journals. She drew attention outside her country in 1951, when her stories began appearing in The New Yorker magazine. In her short stories and novels such as Burger's Daughter and July's People, she explored the distortions imposed on ordinary human relationships by oppressive...
Published 07/03/09
The poet and playwright Wole Soyinka is a towering figure in world literature. He has won international acclaim for his verse, as well as for novels such as The Interpreters. His work in the theater ranges from the early comedy The Lion and the Jewel to the poetic tragedy Death and the King's Horseman. Born in Nigeria, he returned from graduate studies in England just as his country attained its independence from Britain. Many of his plays, including Kongi's Harvest and Madmen and...
Published 07/03/09
The songs Brian Wilson created as leader of the Beach Boys combined the rhythms of rock and roll with Baroque counterpoint and jazz harmony to create an exhilarating sound that has become the perennial soundtrack of the American summer. Despite near deafness in one ear, Brian Wilson began experimenting with music and tape recorders as a teenager in Hawthorne, California. Forming the Beach Boys with his two younger brothers, a cousin, and a neighbor, he recorded their first single at...
Published 07/05/08
Taylor Swift attended the International Achievement Summit as a student delegate in 2008. In Part 2 of this video excerpt from her performance at the Summit, she sings "Teardrops on My Guitar" and "Picture to Burn"
Published 07/05/08
Taylor Swift attended the International Achievement Summit as a student delegate in 2008. In Part 1 of this video excerpt from her performance at the Summit, she sings her hits "Our Song" and "Tim McGraw."
Published 07/05/08
The brilliant novelist, poet and literary innovator Michael Ondaatje was born on the island nation of Ceylon (now the independent republic of Sri Lanka) to parents of Indian and Dutch descent. When Ondaatje was nine his parents separated, and his mother took him, along with his brother and sister, to England. At 19, Ondaatje immigrated to Canada; he has since become a Canadian citizen. Ondaatje first won recognition as a poet. His collected poems, There's a Trick With a Knife I'm...
Published 07/04/08
The dynamic evolution of W.S. Merwin's verse -- allied with his accomplishments as translator, essayist and environmentalist -- have made him the most admired and imitated of American poets. He published his first volume of verse at age 24 and soon won acclaim for an impressive mastery of classical verse technique, combined with a vivid appreciation of animal life and the natural world. Merwin embraced the use of more colloquial language and contemporary themes in the 1960s, advocating...
Published 07/03/08
A. Scott Berg found his calling early in life. At 15, he already knew he wanted to attend Princeton University. At Princeton he determined to tell the story of 20th century America by writing "five or six biographies" of American cultural figures. At 19 he began work on his senior thesis, a biography of Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor who "discovered" and developed F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, James Jones and dozens of other important writers. After graduating...
Published 07/03/08
A. Scott Berg found his calling early in life. At 15, he already knew he wanted to attend Princeton University. At Princeton he determined to tell the story of 20th century America by writing "five or six biographies" of American cultural figures. At 19 he began work on his senior thesis, a biography of Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor who "discovered" and developed F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, James Jones and dozens of other important writers. After graduating...
Published 07/03/08
America's greatest living chronicler of men at war, Rick Atkinson draws on an intimate knowledge of the soldier's life. The son of a career army officer, he was born in Germany and grew up on military posts. He developed his mastery of research -- along with his powerful prose style and keen eye for the telling detail -- as a reporter for The Kansas City Times and The Washington Post. In 1982, he was honored, along with the rest of the Kansas City newsroom team, with a Pulitzer Prize for...
Published 07/03/08
"F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. I think I've proved him wrong. And all because I refused to settle for a one-act existence, the 30 years I taught English in various New York City high schools." Frank McCourt was already retired when he published his first book at age 66. Angela's Ashes, a memoir of his impoverished boyhood in Limerick, Ireland, shot to the top of the best-seller lists and remained there for over a year. Angela's Ashes won McCourt the...
Published 07/03/08
Khaled Hosseini's novel, The Kite Runner, has become an international publishing phenomenon and a modern classic. This tale of childhood innocence betrayed, set against three tragic decades in the history of Afghanistan, gave readers around the world an insight into the human truth behind the headlines. This unforgettable book is the product of Khaled Hosseini's own life experience. Born in Afghanistan, his family fled to the United States when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. In...
Published 07/03/08