In this episode of BEYOND THE PAGE, former United States Ambassador to the United Nations, human rights activist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author SAMANTHA POWER – interviewed in the lead-up to her pending US Senate confirmation vote to be President Biden’s new administrator of USAID – discusses her distinctly American journey from immigrant to war correspondent to one of America’s leading foreign policy voices. Power transports us from her childhood in Dublin to the streets of war-torn...

In this episode, the host of American Public Media’s award-winning radio show The Splendid Table shares with us a few unforgettable food stories from his childhood, along with some of his current thoughts about the social experience of food during these pandemic times, the struggles and future of restaurants, and how certain tastes become identity markers for life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On today's episode of Beyond the Page, John Burnham Schwartz speaks with David Eagleman, who not only teaches neuroscience at Stanford University, but is also CEO and co-founder of New Century, a company that develops devices for sensory substitution. Eagleman is the author most recently of Live Wired: The Inside Story of the Ever Changing Brain, as well as The Brain, The Story of You, and many other books. He's the host of the new Netflix documentary, The Creative Brain. And not only all...

On Christmas morning, 2020, the writer BARRY LOPEZ died in Eugene, Oregon, surrounded by his family, after a long battle with prostate cancer. Widely honored as one of our greatest writers about the natural world – in non-fiction classics such as “Of Wolves and Men,” “Arctic Dreams,” and “Horizon” – for half a century Barry traveled the globe – High Arctic to Antarctica, Oregon to Kenya – bringing back stories etched in luminous prose that explored our profound connections to the diverse,...

In this episode of BEYOND THE PAGE, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with novelist and classicist MADELINE MILLER, author of THE SONG OF ACHILLES and CIRCE, about why Homer’s wisdom has never been more relevant, and why she decided to finally give a witch who changes men into pigs the starring role in her own drama. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join us for a conversation with ROGER MCNAMEE, the noted tech venture capitalist, early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook investor, who went from being a founding supporter of the world’s biggest and most profitable social media company to becoming one of its most influential critics. There is nothing the charismatic McNamee won’t discuss about Facebook's business model and practices, including his own adventures at the birth of Big Tech.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

In this episode, internationally beloved author ISABEL ALLENDE, sits down virtually with her good friend, PBS/NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown, to discuss her latest novel “A LONG PETAL OF THE SEA.” Along the way, she brings us closer to the upheavals of the Spanish Civil War; Chile during Pinochet’s military dictatorship; the stories of refugees known and imagined; and, of course, the art of fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Beyond the Page, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with Ayad Akhtar, the new president of PEN America and author of Homeland Elegies, about the uncanny experience of writing his latest novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of BEYOND THE PAGE, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with SUSAN ORLEAN, longtime New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author of The Library Book and The Orchid Thief, about libraries and memory, about the eccentric nature of curiosity, and about the journalistic surprises and personal satisfactions of finally writing her own story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his sixth novel, The Red Daughter, novelist (and regular Beyond the Page host, JOHN BURNHAM SCHWARTZ imaginatively inhabits the life of Svetlana Alliluyeva (1926 – 2011), the only daughter of Joseph Stalin, who in his three decades as the tyrannical ruler of the Soviet Union was responsible for the deaths of far more than twenty million people. At the height of the Cold War, Svetlana became the most important Soviet citizen ever to defect to the West, arriving in New York to throngs of...

In 2002, the late civil rights champion Roger Wilkins gave one of the most memorable talks ever given at the Writers’ Conference. Roger’s great grandfather was a slave. Two generations later, Roger’s uncle, Roy Wilkins, became the legendary leader of the NAACP for over two decades. Three generations removed from the Mississippi slave fields, Roger Wilkins played pivotal roles in the civil rights advancements of both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and later, as author, columnist,...

As the country reeled under the weight of one shock after another—first the pandemic, then levels of mass unemployment not seen since the Great Depression, and most recently an unprecedented wave of protests against racism and police brutality—the June issue of The Atlantic magazine ran a cover story with the provocative title, “We Are Living in a Failed State.” The author was George Packer, one of the preeminent long-form journalists writing in the US today. His last three books—The...

What happens, what emotional threads get pulled when halfway around the globe a father gets sick from Covid? In an evocative personal essay for The New Yorker, My Father's Voice from Paris, novelist Alexander Maksik faces those questions and all the attendant thoughts and feelings provoked by them. Living in Maui with his wife, the novelist Madhuri Vijay, and his 6-month-old daughter Ela, Maksik's only contact with his father was through the phone. He listened as his father grew weaker...

In the spring of 2016, author DANI SHAPIRO received the stunning news through a genealogy website that her father was not her biological father.  Her memoir, Inheritance, captures her urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that had been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years. It caused her to rethink everything she knew about herself, her roots, her family, the ground underneath her. In this episode of Beyond the Page, she talks with physician and author...

In 1996, (a 66-year-old) retired New York City public school teacher named Frank McCourt published his first book, a memoir about his brutally impoverished Irish Catholic childhood in the slums of Limerick. If ever there was a “rags-to-riches” story in publishing, Angela’s Ashes was it: The book would go on to receive the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, sell more than four million copies in hardcover alone, and become a film directed by Alan Parker. At the age of...

In one way or another, from the moment she left Haiti to settle in Brooklyn, New York, at age 12, Edwidge Danticat has been writing stories (prize-winning novels, memoirs, and essays) about the experience and effects of immigration. In conversation with Jeffrey Brown of the PBS NewsHour, she will talk about the ways that first seismic journey in her life has shaped all the journeys she has lived and written since. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu addressed the people of his city in May, 2017 about his decision to take down four Confederate monuments, including the statue of Robert E. Lee, he struck a nerve throughout the nation – his brave and inspirational speech has now been heard by millions.  As he described that experience in his powerful memoir In the Shadow of Statues – and as he tells it here – Mayor Landrieu’s relationship to the question of race in America is deeply personal and...

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing's brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens. Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks from the past quarter century at the Writers’ Conference, giving you a front row seat on the kind of knowledge, inspiration, laughter, and meaning that Sun...

No playwright has challenged our perceptions of Muslims in America as boldly, and with such dramatic vigor, as has AYAD AKHTAR, who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Disgraced, the most produced play of the 2015-2016 season.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers' Conference. In this episode, we hear from the award-winning novelist Min Jin Lee. Speech, memory, and the power to tell one's story -- for Lee, these are not abstract, philosophical ideas. They are doorways leading her back to the process by which after great struggle she was able to find her own voice, first as a profoundly shy Korean girl growing up in America and eventually as the exceptional novelist she became.Learn more...

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers' Conference. In this episode, we hear from the great Israeli novelist David Grossman, widely regarded as part of the collective liberal conscience of Israel, about his masterpiece To the End of the Land. 

In a world obsessed with success, Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist ANTHONY DOERR has maintained an abiding belief in, and a creative need for, the bracing tonic of failure. In a talk filled with humor and hard-won wisdom, he discusses how being willing to risk failing at stuff to realize one’s original vision is the writer’s most essential job.