City Arts & Lectures

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louise Erdrich has written many novels including Love Medicine and The Roundhouse, as well as works of non-fiction, poetry, and children’s books.  She’s written extensively on Native American identity, and is the owner of an independent bookstore in Minneapolis, Birchbark Books, which specializes in Native American writing.  Her new novel, The Sentence, takes place in such a bookstore. It's a ghost story, set against the real-life backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd. On November 19, 2021, Louise Erdrich spoke to Steven Wynn at the studios of KQED in San Francisco.

This week – Jeff Chang talks to Nikole Hannah-Jones, one of today’s foremost investigative journalists.  Her reporting on civil rights and racial justice, including school segregation, has earned her numerous awards, chief among them a Pulitzer Prize for her work on the 1619 Project.  It’s an ongoing initiative from the New York Times that reframes the way we understand America’s history by examining the modern legacy of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans.  On November 29, 2021, Nikole Hannah-Jones came to San Francisco to celebrate the release of the book version of the 1619 Project.  Joining her was one of the book’s contributors, Barry Jenkins, the Academy-Award-winning director of Moonlight, and most recently, a television adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad”.  But before the two sat down to talk to Jeff Chang, Forrest Hamer read his poem “Race Riot”.  

For this special archive edition of City Arts and Lectures, we present a 2008 interview with the lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim.  Since his Broadway debut at age 27 as the lyricist for “West Side Story”, Stephen Sondheim has stretched the conventions of musical theater with sophisticated storylines and complex musicality.  Though his work has always been controversial, and met with mixed reviews from critics and audiences, Sondheim’s impact on music theater is undeniable. His landmark shows include “Company”, “Into the Woods”, “A Little Night Music”, “Sunday in the Park with George”, “Assassins”, and “Sweeney Todd”.  Sondheim has won eight Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, a Pulitzer Prize, eight Tony Awards, and received the Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Honors and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.   Stephen Sondheim died on Friday, November 26, 2021, the day after enjoying a Thanksgiving dinner with friends.  He was 91 years old.  At the time of his death, he was working on a new musical called “Square One”. In this program, recorded on March 9, 2008, Sondheim was interviewed on the stage of the Herbst Theater in San Francisco by Frank Rich of the New York Times.  Join me now for a 2008 conversation with the late Stephen Sondheim.

Gary Shteyngart’s new book is “Our Country Friends”, which he began writing during the first month of the pandemic.  It’s the story of eight friends who shelter in place at the upstate New York home of a Russian-born American writer.  His previous books include “Super Sad True Love Story” and “Absurdistan”.  On November 8, 2021, Gary Shteyngart joined Andrew Sean Greer, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of “Less”, to talk about finding humor in dystopic times. 

Jelani Cobb is a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, historian, and professor of journalism at Columbia, and one of today’s most important public intellectuals.  He is the co-editor of  a new anthology, The Matter of Black Lives, which compiles New Yorker essays on race in America through time, by writers including James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hilton Als, and Zadie Smith. On November 5, 2021, he came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an on-stage conversation with Jeff Chang and a live audience. They spoke about diversity in the newsroom, the controversy surrounding Dave Chappelle, and the findings of a task force created by Lyndon Johnson in the wake of racial riots in the 1960s.

In 1991, Anita Hill testified at the Senate confirmation hearings of Justice Clarence Thomas.  It was an act of enormous bravery, and Hill immediately became a symbolic figure of extraordinary controversy.  Anita Hill’s role in bringing gender-based discrimination to America’s consciousness cannot be understated.  In fact, prior to her testimony, sexual harassment simply wasn’t part of our collective consciousness. Her work for fair treatment in the workplace, and for a society free of harassment and violence, continues to this day. On October 22, 2021, Anita Hill came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to speak with USF law professor Lara Bazelon, about the arc of her remarkable life, and her new book Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence. 

Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief, and The Library Book, returns with On Animals. The book is a collection of essays she’s written for The New Yorker-- where she is a staff writer-- that catalogue her love and wonder of animals. On October 13, 2021, Susan Orlean talked to Steven Winn about her fascination with all kinds of creatures, and some truly bizarre animal owners, like a woman who has twenty-three pet tigers.

Dave Eggers’ books include A Hologram for the King, What is the What, and many more since his breakout memoir in the year 2000, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. He’s written a new novel, called The Every. It’s follow up to his 2013 book The Circle, and both take a very skeptical view of technology’s impact not only on our daily lives, but our capacity for focus and empathy. On September 23, 2021, Eggers talked to Tom Barbash about the problems with big tech and about social media’s addictive and destructive algorithms - and the disappointment he feels when an adult friend or colleague resorts to an emoji to express a serious emotion.

Congressman Adam Schiff represents California’s 28th Congressional District. In his 11th term in the House of Representatives, Schiff currently serves as the Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which oversees the nation’s intelligence agencies. In his role as Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Schiff led the first impeachment of Donald J. Trump. Before he served in Congress, he worked as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles and as a California State Senator. His new book Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy And Still Could offers a vital inside account of American democracy in its darkest hour, and a warning that the forces of autocracy unleashed by Trump remain as potent as ever.

Andrea Elliott is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The New York Times and a former staff writer at The Miami Herald. In 2012, Elliott set out to report about what it was like to be an unhoused child in New York City. She met 11-year-old Dasani Coates, living in a shelter with her parents and seven siblings.  The conditions were unsurprisingly horrible, and the challenges faced by Dasani’s family enormous and multigenerational. Elliott followed Dasani and her family for eight years, and her book Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City, weaves together Dasani’s story - including her time at a boarding school designed to help disadvantaged girls escape poverty – with the history of Dasani’s family, tracing the passage of their ancestors from slavery to the Great Migration north. It’s the story of a fierce, resilient, and overburdened child – and the profound impacts of poverty and racism.  On October 5, 2021, Andrea Elliott spoke with Isabel Duffy about the book - what it took to write it and what she’d like readers to take from it.