Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference

In this episode of Beyond the Page, we offer something fun and different, a lively conversation between SVWC Literary Director John Burnham Schwartz and Associate Director Anne Taylor Fleming about the upcoming 2022 conference.  As the chief programmers, the longtime colleagues and friends will talk about some of the magical writers who are coming, from Evan Osnos and Heather McGhee to Ocean Vuong and Arthur Brooks, and chat about their selection process, including adding the wonderful PBS anchor Judy Woodruff to moderate some deep dives into the threats to democracy, here and around the globe.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode, John Burnham Schwartz talks with SUSAN ORLEAN, whose New Yorker articles across the last 30 years, along with books such as The Orchard Thief, The Library Book, her biography of the movie star dog Rin Tin Tin, and her latest collection of pieces, On Animals, have made her one of our most beloved and distinctive writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is Thomas Jefferson to be deplored as a slave-owner who had a family with a young woman he owned or is he to be celebrated as one of the country's most essential and gifted founders? Or, should he be both--condemned and revered? That is the question Annette Gordon-Reed, the brilliant Harvard law professor, historian, and author of the Pulitzer prize-winning The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, has long wrestled with. In conversation with SVWC associate director Anne Taylor Fleming, Gordon-Reed reflects on her evolving feelings about Jefferson and on the moral responsibility of the historian, and talks about her recent memoir, On Juneteenth, a stirring remembrance of growing up black in Texas. Hers is the rare wise and nuanced voice we need in today's overheated culture.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Beyond the Page, John Burnham Schwartz speaks with author TOBIAS WOLFF, renowned for his classic memoirs and short stories, for an intimate, wide-ranging conversation about life, literature, craft, and the never- ending mysteries and revelations that come from spending one’s time inhabiting the minds of others.Tobias Wolff was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and grew up in Washington State. He attended Oxford University and Stanford University, where he now teaches English and creative writing. He has received the Story Prize, both the Rea Award and PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, John Burnham Schwartz speaks with Noah Feldman, Harvard Law professor and renowned Constitutional scholar, whose groundbreaking new book, The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America, takes us inside one of the more surprising realities of American History: in abolishing slavery and preserving our union, Abraham Lincoln was not adhering to the original Constitution of 1787, but rather tearing it up in order to save it through transformation. Feldman calls not only for a reassessment of Lincoln himself but also for a new look at America's founding document and its place in our law, our politics, and ourselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Beyond the Page, acclaimed novelist, journalist, and Marine Corps veteran ELLIOT ACKERMAN talks to former CBS News Vice President and Washington Bureau Chief Christopher Isham about the United States military’s calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan and what comes after. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Valley is known for.In this episode of Beyond the Page, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with Patrick Radden Keefe about his new book, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of BEYOND THE PAGE, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with Pulitzer Prize-winning authors MARK STEVENS and ANNALYN SWAN about their landmark biography Francis Bacon: Revelations.MARK STEVENS is the former art critic of New York magazine. He has been the art critic for The New Republic and Newsweek and has also written for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times.ANNALYN SWAN is the former arts editor of Newsweek and an award-winning music critic. She teaches biography at the Graduate Center of CUNY as well as at the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English. Stevens and Swan won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for their biography, de Kooning: An American Master. They live in New York. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Bosnia to the White House Situation Room and the world of high-stakes diplomacy, offering a compelling and deeply honest look at navigating the halls of power while trying to put one’s ideals into practice. Along the way, she lays bare the searing battles and defining moments of her life, shows how she juggled the demands of a 24/7 national security job with raising two young children, and makes the case for how we each can advance the cause of human dignity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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