11.11.07: CHICAGO HUMANITIES FESTIVAL RETROSPECTIVE

featuring Terry Tempest Williams and E.L. Doctorow

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Terry Tempest Williams is a Utah native, naturalist and fierce advocate for freedom of speech. She is known for her impassioned lyrical prose, which has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Orion magazine. She is the author of the environmental literature classic Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. In 2006, she received the Robert Marshall Award from The Wilderness Society, their highest honor given to an American citizen. She is currently the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah and divides her time between Castle Valley, Utah and Moose, Wyoming.

Her talk was entitled "The Writer as Witness," using craft to bear witness along the lines of the '07 Humanities Festival theme: The Climate of Concern.

E.L. Doctorow has had work published in thirty languages. His novels include Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, Lives of the Poets, World's Fair, Billy Bathgate, The Waterworks and most recently the Civil War epic The March. Among his honors are the National Book Award, two National Book Critics Circle awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howell's Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Humanities Medal. He lives and works in New York.

He was this year's Chicago Tribune Literary Prize winner.

Listen to the 2007 Chicago Humanities Festival Retrospective on The Lit Show:
Stream 32k MP3
Stream 128k MP3