ED ZWICK - Academy Award-winning Writer, Director & Producer - Glory, The Last Samurai, Shakespeare in Love, Thirtysomething

ED ZWICK - Academy Award-winning Writer, Director & Producer - Glory, The Last Samurai, Shakespeare in Love, Thirtysomething

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Academy Award-winning Writer, Director & Producer
Glory · The Last Samurai · Shakespeare in Love · Thirtysomething
Author of Hits, Flops & Other Illions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood

My intention was to write about my experiences, obviously, but also I felt that there was a little bit of a counterintuitive approach, which is to talk about some of the inner experiences of the creative process and being a director, being a writer, and I felt that that would open the window a little bit wider. I liked that it wasn't just a behind-the-scenes look. It is that, and I think it's full of fun anecdotes and little reveals, but it is to be a real book. It presumes to be a memoir, like many of the memoirs that I have loved of creative people in the past.

JERICHO BROWN - Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet, Author of "The Tradition", "The New Testament"

JERICHO BROWN - Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet, Author of "The Tradition", "The New Testament"

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Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet
Author of The Tradition & The New Testament

I just want to make the poems like a living being…There are moments that I’m not at the desk, but I’m living life. And living life is actually what leads to writing. You have to have experiences to write about. Whether or not you are aware of those experiences as you are writing them down because if you’re doing music first, maybe you’re not aware of what you’re writing. And yet, those experiences are what come to fruition in your writing. You become aware. Oh, I did come on that roller coaster that time that I haven’t thought about in twenty years. Oh I did make love to that cute person that I haven’t thought about in ten years, but you’ve got to make love, you’ve got to get on roller coasters, you’ve got to get your heart broken. You’ve got to dance. You gotta get out and do things and that, too, is a part of writing. You have to trust you’re a writer by identity. And if you can trust that you’re a writer by identity, then you don’t have to be at a desk.

E.J. KOH - Award-Winning Memoirist & Poet - “The Magical Language of Others”, “A Lesser Love”

E.J. KOH - Award-Winning Memoirist & Poet - “The Magical Language of Others”, “A Lesser Love”

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Award-winning Memoirist & Poet
The Magical Language of Others · A Lesser Love

I had delayed speech, and I had quite a bit of trouble with speaking. I think I must have been five before I was uttering some of my first words and trying to articulate. Simple communication was very difficult for me and my family, especially in a family where we were speaking several languages. They hoped to instill English. It’s the language of survival. There was a lot of frustration and fear in my relationship to language, and the relationship these languages had to each other, that was something I felt very sensitive to since I was young. Since before I could speak.

ADA LIMÓN - U.S. Poet Laureate - Host of The Slowdown podcast

ADA LIMÓN - U.S. Poet Laureate - Host of The Slowdown podcast

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U.S. Poet Laureate · Host of The Slowdown podcast

This poem was written when I was having a real moment of reckoning, not that I hadn't had it earlier, but where I was doing some deep reading about the climate crisis and really reckoning with myself, with where we were and what was happening, what the truth was. And I felt like it was so easy to slip down into a darkness, into a sort of numbness, and I didn't think that that numbness and darkness could be useful.

JOHN PATRICK SHANLEY - Academy Award-winning Writer/Director - Doubt starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams - Moonstruck

JOHN PATRICK SHANLEY - Academy Award-winning Writer/Director - Doubt starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams - Moonstruck

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Academy Award · Tony · Pulitzer Prize-winning Writer/Director
Doubt starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams
Moonstruck · Wild Mountain Thyme · Danny and the Deep Blue Sea · Joe Versus the Volcano

I knew Philip Seymour Hoffman for several years. We went on vacation together. He produced a play of mine. Before we did Doubt, we worked in the same theater company together, and he was, you know, very committed to excellence. And so he could become impatient with anybody who was not committed to excellence, and that could make him a volatile person to deal with. Phil cared. He cared a great deal. And he worked really hard. They're very committed. Like with Viola Davis. Viola had done a decent amount of big work before Doubt, but she was not recognized yet. And she was careful. You know, she certainly wasn't throwing weight around. She was, I'm the new kid on the block, and I'm just here to work and be serious and do my job, keep my head down, and get out. And pretty much that's what I was doing too, you know, because I've got Meryl Streep, I've got Philip Hoffman, who I was friends with, but Phil's not an easy guy to be friends with or was not easy to be friends with. He's a very prickly person prone to getting pissed off about things that you might not expect. And then Amy Adams was somebody who, you know, tried to get along with everybody and Phil would say like, 'You just want everybody to like you.' So, you know, you're in the middle of that group, and you just, you don't want to put yourself in a position where you're trying to prove something. You have to let them...they're very, very smart people, and they're going to figure out whatever it is that you're doing. They're going to figure out whether you are in any way trying to handle that. And that's not going to go well. And so I didn't do that.

Abby Ajayi - Creator of “Riches” - Writer/Producer “Inventing Anna” “The First Lady”

Abby Ajayi - Creator of “Riches” - Writer/Producer “Inventing Anna” “The First Lady”

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Creator of the Amazon series Riches
Writer/Producer on Inventing Anna · The First Lady · How to Get Away with Murder

I do feel that if one has the desire and the ability to be a much more big-picture showrunner, I think that's to the best. That benefits the show because there's a creative voice running all the way through. This isn't a movie, where it's a director's medium. It is the writer's medium, so I think the writer should be across producing and also empowering the director, but there is a clear vision. I think Riches has all the hallmarks of the things I've worked on before in terms of complex, slightly subversive women. At the heart of it, it is negotiating power dynamics. And at the heart of it, there are two very complex and yet vulnerable black women, but I've always loved family drama shows and particularly family businesses, whether it's fictional ones or in real life.

Karina Manashil - President of Mad Solar - Creative Confidante for Kid Cudi - Exec. Producer of “Entergalactic”

Karina Manashil - President of Mad Solar - Creative Confidante for Kid Cudi - Exec. Producer of “Entergalactic”

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President of Mad Solar · Creative Confidante & Industry Catalyst for Scott Mescudi a.k.a. Kid Cudi
Exec. Producer: Entergalactic starring Mescudi, Jessica Williams & Timothée Chalamet
Pearl · X starring Mia Goth

And what was so moving was when we went into Netflix to the theater to screen the finished product for the first time. You're sitting there and at the end of it, Scott was crying, and I looked over - it made me cry low-key - but Scott was crying and he said – This completely blows my mind because this is the first time I had a vision up here in my head and tried to express it, and then had to trust all 300 plus people, all around the world, working in different time zones, in different places, and each of them putting a hand to it and seeing exactly that vision. And then watching the product, and it is the best version of anything I could have ever possibly had in my head.
So, to us, that's the purest, most beautiful... Again, how fortunate that every hand was moving in tandem and moving in lockstep, and all of it. But that was the beauty of collaboration, this opportunity for a small vision to touch so many hands and become the big vision.

Karen McManus - NYTimes Bestselling Author of “Nothing More to Tell”, “One of Us is Lying”

Karen McManus - NYTimes Bestselling Author of “Nothing More to Tell”, “One of Us is Lying”

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NYTimes Bestselling Author of Nothing More to Tell, One of Us is Lying

Well, I had a wonderful teacher in second grade who kind of inspired me to start writing and really stuck with me through elementary school and beyond as I made attempts to find my voice, but think part of the reason it never really went anywhere for me as a young person was because I was too afraid to share that with anyone except for that one teacher. I never showed friends. I didn't even really show family. I just always felt that it wasn't quite good enough. And so the thing I always tell writers now if they ask for, you know, "What's one tip?" It's let someone else tell you no, because I just told myself no for pretty much my entire young adulthood. And once I let other people tell me no, they did a lot, you know, but that is how I got better.

Ken Cheng - Writer/Producer of “Easter Sunday” starring Jo Koy - Co-Founder - Crab Club, Inc.

Ken Cheng - Writer/Producer of “Easter Sunday” starring Jo Koy - Co-Founder - Crab Club, Inc.

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Writer & Executive Producer of Easter Sunday starring Jo Koy, Jimmy O’Yang, Tia Carrere, Tiffany Haddish
Co-Founder of Crab Club, Inc.

I think there's this belief that creativity requires our ability to think outward and extrapolate beyond our own experiences and think of the world in imaginative new ways - which is true in a lot of cases - but I also believe in creativity as the ability to access inward and look introspectively at our own personal experiences and mine those experiences in ways that aren't necessarily one to one copies of our lives, but that we can extrapolate themes and lessons, comedy, drama, humor...into new works.

David Farrier - Author of “Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils” - Prof. U of Edinburgh

David Farrier - Author of “Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils” - Prof. U of Edinburgh

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Author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils · Anthropocene Poetics
Professor of Literature & the Environment · University of Edinburgh.

Just thinking about how our actions play out over multiple generations who will have to live with the consequences of these decisions. I think we need to stretch our sense of time, and within that stretch our sense of empathy. The philosopher Roman Krznaric talks about that in his book The Good Ancestor, that we need a more elastic sense of empathy that can encompass not just those close to us or living alongside us, but those who have yet to be born will have to inherit the world that we passed down to them. But I think in stretching that sense of empathy and stretching that sense of the times that we touch, if you like, because all of us are engaged in activities that will lead long legacies, long tails, in terms of the fossil fuels we're consuming. And so, alongside that, I think we need to accept that the time we live in is a strange one, and time itself is doing strange things in the anthropocene.

Claudia Forestieri - Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz - “Gordita Chronicles”on HBO Max

Claudia Forestieri - Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz - “Gordita Chronicles”on HBO Max

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Claudia Forestieri (Creator) & Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz (Showrunner)
Gordita Chronicles

When you immigrate, it's kind of like you're going through adolescence because you're in a new place. You feel weird in your own skin. You're learning new things. Everything is changing. You feel awkward. So that also helped us connect the adult stories to the children's stories.

Florian Hoffmeister - Award-winning DP “Pachinko”, “Great Expectations”

Florian Hoffmeister - Award-winning DP “Pachinko”, “Great Expectations”

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Florian Hoffmeister · Emmy & BAFTA Award-winning Director of Photography
Pachinko · Great Expectations · Official Secrets

Every time I ask, ‘What do you need? What do I want? What does the director want? How do we collaborate? What is generated during the collaboration? What ideas, questions come across? And then I can start constructing something like a look.

Isabel Sandoval - Director of “Under the Banner of Heaven”, "Lingua Franca"

Isabel Sandoval - Director of “Under the Banner of Heaven”, "Lingua Franca"

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Director of Lingua Franca & Under the Banner of Heaven

Before coming on board Under the Banner of Heaven, I had very little knowledge of Mormonism, but having read the script by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who is also the showrunner for the show, I resonated deeply with Jeb Pyre (played by Andrew Garfield) when it comes to his growing ambivalence and his crisis of faith. And the more he learned about the gruesome, grisly history of the founding Mormonism, and also about the case that he was investigating, the more disillusioned and disenchanted he was becoming. And that resonated with me because I was raised Catholic in the Philippines, but as I grew older, actually went to Catholic schools and universities from kindergarten until college, and then the more I learned about the history of the Catholic Church and the atrocities and the injustices that it has committed, especially in the name of colonialist and imperialist pursuits in the Middle ages, the more I questioned its control over me and my life.

Ellen Rapoport · Creator, Exec. Producer & Showrunner of “Minx” for HBO Max

Ellen Rapoport · Creator, Exec. Producer & Showrunner of “Minx” for HBO Max

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Creator, Executive Producer & Showrunner of Minx
starring Ophelia Lovibond & Jake Johnson

What drew me to the time period of the 70s was the real story of these magazines Playgirl, Viva, Foxy Lady, all the magazines that existed in this period. So it was a natural outgrowth of trying to tell a story that was inspired by, to some extent, real-life events. When I started developing Minx, what struck me about the 70s, in particular, is just how similar it was to our time. It seems like the magazines were covering all the same issues that we're now talking about. Obviously, we all saw with the leaked decision in Roe vs. Wade just how close we are to that time period and how far we haven't come.

Anthony Gardner · Prof. Contemporary Art History, Oxford · Fmr. Head, Ruskin School of Art

Anthony Gardner · Prof. Contemporary Art History, Oxford · Fmr. Head, Ruskin School of Art

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Professor of Contemporary Art History, University of Oxford
Fmr. Head, Ruskin School of Art · Co-author of Biennials, Triennials and documenta: The Exhibitions That Created Contemporary Art

I think art can engage with the body, the mind, and the imagination in so many different ways that can compliment modes of thinking, other modes of creating and thinking through and working through and devising.
I was thinking about this in relation to the last 18 months and how the sciences have rightly been heralded as the great way of getting ourselves out of this pandemic, but culture is the way and art is the way that we've been getting through the pandemic.

Stuart Pimm · Expert in Study of Present-Day Extinctions · Founder/Dir. Saving Nature

Stuart Pimm · Expert in Study of Present-Day Extinctions · Founder/Dir. Saving Nature

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Global Leader in the Study of Present-Day Extinctions & Biodiversity
Founder & Director of Saving Nature

It's a complicated issue. I think a lot of those bird disappearances come from the fact that we have massively intensified our agriculture. Large areas of North America and Europe are now under intense agriculture. They are sprayed with a whole variety of pesticides, which I think is also responsible for the fact that many insects have disappeared, so species that depend on farmland have clearly declined dramatically, but it isn't all birds and there is a piece of this complicated story that involves water birds. Herons and egrets and ducks. Those species both in North America and Europe, are now much more common than they were 30, or 40 years ago. That comes from active conservation of protecting wetlands, making sure we don't shoot our wetland birds. So it’s not all doom and gloom. There are some success stories. There are many things we can do. I think 50 years ago, there were only something like 300 bald eagles in the lower 48 states. Bald eagles are now nesting in every state apart from Hawaii. Our conservation efforts have done a great job.

Courtney Peppernell · YA Writer & Poet · Author of “Pillow Thoughts”

Courtney Peppernell · YA Writer & Poet · Author of “Pillow Thoughts”

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YA Writer & Poet
Author of Pillow Thoughts & I Hope You Stay

I really hope that kindness is preserved. I really think manners and being polite can go a long way. People are in such a rush these days. Everybody wants to acquire so much, and they forget to just be thankful for the little things in life. To slow down, how you move through the world and how selfless you are, holding open a door for someone, or just telling someone to have a good day. Those are all things that can have a lasting effect on another person and make them want to be better as well.

Candace Fujikane · Author of "Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future”

Candace Fujikane · Author of "Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future”

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Author of Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future
Professor of English at the University of the Hawaiʻi at Manoa

The struggle for a planetary future calls for a profound epistemological shift. Indigenous ancestral knowledges are now providing a foundation for our work against climate change, one based on what I refer to as Indigenous economies of abundance—as opposed to capitalist economies of scarcity. Rather than seeing climate change as apocalyptic, we can see that climate change is bringing about the demise of capital, making way for Indigenous lifeways that center familial relationships with the earth and elemental forms. Kānaka Maoli are restoring the worlds where their attunement to climatic change and their capacity for kilo adaptation, regeneration, and tranforma- tion will enable them to survive what capital cannot.


Dolen Perkins-Valdez · NYTimes Best-selling Author of “Take My Hand”


Dolen Perkins-Valdez · NYTimes Best-selling Author of “Take My Hand”

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NYTimes Best-selling Author of the books Take My Hand · Balm, & Wench
Chair of the Board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation

My dad graduated from Tuskegee, and he often told me about the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. He really wanted me to understand the history, not only of medical experimentation but more specifically, medical experimentation in the state of Alabama. So my feeling about medical experimentation is that there's a long history in this country of medical experimentation on black bodies, particularly based behind this racist notion that black people don't feel pain in the same way. And so I've always sort of known that, but once I started to research this book, I began to really understand more specifically what it has meant for black women.

Ami Vitale · Award-winning Photographer, Filmmaker & Exec. Director of Vital Impacts

Ami Vitale · Award-winning Photographer, Filmmaker & Exec. Director of Vital Impacts

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Award-Winning Photographer & Filmmaker
Executive Director of Vital Impacts

When are we all going to start to care about one another? Because all of our individual choices do have impacts. And I just think the demands that we place on this planet, on the ecosystems, are what are driving conflict and human suffering. In some cases, it's really the scarcity of resources, just like water. In others, it's the changing climate and the loss of fertile lands to be able to grow food. But in the end, it's always the people living in these places that really suffer the most. All of my work today, it’s not really about wildlife, and it's not just about people either. It's about how deeply interconnected all of those things are. People and the human condition are the backdrop of every one of the stories on this planet.