ALICE NOTLEY - Poet & Artist - Academy of American Poets Award Winner
/Poet
It's all-inclusive – poetry– and everything is poetry in a certain way, and poetic measure is like what we're composed of. It's what we are. I mean, we're poetry.
Poet
It's all-inclusive – poetry– and everything is poetry in a certain way, and poetic measure is like what we're composed of. It's what we are. I mean, we're poetry.
Author of The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women and Girls: A Black Feminist Approach to Healing from Sexual Abuse
Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work · Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Innovation in Social Work & Health at Boston University,
So many of us have experienced things along this vein, and when we know that, then the feelings of isolation can be interrupted with this understanding that many of us have been through these things. And if that person over there can experience joy, well maybe I can experience joy too, and maybe this is a different kind of harm and cultural betrayal. Sexual trauma and abuse as a collective community-level harm, that means community-level healing and personal healing.
Tony & Emmy Award-Winning Actress · Conservationist
Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts 1993-97
I did not seek out these roles like All the President's Men. I know that I was very interested in social and political issues from childhood. I don't know whether there was something in me that translated that I was politically and socially conscious when I was a young actress because these roles came to me. I didn't go out begging for them. And I was so grateful to have them because I thought they had a depth to them.
Tony & Emmy Award-Winning Actress, Conservationist, Author
Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts 1993-97
I did not seek out these roles like All the President's Men. I know that I was very interested in social and political issues from childhood. I don't know whether there was something in me that translated that I was politically and socially conscious when I was a young actress because these roles came to me. I didn't go out begging for them. And I was so grateful to have them because I thought they had a depth to them.
Alice Fulton’s books include Barely Composed, a poetry collection; The Nightingales Of Troy, linked stories; and Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems. Her book Felt received the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, awarded to the best book of poems published within a two-year period. She has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, and Ingram Merrill Foundation. Her other books include Sensual Math, Powers Of Congress, Palladium, Dance Script With Electric Ballerina, and an essay collection, Feeling As A Foreign Language. She lives in Ithaca, NY.
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.
Circular Economy & Design Expert · Founder of The Circular Way
Author of Danish Design Heritage & Global Sustainability
Putting design first, it really enables us to shape a future that we don't yet know. But we need to be super tactile and practical about it as well. And then seeing that is something that design very much has the ability to do. And at the same time, having this growing frustration that wherever you go, wherever you talk about sustainability, it was a compromise. It was something that meant uglier, less convenient, more expensive, all these different things, but then diving into the Danish Design heritage, seeing that what set them apart was that after the World Wars, they had a social purpose of democratizing and rebuilding the welfare state, and that was not something that lessened the final result. On the contrary, it heightened the ambition, the final design, and the solutions.
Circular Economy & Design Expert · Founder of The Circular Way
Author of Danish Design Heritage & Global Sustainability
Putting design first, it really enables us to shape a future that we don't yet know. But we need to be super tactile and practical about it as well. And then seeing that is something that design very much has the ability to do. And at the same time, having this growing frustration that wherever you go, wherever you talk about sustainability, it was a compromise. It was something that meant uglier, less convenient, more expensive, all these different things, but then diving into the Danish Design heritage, seeing that what set them apart was that after the World Wars, they had a social purpose of democratizing and rebuilding the welfare state, and that was not something that lessened the final result. On the contrary, it heightened the ambition, the final design, and the solutions.
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.
Whitley Award-winning Conservationist
Founder/Director of the Southwest Niger Delta Forest Project
There's no question, we are in a state of conservation emergency. And we have a real situation on our hands and it's so fragile that if we take a step back, we could say goodbye to two types of chimpanzee species and the forest is also on the brink of disappearing forever. And when I started as a conservation researcher, there was kidnapping and insecurity throughout the Nile Delta region, and it was immersed in a lot of oil politics and civil conflicts. Kidnapping and insecurity ran throughout that region. Let's not forget that Nigeria is Africa's most populous nation now. We are over 200 million people in the country, and it's a growing population of young people who are looking for means of livelihood and on the lookout to find space to live. So parts of the forest within one year would suddenly become a new village.
Whitley Award-winning Conservationist
Founder/Director of the Southwest Niger Delta Forest Project
There's no question, we are in a state of conservation emergency. And we have a real situation on our hands and it's so fragile that if we take a step back, we could say goodbye to two types of chimpanzee species and the forest is also on the brink of disappearing forever. And when I started as a conservation researcher, there was kidnapping and insecurity throughout the Nile Delta region, and it was immersed in a lot of oil politics and civil conflicts. Kidnapping and insecurity ran throughout that region. Let's not forget that Nigeria is Africa's most populous nation now. We are over 200 million people in the country, and it's a growing population of young people who are looking for means of livelihood and on the lookout to find space to live. So parts of the forest within one year would suddenly become a new village.
Author of The Inland Sea
Professor of Creative Writing at Columbia University
I was reading ecological history and also reading about violence against women and how violence perpetuates itself over many generations. And there was something about this European sort of supremacy of ideas about nature, their ideas about rationality, all of this stuff that sort of came from the Enlightenment. John Oxley's diaries made no mention of the Indigenous Australians who were at the time subject to genocide. So I was interested in these ideas about how they tried to tame the land, which is often talked about as "a woman" and the way that the kind of violence that comes from a particular kind of European colonial project that is enacted on the land intertwines with the way that violence is enacted upon women. And it was something that I felt growing up in Australia.
Author of The Inland Sea
Professor of Creative Writing at Columbia University
I was reading ecological history and also reading about violence against women and how violence perpetuates itself over many generations. And there was something about this European sort of supremacy of ideas about nature, their ideas about rationality, all of this stuff that sort of came from the Enlightenment. John Oxley's diaries made no mention of the Indigenous Australians who were at the time subject to genocide. So I was interested in these ideas about how they tried to tame the land, which is often talked about as "a woman" and the way that the kind of violence that comes from a particular kind of European colonial project that is enacted on the land intertwines with the way that violence is enacted upon women. And it was something that I felt growing up in Australia.
Founder of Kids4abetterworld
Climate Activist & Educator
Sagarika Sriram is currently a student at Jumeirah College in Dubai. She founded the organization Kids4abetterworld when she was 10 years old with a mission to educate and encourage young children to lead a more sustainable life and reduce their carbon footprint. Children are the worst affected by the effects of climate change, yet most children do not participate in climate change discussions or take actions to live more sustainably because they do not have the awareness and capability to do so. Kids4abetterworld conducts awareness workshops on sustainability aiming to Educate, Motivate and Activate young children to conserve natural resources, protect biodiversity, and positively impact climate change. As a UN Climate Advisor, she has participated in the global consultations that will ensure children are made aware of their environmental rights and that UN member states protect and uphold these.
Environmentalists, Artists, Students & Teachers share their Love for the Planet
Today we’re streaming voices of environmentalists, artists, students, and teachers with music courtesy of composer Max Richter.
Showrunner & Executive Producer of Netflix’s The Diplomat starring Keri Russell & Rufus Sewell
Exec. Producer Homeland · Grey’s Anatomy · Vinyl
Co-Producer The West Wing
So the idea was to look at what it's like to be an ambassador for the United States abroad and to do that in the context of a married couple, both of whom are in the same field. And what kind of tensions come from being in a relationship with somebody where you're both collaborators and personal partners and sometimes competitors? And what does that do to your life? What does it do to your work experience? And it felt like a military alliance and a marriage are not so different in many ways. You know, you get together under certain circumstances, and then time marches on and things change, and both parties change, and you're still in this relationship that either can or can't bend with you.
Showrunner & Executive Producer of Netflix’s The Diplomat starring Keri Russell & Rufus Sewell
Exec. Producer Homeland · Grey’s Anatomy · Vinyl
Co-Producer The West Wing
So the idea was to look at what it's like to be an ambassador for the United States abroad and to do that in the context of a married couple, both of whom are in the same field. And what kind of tensions come from being in a relationship with somebody where you're both collaborators and personal partners and sometimes competitors? And what does that do to your life? What does it do to your work experience? And it felt like a military alliance and a marriage are not so different in many ways. You know, you get together under certain circumstances, and then time marches on and things change, and both parties change, and you're still in this relationship that either can or can't bend with you.
Environmentalists, Artists, Students & Teachers share their Love for the Planet
Today we’re streaming voices of environmentalists, artists, students, and teachers with music courtesy of composer Max Richter.
Filmmakers, poets, aviators, musicians, cave divers, environmentalists, writers, and artists explore what love means to them
Showrunner · Writer & Executive Producer
Perry Mason starring Matthew Rhys, Juliet Rylance, Shea Whigham, Hope Davis
The Knick starring Clive Owen · directed by Steven Soderbergh
Storytelling is our oldest art form. We can't silence the arts and those voices because if we do, we lose something that is so crucial to who we are just as human beings. We want to tell stories. We want to express things. For example, I cannot draw. And one day the teacher wanted us to do negative space drawings. And I said, "What is that?" And they explained that it's looking at what's around the object and not the object. And it clicked, and it made me look at things from a whole different perspective. And you know, what? That became where I was most successful. And so for me, there's are an infinite number of ways to tell a story that you never run out of ideas, that you can always find another road, another way to look at something. That's probably one of the key elements to my career.
The Creative Process: Podcast Interviews & Portraits of the World’s Leading Authors & Creative Thinkers
Inspiring Students – Encouraging Reading - Connecting through Stories
The Creative Process exhibition is traveling to universities and museums. The Creative Process exhibition consists of interviews with over 100 esteemed writers, including Joyce Carol Oates, Hilary Mantel, Neil Gaiman, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, Junot Díaz, Marie Darrieussecq, Michel Faber, T.C. Boyle, Jay McInerney, George Saunders, Geoff Dyer, Etgar Keret, Douglas Kennedy, Sam Lipsyte, and Yiyun Li, among others. Artist and interviewer: Mia Funk.