ARTSINVAL1127 Click this link to listen to the November 27th show.
Mitch Horowitz, Author, http://www.mitchhorowitz.com/
Mitch Horowitz is a writer and publisher of many years’ experience with a lifelong interest in man’s search for meaning. He is the editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin in New York and the author of Occult America (Bantam), which The Washington Post Book World called: “Fascinating…a serious, wide-ranging study of all the magical, mystical, and spiritual movements that have arisen and influenced American history in often-surprising ways.”
A widely known writer and speaker on the history and impact of alternative spirituality, he has appeared on CBS Sunday Morning, Dateline NBC, All Things Considered, Air America Radio, The History Channel, The Montel Williams Show, and Coast to Coast AM. He has written forThe Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report, Parabola, the Religion News Service, and the popular weblog BoingBoing.
Mitch Horowitz‘s Occult America is the winner of the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles National Literary Award. “This book is a delightfully original tour through American history, as seen through the lives of men and women devoted to all manner of mysticism. Across these pages troop spiritualists, prophets, seers, psychics, numerologists, transcendentalists, theosophists, and historical figures from Mary Todd Lincoln to Marcus Garvey to Henry Wallace. Their stories are part of the deep-seated American tradition of searching for the new—a tradition that Occult America both explains and enriches.” — Stephen Kinzer, author of Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq and All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
*************************
Michael Winder, Playwright, http://writingprogram.ucmerced.edu/resources
UC Merced Lecturer Michael Winder with the Merritt Writing Program will discuss UC Merced students collaboration with Playhouse Merced. On November 13th, Playhouse Merced and UC Merced’s Merritt Writing Program collaborated on A NIGHT OF LOVE AND MUTANTS: NINE ORIGINAL PLAYS WRITTEN BY UC MERCED STUDENTS. Winder discusses this program, and the upcoming 2011 season.
**********************
Gerald Haslam, Author, http://www.geraldhaslam.com
Gerald Haslam is a professor emertius of English at Sonoma State University, whose The Great Central Valley: California’s Heartland won several major non-fiction awards in 1993 and whose Workin’ Man Blues won Rolling Stone’s Ralph J. Gleason Award in 2001. His novel, Straight White Male, won the 2000 Western States Book Award for fiction and was named Book of the Year by Foreword magazine. He is a native of Oildale.
In Haslam’s latest novel, Grace Period, journalist Marty Martinez thinks his life can’t get any worse: His beloved son has died of AIDS, his wife has divorced him, his daughter blames him for the disintegration of their family, and a medical examination reveals that he has prostate cancer. Then he meets a divorced doctor named Miranda Mossi and everything takes a turn for the better. The action takes place in two communities: Sacramento, and Merced, CA.