The Writers Studio
D Magazine says, “Fact: Literary readings can be boring. Another fact: The Writers Studio . . . is anything but.” Inspired by Bravo’s “Inside the Actors Studio,” the Writers Studio brings to Dallas the world’s most accomplished writers for an intimate look at their work. A virtual "Who's Who" of the literary world, Studio authors have included Alice Walker, Junot Diaz, Louise Erdrich, Joan Didion, Umberto Eco, Maxine Hong Kingston, Candace Bushnell, Ernest Gaines, Julia Alvarez, and many others.
Uniquely, The Writers Studio is both an event and an educational experience. Hosts Randy Gordon and Catherine Cuellar involve the audience in the life and art of being a writer through a combination of interview and audience Q&A. Episodes are taped for radio broadcast on KERA and NPR affiliates.
Currently, the Writers Studio is airing on KERA, Thursdays at 8 PM
February 9
LOUIS BEGLEY was born in Poland and is a Holocaust Survivor. He is the author of Wartime Lies, The Man Who Was Late, As Max Saw It, About Schmidt, Mistler's Exit, Schmidt Delivered, Das Gelobte Land, Venedig unter vier Augen (with Anka Muhlstein, Shipwreck, Matters of Honor, and numerous essays and articles. About Schmidt was made into a Jack Nicholson film. He is a Harvard graduate and his prizes include The Irish Times-Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize, National Book Award Finalist, National Book Critics' Circle Finalist, PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award, Prix Médicis Étranger, Jeanette-Schocken-Preis, Bremerhavener Bürgerpreis für Literatur, American Academy of Letters Award in Literature, Konrad Adenauer-Stiftung Literaturpreis, past President PEN American Center; and Chevalier, Ordre des Arts et Lettres.
February 16
JUNOT DÍAZ received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Hip, funny, and very, very smart, he's been a media sensation from The New York Times Book Review to the Colbert Report. Nevertheless, a serious writer, Díaz has published fiction in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, and four times in The Best American Short Stories. His critically praised, bestselling debut book, Drown, led to his inclusion among Newsweek’s “New Faces of 1996”-- the only writer in the group. The New Yorker placed him on a list of the 20 top writers for the twenty-first century. Díaz has won the Eugene McDermott Award, the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship, a U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship from the NEA, and most recently the Rome Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Born in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic, and raised there and in New Jersey, he graduated from Rutgers and received an MFA from Cornell. He lives in New York City and Boston, and is a tenured professor at MIT.
February 23
CANDACE BUSHNELL'S creation of Sex and the City tapped into a zeitgeist about New York and its denizens. With each of her four novels she has explored the lives of women as they navigated the city – from their halcyon days through careers and family. In One Fifth Avenue, she broadened her canvas and cast a gimlet eye on the hothouse lives of one storied address. Sexual politics, real estate, theft, fortunes lost in a day—with blogs and tabloids capturing it all-- is a chronicle of the city as it plays out its outsized and glittering fable. Called by many "the Edith Wharton" of today's Big Apple, Bushnell has traded the delicate China teacup and saucer for a pair of leopard-spotted Italian pumps, sashaying her way to gender-truths beneath codified props and manners.
March 1
KIMBERLA LAWSON ROBY, New York Times Bestselling Author, has written eight novels which include Changing Faces, The Best-Kept Secret, Too Much of a Good Thing, A Taste of Reality, It’s a Thin Line, Casting the First Stone, Here and Now, and her debut title, Behind Closed Doors, which was originally self-published through her own company, Lenox Press. Her novels have frequented numerous bestseller lists, including not only The New York Times and those in Essence Magazine, Upscale Magazine, Emerge Magazine, Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, The Dallas Morning News, and The Austin Chronicle to name a few. Both Behind Closed Doors and Casting the First Stone were #1 Blackboard bestsellers for four consecutive months in 1997 and 2000 respectively.
March 8
MARY GORDON is, according to The New York Times, America’s “preeminent novelist of Roman Catholic mores,” and the author of the novels Spending, The Company of Women, The Rest of Life, Final Payments, The Other Side, and Pearl, as well as the memoirs The Shadow Man and her latest work, Circling My Mother. Mary Gordon, a consummate story-teller with a keen eye for moral exploration, has received a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, A Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 1997 O. Henry Award for Best Short Story. She teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City.
March 15
LOUISE ERDRICH’s first book of poems, Jacklight, was published in 1983, followed a year later by Love Medicine, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award from the American Institute of Arts and Letters, and other prizes. Love Medicine eventually became the first novel in a remarkable series that would include, The Beet Queen, Tracks, The Bingo Palace, Tales of Burning Love, The Antelope Wife, Four Souls, The Master Butchers Singing Club, and The Painted Drum. In addition to these novels, Erdrich’s publications include a collaborative novel, The Crown of Columbus (written with Michael Dorris), another book of poetry Baptism of Desire, and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, a finalist for the National Book Award. The Plague of Doves was published by HarperCollins in 2008.
