Special Events
March 11: Lisa See, 7:30 p.m. April 26: David Sedaris, 7:30 p.m. May 6: Robert Kurson, 7:30 p.m. May 7: Laura W. Bush, 7:30 p.m. May 25: Yann Martel, 7:30 p.m. June 1: Annette Gordon Reed, 7:30 p.m. June 12: Ira Glass, 7:30 p.m. ORDER ONLINE or call 214-922-1818
 
LISA SEEThursday, March 11, 7:30 p.m.
Horchow AuditoriumLisa See, author of the acclaimed New York Times bestsellers Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), Peony in Love (2007), and Shanghai Girls (2009), has always been intrigued by stories that have been lost, forgotten, or deliberately covered up, whether in the past or happening in the world today. In her novels, she also explores the bonds of female friendship, the power of words, and the desire all women have to be heard. The Philadelphia Inquirer raved, “With Snow Flower, See has written a novel that ranks with the best fiction of Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston, the modern luminaries of Chinese storytelling.” Amy Tan herself called it “achingly beautiful, a marvel of imagination.” At this event, See will share insights from her newest novel, Shanghai Girls, which is set close to See’s home: Los Angeles’s Chinatown. Two sisters, Pearl and May, leave Shanghai in 1937 and go to Los Angeles after their father gambled away their family’s wealth and sold them to suitors in arranged marriages. It is a story of immigration, identity, war, and love—but at its heart is a story of sisters who share hopes and dreams as well as jealousies and rivalries. See’s first book, On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family, traced the journey of her great-grandfather, Fong See, who overcame many obstacles to become the one-hundred-year-old godfather of Los Angeles’s Chinatown and the patriarch of a sprawling family. She interviewed nearly one hundred of her relatives while researching the book in order to paint a clearer portrait of how her racially mixed family developed. She was the recipient of the 2001 National Woman of the Year Award from the Organization of Chinese American Women and the 2003 History Makers Award presented by the Chinese American Museum.
Wine reception and book signing following the event at the Crow Collection of Asian Art. Community Partner: 
Ticket Prices
Full $37
Reduced (DMA and Crow Collection members, Educators, Seniors)$32
Student $15
ORDER ONLINE or call 214-922-1818
 
  
DAVID SEDARISMonday, April 26, 7:30 p.m.
Promotional partner:
Back by popular demand to read new and unpublished material! David Sedaris may well be the closest thing the literary world has these days to a rock star—his speaking engagements are now consistently standing-room only. The skill with which Sedaris slices through cultural euphemisms
and political correctness proves that he is a master of satire and one of the most observant writers addressing the human condition today. Sedaris is the author of Barrel Fever and Holidays on Ice, as well as the best-selling collections of personal essays Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day, and When You Are Engulfed in Flames. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker and Esquire, and his original radio pieces can often be heard on This American Life. There are a total of seven million copies of his books in print, and they have been translated into twenty-five languages. Sedaris has been nominated for three Grammy Awards for Best Spoken Word and Best Comedy Album. His most recent live album is David Sedaris: For Your Listening Pleasure (November 2009). In 2001 Sedaris received the Thurber Prize for American Humor and Time magazine named him “Humorist of the Year.” His wit has been compared to Mark Twain and Dorothy Parker; Publishers Weekly dubbed him Garrison Keillor’s evil twin.”
“Sedaris belongs on any list of people writing in English at the moment who are revising our ideas about what’s funny.”—San Francisco Chronicle
Ticket prices are based on seat location and range from $25 to $65.
ORDER ONLINE or call 214-922-1818
  ROBERT KURSONShadow Divers: Mystery and Adventure at the Bottom of the AtlanticThursday, May 6, 7:30 p.m.
Horchow Auditorium
Hailed by the New York Times as a “pulse-quickening real-life thriller,” Shadow Divers is a story of riveting adventure in the frigid waters of the Atlantic Ocean. An unexpected discovery in 1991 began a six-year quest to solve one of the last mysteries of World War II. Though official records denied it, and no historian or government could explain it, a German U-boat with the remains of fifty-six Nazi soldiers lay wrecked sixty miles off the coast of New Jersey. Join Robert Kurson as he shares insights into the remarkable discovery and the subsequent pursuit to identify the lost submarine and its nameless crew.
Robert Kurson, a native of Chicago, holds degrees in philosophy and law. He quit a practice in real estate law to pursue a writing career. Kurson’s award-winning stories have appeared in Rolling Stone, the New York Times Magazine, and Esquire, where he is a contributing editor. “The phrase ‘page-turner’ is bandied about too cheaply, but Shadow Divers’ is the real thing.”—Dallas Morning NewsBefore the event:
6:30 p.m. Join Dr. Heather MacDonald, The Lillian and James H. Clark Associate Curator of European Art, for a tour of Coastlines: Images of Land and Sea. The exhibition is drawn from the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art and from local collections and explores how visual artists of the modern period (1850–present) have represented coastal landscapes.
Sponsored by: 
Ticket Prices
Full $37
Reduced (DMA members, Educators, Seniors)$32
Student $15
ORDER ONLINE or call 214-922-1818
Yann MartelTuesday, May 25, 7:30 p.m.
Horchow AuditoriumYann Martel is one of today’s most interesting and surprising writers. He rocketed onto the literary scene with his whimsical, imaginative novel, Life of Pi, for which he received the 2002 Man Booker Prize and the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. The novel tells the tale of a sixteen-year-old boy’s 227-day odyssey adrift in the Pacific, accompanied by a 450-pound Bengal tiger, and his use of all his knowledge, wits, and faith to keep himself alive. Both a critical and popular success, Life of Pi has sold almost two million copies and has been published in over forty countries and more than thirty languages. At this event, Martel will discuss his forthcoming novel, Beatrice and Virgil (April 2010), a mesmerizing and brilliant exploration of the limitations of language in describing and understanding the horrors of the Holocaust. Heartbreaking and wildly imaginative, it defies conventions, mixing genres, from the short story, the essay, the play, and the novel. Like Life of Pi, it will elicit endless discussion about man's relationship to animals and the stories we tell ourselves in order to ignore the evils we would rather not confront. Publisher Cindy Spiegel said upon reading the manuscript that "it has the feel of a classic. I felt as if I were discovering a Beckett or a Nabokov today. It's a book that addresses a topic that's been written about many, many times but feels profoundly original." “We’re all busy. But every person has a space next to where they sleep, whether a patch of pavement or a fine bedside table. In that space, at night, a book can glow. And in those moments of docile wakefulness, when we begin to let go of the day, then is the perfect time to pick up a book and be someone else, somewhere else, for a few minutes, a few pages, before we fall asleep.” —Yann Martel
LAURA W. BUSHFriday, May 7, 2010, 7:30 p.m.Arts & Letters Live is honored to present Mrs. Laura W. Bush, who will share insights from her forthcoming memoir to be released by Scribner in May 2010. Mrs. Laura W. Bush is actively involved in issues of national and global concern, with a particular emphasis on education, health care, and human rights. As First Lady, she made a historic trip to Afghanistan in 2005. Her involvement began there in 2001, when she delivered the weekly presidential radio address to call attention to the plight of women and children suffering under the Taliban. A former teacher and librarian, Mrs. Bush convened a Summit on Early Childhood Cognitive Development, providing a forum for prominent scholars and educators to share research on the best ways for parents and caregivers to prepare children for lifelong learning. She is an enthusiastic proponent of teacher recruitment programs such as Teach for America. In 2001 Mrs. Bush partnered with the Library of Congress to launch the first National Book Festival. The Festival has grown each year, drawing more than 120,000 book-lovers from across the nation to Washington, D.C., in 2008. Mrs. Bush established the Texas Book Festival in 1995, and it continues to thrive today. She hosted leaders from around the world for the White House Conference on Advancing Global Literacy. Her leadership of this effort continues in her role as Honorary Ambassador for the United Nations Literacy Decade. Mrs. Bush was born in Midland. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in education from Southern Methodist University and a master’s degree in library science from the University of Texas. She taught in public schools in Dallas, Houston, and Austin and worked as a public school librarian. In 1977 she met and married George Walker Bush.
Ticket Prices
Full $37
Reduced $32
Student $15 ORDER ONLINE or call 214-922-1818
  ANNETTE GORDON-REEDTuesday, June 1, 7:30 p.m.
Horchow AuditoriumAnnette Gordon-Reed won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History and the 2008 National Book Award for nonfiction for the Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008), a multigenerational epic about an American slave family with ties to the third president; she has been lauded as one of our country’s most distinguished presidential scholars and authorities on race. She currently serves as a professor of law and history at New York Law School and Rutgers respectively. Reared in segregated Conroe, Texas, she became fascinated with Thomas Jefferson in elementary school after reading a children’s biography of him, narrated by a fictional slave boy. At fourteen, she joined the Book-of-the-Month Club (concealing her status as a minor) to receive Fawn Brodie’s biography Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Portrait. Gordon-Reed said, “The fact that he loved books and I loved books was something that attracted me to him.” The New Yorker hailed her first book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997), as “brilliant.” Gordon-Reed is the living definition of a history detective. In 1998 the news broke that DNA tests revealed a near-certain confirmation of a genetic link between Jefferson and Hemings’s youngest child, Eston. Publishers Weekly hailed The Hemingses of Monticello as “fascinating, wise, and of the utmost importance.” The Washington Post said that Gordon-Reed “has succeeded not only in recovering the lives of an entire slave family, but also in showing them as creative agents intelligently maneuvering to achieve maximum advantage for themselves within the orbit of institutionalized slavery.”
Ticket Prices
Full $37
Reduced $32
Student $15
ORDER ONLINE or call 214-922-1818
 
IRA GLASSSaturday, June 12, 7:30 p.m. Promotional partner:
In an age of handheld technology and constantly accessible entertainment, Ira Glass is simultaneously leading a journalistic revolution and bridging the generational gap via a more classic route—the radio—as host of This American Life, an award-winning program that is heard on more than five hundred public radio stations each week by over 1.8 million listeners. Most weeks, the podcast of the program is the most popular podcast in America. The New York Times calls Glass “a storyteller who filters his interviews and impressions through a distinctive literary imagination and eccentric intelligence.” Since establishing This American Life in 1995, Glass has piloted the show to the heights of journalistic and broadcasting excellence, garnering such distinctions as the Peabody and DuPont-Columbia awards, as well as the Edward R. Murrow and Overseas Press Club awards. In 2001 Time magazine named Glass “Best Radio Show Host in America.” But Glass’s talent for engaging listeners has taken him beyond the realm of radio: the first season of the television series This American Life won two Emmys, and its second season won another. Glass also compiled The New Kings of Nonfiction in 2007, collaborated on a This American Life–inspired comic book entitled Radio: An Illustrated Guide, and served as an executive producer for Unaccompanied Minors, a movie based on a story featured on the show. Purchase Ira Glass tickets ONLINE or by calling 972-744-4650.
Photo Credits: Daniel H. Pink: Jerry Bauer Lisa See: Patricia Williams David Sedaris: Laurie Rosenwald Laura W. Bush: Shealah Craighead, White House Photographer Ira Glass: Stuart Mullenberg Arts & Letters Live is supported by the Kay Cattarulla Endowment for the Literary and Performing Arts, The George and Fay Young Foundation, The Hoglund Foundation, The Eugene McDermott Foundation, and Annual Series Supporters. Additional support provided by Friends of the Dallas Public Library. Air transportation provided in part by American Airlines. Hotel accommodations provided in part by The Adolphus. Promotional partners include The Dallas Morning News, Einstein Printing, and
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