The 20th Anniversary 2007-08 Literary Lecture Series features original talks by six of the world's most respected and entertaining writers.

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Orhan Pamuk
Monday, October 15, 2007
Winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature, Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk burst upon the international stage with The White Castle (1992). In this and later novels, such as The Black Book and Snow, Pamuk delineates the cultural and religious borders between East and West, Muslim and Christian. Though not an overtly political writer, Pamuk's work and life expose the tension between the artist and the state.

Diane Ackerman
Monday, November 19, 2007
Diane Ackerman -- a Guggenheim Fellow, Lavan Poetry Prize winner, and recipient of the John Burroughs Nature Award -- brings poetry to science and science to poetry. The author of the lyrical nonfiction bestseller A Natural History of the Senses and An Alchemy of Mind, a poetics of the brain based on recent neuroscience, she has also written Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire and nature books for children. In an unusual distinction, Ackerman lends her name to a molecule: the dianeackerone.

Colson Whitehead
Monday, January 14, 2008
Brilliant African American novelist Colson Whitehead debuted with The Intuitionist, a complex allegory of race in America. John Henry Days, his striking juxtaposition of the 19th century railroad folk hero and a modern-day journalist, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. This novel also won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, which honors American authors 35 or younger. The MacArthur "genius" grantee's most recent work is Apex Hides the Hurt, the story of a town in search of a name, in a culture overwhelmed by marketing.

Mary Oliver
Monday, February 4, 2008
Mary Oliver's poetry, with its lyrical connection to the natural world, has firmly established her in the highest realm of American poets. She is known for imagery that brings nature into clear focus and transforms our everyday world into a place of magic. The author of dozens of volumes, among them Thirst, Blue Iris, and Why I Wake Early, is a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and Lannan Foundation Literary Award winner. Her next poetry collection, Red Bird, will be released in 2008.

Richard Powers
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
A novelist whose work plumbs the nature of consciousness and what it means to be human, Richard Powers won the 2006 National Book Award for neuro-cosmological adventure The Echo Maker. Author of nine novels, including Galatea 2.2 and The Time of Our Singing, Powers has also received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Historical Fiction. Plowing the Dark, his tale of virtual reality environments, human and otherwise, is set in Seattle.

Pico Iyer*
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
*Pico Iyer replaces John Banville.
Pico Iyer has referred to himself as a “global village on two legs.” This consummate travel writer and cultural reporter was born in England to Indian parents, grew up in California, was educated at Eton and Oxford, and now lives in Japan and California. In 1985, at 28 he began the trip to the “not so Far East” that would result in Video Night in Kathmandu, a book that quickly established him as one of the world’s leading travel writers in the vein of Jan Morris and Paul Theroux. His incisive observations on the emerging global culture continued with The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto; Cuba and the Night; Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home; and Abandon. His upcoming book is The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, “ . . . an uncommonly thoughtful and eloquent report on the spiritual reflections and also the complex and demanding political and practical encounters negotiated every day by the Dalai Lama–an old friend of his father whom he has known well since early boyhood, not only on regular sojourns at Dharamsala but as a companionable observer on His Holiness’s tireless world travels on behalf of simple sanity and peace–Iyer has brought us an invaluable account and precious gift.” –Peter Matthiessen

Pico Iyer Publications:
Video Night in Kathmandu (1988)
The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto (1991)
Falling Off the Map (1993)
Cuba and the Night (novel, 1995)
Tropical Classical: Essays from Several Directions (1997)
Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home (2000)
Imagining Canada: An Outsider's Hope for a Global Future (2001)
Abandon (novel, 2003)
Sun After Dark: Flights into the Foreign (2004)
The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (March, 2008)
Longtime, regular reviewer for New York Review of Books and New York Times Book Review
Liner notes to The Essential Leonard Cohen