PODCAST
Authors and Poets
by Academy of Achievement
For 50 years, the Academy of Achievement has invited the world's pre-eminent authors to address its annual Summit. Novelists and playwrights, journalists and historians, critics and humorists, poets and songwriters, essayists and philosophers, all have shared their wisdom with the Academy's honorees and student delegates. Now you can see and hear these presentations, recorded live at the International Achievement Summit. In poetry and prose, these men and women explore the world of nature and the drama of the human condition. Some are creators of fantasy, others are chroniclers of fact; some evoke the nuances of personal experience, others explain the mysteries of the cosmos. Hear their personal accounts of the passions that first inspired them, and the dedication that sustained them as they patiently mastered their art.
Episodes
-
Esperanza Spalding
Vocalist, composer and instrumentalist Esperanza Spalding fell in love with music as a little girl in Portland, Oregon. She first drew acclaim as a child violinist before discovering the upright bass as a teenager. Within months she was playing in local clubs, exploring pop, rock, hip-hop and...
-
Athol Fugard
Hailed as the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world, South Africa's Athol Fugard has won international praise for creating theater of "power, glory, and majestic language." In more than 20 plays, written over six decades, he has chronicled the struggles of men and women of all...
-
Carole King
The most successful and admired female songwriter in the history of pop music, Carole King proves that one woman alone at the piano can be more powerful than a four-piece rock band or a 30-piece orchestra. She grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where her mother was a teacher and her father a...
-
Louise Glück (SD)
Louise Glück is “a strong and haunting presence” among America’s greatest living poets. Her work is distinguished by a rare ability to deploy ostensibly simple language to evoke powerful emotion. While many of her poems clearly address the challenges of life and love in the contemporary world…
more -
Jackson Browne Live Performance (SD)
With the release of his debut album in 1972, Jackson Browne joined the elite rank of American singer-songwriters who shaped the musical ethos of an era. He captured the mood of the 1970s with the introspective songs on his albums Late For the Sky and The Pretender, as well as his greatest…
more -
Hal David Interview
For over 60 years, Hal David (1921-2012) wrote the words America loves to sing. His career spanned the decades from the swing era to the age of hip-hop and took him from Hollywood to Broadway to Nashville. He wrote his first hit song in 1947 and continued to score hits throughout the 1950s…
more -
Rick Atkinson 2010 - Part 1
America's greatest living chronicler of men at war, Rick Atkinson draws on an intimate knowledge of the soldier's life. The son of a career army officer, he was born in Germany and grew up on military posts. He developed his mastery of research -- along with his powerful prose style and keen eye...
-
Rick Atkinson 2010 - Part 2
America's greatest living chronicler of men at war, Rick Atkinson draws on an intimate knowledge of the soldier's life. The son of a career army officer, he was born in Germany and grew up on military posts. He developed his mastery of research -- along with his powerful prose style and keen eye...
-
Nadine Gordimer
Born and raised in South Africa, Nadine Gordimer published her first short story in a children's magazine in 1937 at the age of 16. She left college without a degree and continued publishing short fiction in South African journals. She drew attention outside her country in 1951, when her stories...
-
Taylor Swift (SD) - Part 1
Taylor Swift attended the International Achievement Summit as a student delegate in 2008. In Part 1 of this video excerpt from her performance at the Summit, she sings her hits "Our Song" and "Tim McGraw."
-
Taylor Swift (SD) - Part 2
Taylor Swift attended the International Achievement Summit as a student delegate in 2008. In Part 2 of this video excerpt from her performance at the Summit, she sings "Teardrops on My Guitar" and "Picture to Burn"
-
Brian Wilson
The songs Brian Wilson created as leader of the Beach Boys combined the rhythms of rock and roll with Baroque counterpoint and jazz harmony to create an exhilarating sound that has become the perennial soundtrack of the American summer. Despite near deafness in one ear, Brian Wilson began...
-
Michael Ondaatje
The brilliant novelist, poet and literary innovator Michael Ondaatje was born on the island nation of Ceylon (now the independent republic of Sri Lanka) to parents of Indian and Dutch descent. When Ondaatje was nine his parents separated, and his mother took him, along with his brother and…
more -
Khaled Hosseini
Khaled Hosseini's novel, The Kite Runner, has become an international publishing phenomenon and a modern classic. This tale of childhood innocence betrayed, set against three tragic decades in the history of Afghanistan, gave readers around the world an insight into the human truth behind the...
-
Frank McCourt (2008 Symposium)
"F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. I think I've proved him wrong. And all because I refused to settle for a one-act existence, the 30 years I taught English in various New York City high schools." Frank McCourt was already retired when he published his first…
more -
Rick Atkinson 2008
America’'s greatest living chronicler of men at war, Rick Atkinson draws on an intimate knowledge of the soldier’Ŵs life. The son of a career army officer, he was born in Germany and grew up on military posts. He developed his mastery of research’Ůalong with his powerful prose style and keen eye...
-
Scott Berg - Part 1
A. Scott Berg found his calling early in life. At 15, he already knew he wanted to attend Princeton University. At Princeton he determined to tell the story of 20th century America by writing "five or six biographies" of American cultural figures. At 19 he began work on his senior thesis, a...
-
W.S. Merwin
The dynamic evolution of W.S. Merwin's verse -- allied with his accomplishments as translator, essayist and environmentalist -- have made him the most admired and imitated of American poets. He published his first volume of verse at age 24 and soon won acclaim for an impressive mastery of…
more -
Scott Berg - Part 2
A. Scott Berg found his calling early in life. At 15, he already knew he wanted to attend Princeton University. At Princeton he determined to tell the story of 20th century America by writing "five or six biographies" of American cultural figures. At 19 he began work on his senior thesis, a...
-
Lawrence Wright
Lawrence Wright is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11." The book's title is a phrase from the Quran: "Wherever you are, death will find you, even in the looming tower," which Osama bin Laden quoted three times in a videotaped speech as directed to...
-
Arthur Golden
Arthur S. Golden is the author of Memoirs of a Geisha. Readers and critics were stunned that an American man -- a first-time novelist at that -- could so vividly create the internal life of a Japanese woman living the almost unimaginably alien and structured life of a traditional geisha in the...
-
Harold Prince
Make a list of the landmarks of the American musical theater over the last half a century -- West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, Sweeney Todd, The Phantom of the Opera -- and you'll find Harold Prince behind every one of them. He has won 21 Tony Awards as producer and director, a…
more -
N. Scott Momaday (2007 Symposium)
The American literary world offers no greater award than the Pulitzer Prize. In 1969 the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction went to House Made of Dawn, a first novel from an unknown author. This was unusual enough; even more surprisingly, to some observers, the winner was a Kiowa Indian who had grown up...
-
Suzan-Lori Parks
The most exciting and acclaimed playwright in American drama today, Suzan-Lori Parks is the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Audiences across the country relish her rich blend of fantasy, humor, history and legend, bursting with the music and wordplay of African...
-
Toni Morrison
In novels such as the modern classic, Beloved, Toni Morrison has fused history and legend, realism and fantasy, to craft an epic saga of African American life. Although her work is steeped in local history and folklore, the fundamental human values of her art have captured the hearts of readers...
-
Calvin Trillin
Calvin Trillin has excelled in so many forms of writing that his admirers may argue over whether he is properly characterized as a journalist, memoirist, novelist, humorist, or America's greatest living comic poet. Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, Trillin graduated from Yale University,...
-
Nora Ephron - Part 1
Nora Ephron (1941 - 2012) achieved international success as a director and writer of feature films, a field that had been effectively closed to women for over half a century. Her earlier work as a journalist and essayist had already won her a reputation for sharp-eyed social observation and...
-
Nora Ephron - Part 2
Nora Ephron (1941 - 2012) achieved international success as a director and writer of feature films, a field that had been effectively closed to women for over half a century. Her earlier work as a journalist and essayist had already won her a reputation for sharp-eyed social observation and...
-
Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal wrote his first novel at age 19, while serving in the United States Army, and was acclaimed as one of the most promising young writers to emerge from World War II. He created an international sensation in the late '40s with The City and the Pillar, a novel that shattered the taboo...
-
John Irving
Readers around the world have embraced the vivid characters who tumble through the intricately imagined tales of John Irving. He published his first novel when he was 26, and won the National Book Award for The World According to Garp in 1980. Since then, every one of his novels has been an...
-
John Updike
Novelist, short story writer and poet, John Updike is one of America's premier men of letters. As a boy growing up on a farm in Pennsylvania, he suffered from psoriasis and a stammer, ailments that set him apart from his peers. He found solace in writing, and won a scholarship to Harvard, where…
more -
Norman Mailer
The most publicly engaged and controversial American writer of the last half-century, Norman Mailer won American literature's most distinguished honors for both fiction and non-fiction, although much of his best work deliberately tested the limits of these traditional categories. His experiences…
more -
Dean Ornish
Dean Ornish, M.D., is the founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California and Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. For over 30 years, Dr. Ornish has directed clinical research demonstrating that comprehensive...
-
Gao Xingjian
The Chinese-born author Gao Xingjian received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature, for work "of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama." His achievement was all the more remarkable given the obstacles he was forced…
more -
Edna O'Brien
Born and raised in a small town in rural Ireland, Edna O'Brien came to Dublin as a teenager to become a pharmacist, but a chance encounter with James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man helped her find her own voice as a writer. She completed her first novel, The Country Girls, in…
more -
Ernest J. Gaines
Ernest Gaines was born and raised on the same plantation where his ancestors once labored as slaves. For nearly a century, they had remained in the same corner of rural Louisiana, living in the same cabins as their forebears, worshipping in the same church, and working for the same family that…
more -
David Herbert Donald
The Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University, David Herbert Donald (1920-2009) also taught at Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Oxford and Columbia. He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, in 1961 for Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, and again in…
more -
Ray Kurzweil
Raymond Kurzweil has founded four successful businesses, all based on artificial intelligence technology he developed. He pioneered systems for optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, and speech recognition. He developed the CCD (charge-coupled device) flatbed scanner, and...
-
Sue Grafton
Sue Grafton is one of America's most popular mystery writers, the author of a series of best-sellers known as the alphabet mysteries, beginning with "A" is for Alibi and continuing through her latest, "U" is for Undertow due out in December 2009. She was born in Louisville, Kentucky and graduated...
-
Oliver Sacks
Dr. Oliver Sacks is an internationally renowned neurologist and best-sel1ing author. As physician and writer he is concerned above all with the link between body and mind; many of his books recount case histories from the outer limits of neurological experience. Born in London, England, he…
more -
Frank McCourt (1999 Symposium)
Frank McCourt was already retired when he published his first book at age 66. Angela's Ashes, a memoir of his impoverished boyhood in Limerick, Ireland, shot to the top of the best-seller lists and remained there for over a year. Angela's Ashes won McCourt the National Book Critics Circle Award…
more -
Shelby Foote - Part 1
Shelby Foote became known to millions of Americans when he appeared on the PBS documentary series, The Civil War, but he had long enjoyed a great reputation among readers as a novelist, and as the author of a three-volume narrative history of the Civil War, the fruit of 20 years toil and a…
more -
Stanley Crouch
Stanley Crouch is a critic, novelist, social commentator and syndicated columnist. A onetime jazz drummer, he first became well-known for his writings on music and popular culture. Although he was originally associated with the avant-garde, he later become an outspoken champion of jazz tradition...
-
Lord Martin Rees
The Astronomer Royal of the United Kingdom, Martin Rees was appointed to the House of Lords in 2005 as Baron Rees of Ludlow. One of the world's leading cosmologists, he is renowned for his pioneering studies of quasars, galaxies, black holes and the origins of the universe. His early study of the...
-
Shelby Foote - Part 2
Shelby Foote became known to millions of Americans when he appeared on the PBS documentary series, The Civil War, but he had long enjoyed a great reputation among readers as a novelist, and as the author of a three-volume narrative history of the Civil War, the fruit of 20 years toil and a…
more -
Stephen Ambrose
Although the historian Stephen Ambrose (1936 - 2002) wrote over 30 books, he was almost as well-known to the public for his appearances on television's political discussion programs, where he was frequently called upon to discuss the American presidency, the history of the American West and the...
-
Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates is one of America's most prolific and respected authors. She has distinguished herself in the academic world as teacher and critic, while earning a fortune as the author of best-selling novels in a wide range of genres, from the family chronicle to the historical novel, the…
more -
David Herbert Donald
David Herbert Donald (1920 - 2009) was a distinguished historian, longtime chair of the graduate program in American history at Harvard, and a leading authority on the Civil War era and the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Donald's Lincoln studies began at the University of Illinois, where he was a...
-
John Guare
John Guare first won fame at age 29 as the author of the award-winning play House of Blue Leaves (1971) , a distinctive mixture of family drama, black comedy and satire, successfully revived in New York in 1986 and again in 2011. For forty years, he has enjoyed unusually consistent success in the...
-
Doris Kearns Goodwin
The acclaimed presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin was born in Brooklyn, and grew up in Rockville Center, Long Island. Her invalid mother encouraged her love of books, while her father shared her love of baseball; she traces her interest in history to her childhood experience recording the...
We're indexing this podcast's transcripts for the first time — this can take a minute or two. We'll show results as soon as they're ready.
No matches for "" in this podcast's transcripts.
No topics indexed yet for this podcast.
Loading reviews...
ABOUT THIS SHOW
For 50 years, the Academy of Achievement has invited the world's pre-eminent authors to address its annual Summit. Novelists and playwrights, journalists and historians, critics and humorists, poets and songwriters, essayists and philosophers, all have shared their wisdom with the Academy's honorees and student delegates. Now you can see and hear these presentations, recorded live at the International Achievement Summit. In poetry and prose, these men and women explore the world of nature and the drama of the human condition. Some are creators of fantasy, others are chroniclers of fact; some evoke the nuances of personal experience, others explain the mysteries of the cosmos. Hear their personal accounts of the passions that first inspired them, and the dedication that sustained them as they patiently mastered their art.
HOSTED BY
Academy of Achievement
Loading similar podcasts...
Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Authors and Poets have?
Authors and Poets currently has 94 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Authors and Poets about?
For 50 years, the Academy of Achievement has invited the world's pre-eminent authors to address its annual Summit. Novelists and playwrights, journalists and historians, critics and humorists, poets and songwriters, essayists and philosophers, all have shared their wisdom with the Academy's...
How often does Authors and Poets release new episodes?
Authors and Poets has 94 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Authors and Poets?
You can listen to Authors and Poets on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Authors and Poets?
Authors and Poets is created and hosted by Academy of Achievement.
URL copied to clipboard!