Connie Schultz to Moderate CT Forum on Civility

We are thrilled to once again welcome Connie Schultz to The Connecticut Forum as moderator for our first Forum this Season, "The End of Civility?" on Saturday, October 2, 2010.  Panelists for this Forum include David Gergen, Christopher Buckley, Stephen Carter, and Gina Barreca.

A nationally syndicated columnist for The Cleveland Plain Dealer and PARADE magazine's column "Back Page,"  Schultz won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for columns that judges praised for providing “a voice for the underdog and the underprivileged."

During the 2008 presidential race, she was a frequent guest on The Charlie Rose Show and also offered her Midwesterner's perspective on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show, HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher and C-SPAN’s Washington Journal.  

Schultz is the author of two books published by Random House: …And His Lovely Wife, a memoir about her husband Sherrod Brown’s successful 2006 race for the U.S. Senate, and Life Happens – And Other Unavoidable Truths, a collection of essays.

In 2005, Schultz won a Scripps Howard National Journalism Award and a National Headliner Award, both for commentary.  She was a 2003 Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing for her series, The Burden of Innocence, which chronicled the ordeal of Michael Green, who was imprisoned for 13 years for a rape he did not commit.  The week after Schultz’s series ran, the real rapist turned himself in after reading her stories.  The series won the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Social Justice Reporting, the National Headliner Award's Best of Show and journalism awards from Harvard and Columbia universities.

In 2004, Schultz won the Batten Medal, which honors "a body of journalistic work that reflects compassion, courage, humanity and a deep concern for the underdog."  Recently, the Urban League of Greater Cleveland awarded Schultz the Whitney M. Young Humanitarian Award.

She has moderated two previous CT Forums: God in 2009 with Rabbi Harold Kushner, Christopher Hitchens, and Reverend Peter Gomes; and A World of Change in 2010 with Bob Woodward and Tina Brown. 

Here's a clip of Connie in action last Season at A World of Change.

Author John Irving Joins the Forum Book Club Panel!

The Connecticut Forum Announces:
John Irving to Join Azar Nafisi at
The Forum Book Club
Saturday, May 7, 2011

Novelist and screenwriter John Irving is one of the most popular and respected writers in the world. His novels have become American classics; each one is a publishing event.

Irving’s first international bestseller, The World According to Garp, introduced a world of readers to his inventive and expansive style, memorable characters and masterfully woven stories-within-stories. Garp won a National Book Award in 1980 and was made into a film starring Robin Williams.

Since Garp’s release, all of Irving’s novels, including Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and A Widow for One Year, have been translated into over 30 languages and sold tens of millions of copies, and The Cider House Rules was turned into a movie in 1999 that won him the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Irving has three screenplays in-progress; his 12th novel, Last Night in Twisted River, was released in 2009.

Irving has won the O. Henry Award and awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1992 Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma and in 2001 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Watch Irving talk about the "Writer's Craft" below.

Yale Professor Stephen Carter to Join Civility Panel

The Connecticut Forum Announces:
Stephen Carter to Join Gergen, Buckley and Barreca at
The End of Civility?
Saturday, October 2, 2010

Recognized by Time magazine as one of the fifty leaders of the next century, Stephen Carter is one of America’s leading public intellectuals.

The author of four novels and of seven critically acclaimed nonfiction books on law, ethics and politics, he has been shaping the national debate throughout his career on issues ranging from the role of religion in our politics and culture to the role of integrity and civility in our daily lives. He currently is writing a book on the future of democracy and speaks on “Democracy’s Future: Books or Bumper Stickers,” among other topics. Carter has just published his fourth novel, Jericho’s Fall, a sophisticated, topical, thought-provoking thriller about issues ranging from the morality of intelligence operations to the meltdown of the world financial system.
And it creates, in Beck DeForde, an unforgettable heroine for our turbulent modern age.

Carter’s extraordinary fiction debut, The Emperor of Ocean Park, spent three months on the New York Times Bestseller List and has appeared on bestseller lists in several European countries. His other acclaimed novels are New England White and Palace Council.

Stephen Carter is also a Connecticut local: he is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale University. Carter served as a law clerk for two of the great veterans of the civil rights movement, including Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court. As a trustee for the Aspen Institute, he moderates seminars for business executives on the role of values in leadership.

Carter's recent work focuses on the role of human affection in ethical and moral discourse and the intersection between theories of unjust war and unjust law.

Local Author, Academic and Humorist Gina Barreca Joins Civility Panel

The Connecticut Forum Announces:
Gina Barreca to Join David Gergen and Christopher Buckley at
The End of Civility?
Saturday, October 2, 2010

Deemed a “feminist humor maven” by Ms. Magazine and “Very, very funny. For a woman” by Dave Barry, Gina Barreca is most recently the author of It's Not That I'm Bitter: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Visible Panty Lines and Conquered the World. She has appeared on 20/20, 48 Hours, NPR, the BBC, The Today Show, CNN, Joy Behar, and Oprah to discuss gender, power, politics, and humor.

Her earlier books include the bestselling They Used to Call Me Snow White But I Drifted: Women's Strategic Use of Humor, and Babes in Boyland: A Personal History of Coeducation in the Ivy League; her books have been translated into several languages, including Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, and German. She’s the editor of seventeen books, including The Signet Book of American Humor and The Penguin Book of Women’s Humor as well as The Erotics of Instruction and A Sit-Down With the Sopranos.

You may recognize Barreca's name from her weekly column in The Hartford Courant, "Irreconcilable Differences". She also writes for the "Brainstorm" section of The Chronicle of Higher Education, blogs for Psychology Today, and occasionally spars with her former co-author (of I'm With Stupid: One Man, One Woman, and 10,000 of Misunderstandings between the Sexes Cleared Right Up) Gene Weingarten in his "Below the Beltway" column in The Washington Post. With degrees from Dartmouth College, Cambridge University, and the City University of New York, Barreca is Professor of English and Feminist Theory at the University of Connecticut.

Dr. Barreca on her female students and their fear of not dating:

Christopher Buckley, Best Selling Author & Satirist, to Join the Civility Forum

The Connecticut Forum Announces:
Christopher Buckley to Join David Gergen at
The End of Civility?
Saturday, October 2, 2010

Tom Wolfe has called Christopher Buckley, "one of the funniest writers in the English language." Buckley is the author of 13 books, many of them satirical, including Little Green Men, Supreme Courtship and Thank You For Smoking, which was made into a major motion picture. He is most recently the author of Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir.

Christopher Buckley comes from a conservative pedigree; the son of William F. Buckley and Patricia Buckley, he was a long time columnist for The National Review, the conservative magazine founded by his father, as well as the chief speechwriter for George H.W. Bush when he was Vice President. In 2008, Buckley surprisingly endorsed Barack Obama in a piece for The Daily Beast titled "Sorry Dad, I'm Voting for Obama." His column in The National Review was promptly revoked.

Buckley has written for most national newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, TIME, The Atlantic Monthly, US News and World Report, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. He is currently a regular columnist for The Daily Beast. He has published over 50 comic essays in The New Yorker. In 2002, Buckley received the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence.

Watch Christopher Buckley on The Daily Show:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Christopher Buckley
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Azar Nafisi, Author of "Reading Lolita in Tehran," to speak at the Forum Book Club

The Connecticut Forum Announces:

Azar Nafisi, Author of Reading Lolita in Tehran
will be a Panelist at
Forum Book Club
Saturday, May 7, 2011

Azar Nafisi is best known as the author of the national bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which electrified its readers with a compassionate and often harrowing portrait of the Islamic revolution in Iran and how it affected one university professor and her students. Earning high acclaim and an enthusiastic readership, Reading Lolita in Tehran is an incisive exploration of the transformative powers of fiction in a world of tyranny. The book has spent over 117 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Nafisi is a Visiting Professor and the Executive Director of Cultural Conversations at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, where she is a professor of aesthetics, culture, and literature, and teaches courses on the relation between culture and politics. Nafisi held a fellowship at Oxford University, teaching and conducting a series of lectures on culture and the important role of Western literature and culture in Iran after the revolution in 1979. She taught at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University, and Allameh Tabatabai before her return to the United States in 1997 - earning national respect and international recognition for advocating on behalf of Iran’s intellectuals, youth, and especially young women. In 1981, she was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil and did not resume teaching until 1987.

Nafisi also conducted workshops in Iran for women students on the relationship between culture and human rights; the material culled from these workshops formed the basis of a new human rights education curriculum. She has lectured and written extensively in English and Persian on the political implications of literature and culture, as well as the human rights of the Iranian women and girls and the important role they play in the process of change for pluralism and an open society in Iran. She has been consulted on issues related to Iran and human rights both by the policy makers and various human rights organizations in the US and elsewhere. She is also involved in the promotion of not just literacy, but of reading books with universal literary value.

Azar Nafisi has written for The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Her cover story, “The Veiled Threat: The Iranian Revolution’s Woman Problem” published in The New Republic (February 22, 1999) has been reprinted into several languages. Additionally, she has published a children’s book (with illustrator Sophie Benini Pietromarchi) BiBi and the Green Voice. Azar Nafisi’s most recent book, Things I Have Been Silent About: Memories, a memoir about her mother, was published in January 2009. She is currently working on a book entitled Republic of the Imagination, which is about the power of literature to liberate minds and peoples.

For more information, see Nafisi's website .

See Nafisi speaking about her home country of Iran

Autism Advocate Temple Grandin to join Steven Pinker at The Brain Forum

The Connecticut Forum Announces:
Temple Grandin to join Steven Pinker at
The Glorious, Mysterious Brain
Friday, February 25, 2011

"If I could snap my fingers and become nonautistic I would not do so. Autism is a part of who I am." - Temple Grandin

Temple Grandin's doctors confused her autism with brain damage when she was young, and she didn't speak a word until she was nearly four years old. Despite her early silence, these days her words carry weight. Grandin is an important autism advocate, helping raise awareness and understanding about the experience of autistic individuals. A recent HBO movie about her life, starring Claire Danes, has received 15 Emmy nominations. This year, Grandin was included on the Time Magazine list of 100 people who most affect our world. We're excited to welcome her to The Connecticut Forum for The Glorious, Mysterious Brain on November 11, to join Steven Pinker.

In addition to her work as an autism advocate, Grandin is also an accomplished doctor of Animal Science and a consultant on animal welfare issues. She has worked to improve standards in slaughterhouses and livestock; her ability to notice detail and understand the experience of cattle and other animals helps her to "see" the issues with the way livestock are treated and handled. She teaches Animal Science at Colorado State University.

Grandin brings a unique perspective to the panel, as she is able to explain the way she and other autistic individuals think "in pictures". You can watch her on TED, talking about how the world needs all kinds of minds to encourage all kinds of thinking.



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