Arts & Letters Live

Series Summary

Widely acknowledged as a major contribution to Dallas’s cultural life, Arts & Letters Live has been a sellout at the Dallas Museum of Art since its inception in 1992. Audiences estimated at over 100,000 have attended more than 230 series programs, offered locally or on tour. Five broadcasts on public radio, three on the Internet, three books, and four audio publications have greatly extended the series’ reach. To date, Arts & Letters Live has showcased some 275 regional, national, and international writers, often in combination with performing or visual arts. The most innovative program—readings by Texas actors of short fiction by Texas writers, called Texas Bound^®—plays to two packed houses each program night in Dallas and tours widely. Well-known actors participating in Texas Bound have included Tommy Lee Jones, Kathy Bates, Thomas Gibson, Larry Hagman, Marcia Gay Harden, Judith Ivey, G. W. Bailey, Barry Corbin and Doris Roberts. The series has been the subject of articles in the New York Times, Southern Living, and other national publications.

Programs featuring distinguished writers have included Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning novelists Carol Shields, Michael Cunningham, John Updike, Michael Chabon, Art Spiegelman, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Richard Ford, to name a few. Other major authors participating in the series have included Ernest Gaines, Grace Paley, Anne Lamott, Margaret Atwood, Sherman Alexie, Edwidge Danticat, Sandra Cisneros, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Ann Patchett, A. S. Byatt, and Ha Jin, Salman Rushdie, Augusten Burroughs, Sue Monk Kidd, Anchee Min, Frances Mayes, Alexander McCall Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer, Arthur Golden, Myla Goldberg, Azar Nafisi , Barbara Kingsolver, and David Sedaris. In addition, the series has celebrated poets including Billy Collins, Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass, Rita Dove, W. S. Merwin and Seamus Heaney.

Arts & Letters Live is recognized for its creative programming, including a program featuring the writings of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald read by Natasha Richardson and John Benjamin Hickey; an unconventional night of humor with Dave Eggers (author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) and Neal Pollack; tributes to Texas literary giants Katherine Anne Porter, Cormac McCarthy, and Larry McMurtry; as well as other interdisciplinary programs combining music, film, and literature.

arts & Letters Live, jr., an offshoot of the adult series, is targeted for ages nine and up and offers youth and families the unique opportunity to hear authors discuss their works and interact with them. The series has featured award-winning authors and illustrators including: E. L. Konigsburg, Christopher Paul Curtis, Avi, Chris Van Allsburg, Blue Balliett and Brett Helquist, T. A. Barron, Will Hobbs, and Katherine Paterson, Kate DiCamillo, Rick Riordan, Richard Peck, and Lois Lowry. E. L. Konigsburg’s presentation was held in conjunction with a Late Night event at the Museum inspired by her writings. Families took behind-the-scenes tours, flashlight tours, and “Choose Your Own Adventure” tours, and high school theater students presented readings from The View from Saturday in front of thematically appropriate works of art. In 2007, the series hosted Markus Zusak, Laurence Yep, Diane Stanley, and Wendy Mass.

Arts & Letters Live History 1992–2007

Featured Writers
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners: Carol Shields (The Stone Diaries), Michael Cunningham (The Hours), John Updike (The Centaur, Rabbit Is Rich, Rabbit at Rest); Jane Smiley (A Thousand Acres), Robert Olen Butler (A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain), Oscar Hijuelos (The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love), Tim O’Brien (Going After Cacciato), Ellen Gilchrist (Victory Over Japan), Frank McCourt (Angela’s Ashes), Alice McDermott (Charming Billy), Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), Art Spiegelman (Maus: A Survivor’s Tale), Robert Caro (Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson), Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex), Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs and Steel), Richard Ford (Independence Day), Lawrence Wright (The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11)

PEN/Faulkner Award finalists and winners: Tobias Wolff (The Barracks Thief), Ann Patchett (Bel Canto)

Major women: Grace Paley, Anne Lamott, Margaret Atwood, Anita Shreve, Mary Gordon, Kaye Gibbons, Lee Smith, Melissa Bank, Sue Miller, Jeanne Ray, A. S. Byatt, Ann Patchett, Azar Nafisi, Liza Dalby, Myla Goldberg, Debra Dean, Barbara Kingsolver

Top Texas writing women: Lee Cullum, Prudence Mackintosh, Rena Pederson, Maryln Schwartz (Laugh Your Lunch Off fundraiser, 2002), Paulette Jiles

Firebrands: David Sedaris, Mary Karr, Sapphire, Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, Sandra Cisneros, T. C. Boyle, Terry Southern, Sherman Alexie, Dave Eggers, Neal Pollack, Sarah Vowell, Ruth Reichl, Jane and Michael Stern

Notable poets: Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, Rita Dove, Billy Collins, Seamus Heaney, W. S. Merwin

Children’s authors: Diane Stanley, David Diaz, Angela Shelf Medearis, John Erickson and Hank the Cowdog, William Joyce, David Small and Sarah Stewart, Michael Hoeye, Kimberly Willis Holt, Christopher Paul Curtis, E. L. Konigsburg, Avi, Kate DiCamillo, Rick Riordan, Richard Peck, Lois Lowry Wendy Mass, Barry Lyga, Markus Zusak, Laurence Yep

Latino/Latina literature: Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Denise Chavez, Dagoberto Gilb, Lionel Garcia, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Pat Mora, Elena Poniatowska, Rudolfo Anaya, John Phillip Santos

African American novelists: Terry MacMillan, Gloria Naylor, J. California Cooper, Ernest Gaines

Asian writers: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Manil Suri, Ha Jin and Li-Young Lee

Major biographers: Nancy Milford (Zelda Fitzgerald and Edna St. Vincent Millay)

Other hall-fillers: Jim Lehrer, Molly Ivins, novelists Tony Hillerman and Russell Banks, Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha), New York Times crossword puzzle editor Will Shortz, Southern humorists Roy Blount and Bailey White, nonfiction writer Simon Winchester, Alice Sebold (who sold over 1,100 tickets—a new record for Arts & Letters Live!), Bruce Feiler, Gregory Maguire (Wicked).

Programs Combining Literature with Theater and Other Arts

Stage
Texas Bound: Texas short fiction read by Texas-connected actors, among them Tommy Lee Jones, Kathy Bates, Larry Hagman, Judith Ivey, Marcia Gay Harden, Peri Gilpin, Julie White, Harriet Harris, Doris Roberts, Barry Corbin, John Benjamin Hickey, John Feltch, Tess Harper, Brent Spiner, G. W. Bailey. Plus a host of local performers, including Daryl Johnston, Max Hartman, and Alex Burton. Authors from Katherine Anne Porter and Larry McMurtry to Sam Shepard.

Selected Shorts: Broadway actors (including James Naughton, Fritz Weaver, Joe Spano, Malachy McCourt, Kathleen Chalfant, Patricia Kalember, Ted Marcoux, and Estelle Parsons) in the NPR short-fiction reading series with Isaiah Sheffer

Playwrights evenings: Athol Fugard, Edward Albee, Terrence McNally, Wendy Wasserstein, Horton Foote, Larry L. King, Anna Deavere Smith

Two evenings honoring the Texas theater pioneer Margo Jones, with cabaret star Bobby Short and others. Willa Cather program with Eva Marie Saint and Jeffrey Hayden.

Tennessee Williams: A Distant Country Called Youth, a staged reading of Williams’ extraordinary and often hilarious letters, starring Richard Thomas

Film
Texas Film: The Awful Truth with John Bloom (a.k.a. Joe Bob Briggs and Don Graham), Running Shorts (short films based on short fiction). Making a Scene with screenwriters Stephen Harrigan, Anne Rapp, and Lawrence Wright.

Fiction into Film with award-winning director Mira Nair, who discussed her creative process in adapting Jhumpa Lahiri’s acclaimed novel The Namesake to film. The event also included a private film screening of The Namesake before it was released to the general public.

Music
New Seed, protest poetry of the 1960s with Ramona Austin and jazz saxophonist Marchel Ivory; An Evening with the Blues with blues legends live and on film; Tribute to the Harlem Renaissance with singer Liz Mikel and others

Art-Related Events
The Painter and the Story, celebrating one of the Dallas Museum of Art’s recent acquisitions, Clouds, a painting by contemporary German artist Sigmar Polke. Broadway actor Maria Tucci read Marguerite Yourcenar’s How Wang Fo Was Saved, the story that inspired the painting.

ARTsong: A Voyage with the Muses, a literary, visual, and musical journey around the world using the Museum’s collections as inspiration. Four acclaimed musicians presented an evening of poetry and song ranging from Dante to Hemingway, Hayden to Sondheim, Degas to O’Keeffe.

generation m: modern masters from the mid-century to the moment, an evening presented by the Southeastern Festival of Song that wove together song, poetry, and visual art inspired by the exhibition Fast Forward: Contemporary Collections for the Dallas Museum of Art. As a way of honoring those collectors who have made generous gifts to the Museum in recent years, Arts & Letters commissioned a new song by renowned composer Robert Beaser and poet Daniel Mark Epstein entitled Vision at Dawn, which premiered at this event. Arts & Letters also commissioned poets Susan Briante, Farid Matuk, Jack Myers, Shin Yu Pai, and Judith Garrett Segura to write poems inspired by works of art in the exhibition.

Dance
Matisse in Motion was a collaboration between Arts & Letters Live, the Museum’s School Partnership programs, Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, and New York choreographer Jessica Lang. This event featured the world premiere of a short suite of original dances inspired by Henri Matisse’s sculptures, drawings, and collages from the exhibition Matisse: Painter as Sculptor.

Tributes To . . .
Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer (with actors Isaiah Sheffer, Leonard Nimoy, and Marian Seldes); John Graves, author of Goodbye to a River (offered by twenty-five fellow Texas writers); and Texas greats Katherine Anne Porter, Cormac McCarthy, and Larry McMurtry

Poets W. B. Yeats, Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens, offered by contemporary poets Edward Hirsch, Paul Muldoon, Sharon Olds, Richard Howard, and others

Writers abroad: Canaday! Eh? with novelists Mordecai Richler, Robert MacNeil, Jane Urquhart, and others. Bloomsbury in Sussex, about the famous English artists and writers. The Drover’s Wife: An Australian Icon.

Texas history: Dibs on the Alamo with novelists Stephen Harrigan, Elizabeth Crook, Jeff Long; and Lawrence Wright

Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald: The Riviera, the Twenties, and the words of the two legendary Fitzgeralds, interpreted by actors Natasha Richardson and John Benjamin Hickey

Plus
Literary Cafe: Fourteen seasons of free readings, originally held at Club Dada in Deep Ellum, featuring writers, poets, and musicians including Kinky Friedman, Marian Winik, Joe Coomer, Naomi Shihab Nye, Amanda Eyre Ward, and Dean King. Beginning in 2004, Literary Cafe became part of the Museum’s Late Nights program and has featured Mông-Lan, Jonathan Saffron Foer, Carrie Fountain, Dominic Smith, Susan Vreeland, Candance Wolf, Elizabeth Gilbert, Helen Oyeyemi, Nicole Krauss, Ross King, Ron Hall and Denver Moore, A. M. Homes, and Keith Donohue.

Young Writers Workshops: Twelve years of free Saturday workshops in conjunction with the Dallas Public Library. Beginning in 2004, two workshops are held annually, one at the Museum using works of art as inspiration for writing and one at the J. Eric Jonsson Library.

Texas Bound for Kids: Saturday morning readings at area bookstores.

Texas Bound on Tour: Presented regularly in Fort Worth and Houston. One-time appearances in New York City and Tyler, Texas.

Texas Bound radio series: Broadcast by KERA as How Texas Tells It

Texas Bound publications: Three anthologies and four audiocassette editions

Texas-Connected Authors Represented in Person or Through Their Work, 1992–2007

Betty Adcock
Phyllis Allen
Kerry Neville Bakken
Donald Barthelme
Frederick Barthelme
Julia Barton
Rick Bass
John Bennet
Sarah Bird
Glenn Blake
John Bloom (a.k.a. Joe Bob
Briggs)
Mark Edelman Boren
Jenny Browne
James Lee Burke
Robert Olen Butler
Lee Merrill Byrd
Ron Carlson
Oscar Casares
Denise Chavez
Sandra Cisneros
William Cobb
Matt Clark
Lee Cullum
Tracy Daugherty
Curtis Dale Dawson
Rick DeMarinis
Diane DeSanders
Pamela Diamond
Tom Doyal
Lori Lynn Drummond
Tony Earley
Mary K. Flatten
Robert Flynn
Greg Garrett
Daniel L. Garza
Mary Ladd Gavell
Dagoberto Gilb
William Goyen
A. C. Greene
Stephen Gullion
Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey
Leon Hale
Jack Handey
William Hauptman
Shelby Hearon
Philip Heldrich
Christina Henriquez
O. Henry
Irene Beltran Hernandez
Dave Hickey
Barbara Hudson
Arturo Islas
Ray Isle
Molly Ivins
Bret Anthony Johnson
Marjorie Kemper
Larry L. King
Prudence Mackintosh
James Magnuson
Jas. Mardis
David Marquis
Steve Martin
William C. Martin
Jennifer Mathieu
Robert McBrearty
Cormac McCarthy
Reginald McKnight
Charlie McMurtry
Larry McMurtry
Jan Meissner
Maile Meloy
Jewel Mogan
Sarah Morgan
Violette Newton
Tim O’Brien
Carolyn Osborn
Rena Pederson
Ruth Pennebaker
Hermine Pinson
Katherine Anne Porter
Sara Powers
David Rice
Tomas Rivera
Mary Robison
Paul Rudnick
Jim Sanderson
Lisa Sandlin
Annette Sanford
Winifred Sanford
George Saunders
Maryln Schwartz
Daryl Scroggin
Jan Epton Seale
Sam Shepard
C. W. Smith
Dominic Smith
R. E. Smith
Diana Spechler
Bill Swart
Marshall Terry
Lorenzo Thomas
Donna Trussell
Abraham Verghese
Amanda Eyre Ward
Sharon Oard Warner
Barbara Wedgwood
Betty Wiesepape
Lynna Williams
S.L. Wisenberg
Jane Roberts Wood
Bryan Woolley
Lawrence Wright

Texas-Connected Actors Featured at Arts & Letters Live

Amy Acker
Tyress Allen
Mary Anna Austin
Roger Alvarez
Jeffrey Bean
Esther Benson
James Black
Cora Cardona
Don Alan Croll
Gail Cronauer
Bruce DuBose
John Felch
Chamblee Ferguson
John Flores
Cecilia Flores
Linda Gehringer
Thomas Gibson
Dolores Godinez
Connie Gold
Harriet Harris
Max Hartman
Sean Hennigan
John Benjamin Hickey
Laurel Hoitsma
Bill Jenkins
Billy Jones
Jenny Ledel
Denise Lee
Ev Lunning, jr.
Liz Mikel
Norma Moore
Randy Moore
Molly Moroney
Alex Allen Morris
Taylor Anne Mountz
Cynthia Dorn Navarrete
Erin Neal
Katherine Owens
Tina Parker
Raphael Parry
Khary Payton
Angie Phillips
Anthony Ramirez
Jo Schellenberg
Lisa Lee Schmidt
Octavio Solis
Cliff Stephens
Shelley Tharp
Sheriden Thomas
Jessica D. Turner
Sally Nystuen Vahle
Christina Vela
Julie White
Catherine Whiteman
Nance Williamson