ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library

Dagoberto Gilb, of Anglo and Mexican heritage, calls both El Paso and Los Angeles home and is a union carpenter with a degree in philosophy. Gilb's rich experiences translate into stories that range the width of his native desert lands. He has been called "a powerful, necessary voice in American literature whose emergence defies any pigeon-holing." He is a winner of the James D. Phelan Award in Literature, the Whiting Award, the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters, and a recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship. He is the author of The Last Residence of Mickey Acuna and  The Magic of Blood, stories which Jim Harrison said: "deal with a portion of society that literature seldom ever reaches." Howard Junker is the founding editor & publisher of ZYZZYVA, a quarterly of West Coast writers and artists. This program was produced as part of the 1997 season of Racing Toward the Millennium: Voices from the American West in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The media has been digitized with minor edits.

Terry Tempest Williams is one of the most knowledgeable and elegant voices of the American West. She brings to her writing, in the words of the poet W.S. Merwin, "the dedicated observation of a naturalist and the abiding innocence and excitement of an open heart." Williams is a Naturalist-In-Residence at the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City. A member of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, Williams is committed to protecting Americas Red Rock Desert. She is a recipient of a 1993 Fellowship for Nonfiction from the Lannan Foundation. Among her books are An Unnatural History of Family and Places and An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field. This program was produced as part of the 1997 season of Racing Toward the Millennium: Voices from the American West in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Anne Lamott is the author of five novels, most recently Crooked Little Heart (1997). In addition, she wrote the bestseller Operating Instructions (1993), a highly personal account of life as a single mother during her son's first year; and Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, "a candidly drawn map of a writer's home terrain: dazzling peaks and weird, dark cellars." Lamott has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and has taught writing at U.C. Davis and at many writing conferences around the United States. She lives in the Bay Area. This program was produced as part of the 1997 season of Racing Toward the Millennium: Voices from the American West in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Ivan Doig has described the Pacific Northwest in a number of well-known nonfiction books and novels, including Bucking the Sun (1996), Heart Earth (1993), Winter Brothers (1980), This House of Sky (1984), and the trilogy English Creek (1984), Dancing at the Rascal Fair (1987), and Ride with Me, Mariah Montana (1990). Born in White Sulpher Springs, Montana, Doig has been a ranch hand, newspaperman, magazine editor, and writer. Doig received the Distinguished Achievement Award of the Western Literature Association in 1989. He lives in Seattle, Washington. This program was originally produced as part of the 1997 season of Racing Toward the Millennium: Voices from the American West in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

This program includes readings and discussions among writers in exile from their native countries. Majid Naficy, an Iranian poet who fled Khomeini's regime at great risk, has lived in Los Angeles since 1985. He has published three collections of poems and holds a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from UCLA. Chinese novelist Anchee Min was born in Shanghai in 1957. At seventeen, she was sent to a labor collective, where talent scouts discovered her and recruited her to work as a movie actress at the Shanghai Film Studio. Her memoir Red Azalea, about life during the Cultural Revolution, was an international bestseller. SAID, born in Tehran in 1947, was forced to leave Iran at age seventeen and has lived in exile in Munich, Germany, since 1964. His publications include Poems of Love, Then I Will Scream Until Silence, and his most recent work, The Long Arm of the Mullahs: Notes from My Exile. This program was co-presented with Villa Aurora and produced in conjunction with the exhibition "Exiles and Emigres: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler" at LACMA.

In 1997, Sherman Alexie had just been named one of America's "Best Young Novelists" by GRANTA Magazine and had won the American Book Award. Alexie's work resonates with the collision between white and Native American cultures and while his subjects are serious, Alexie himself is often scathingly funny. In his work Indian Killer, Alexie creates a rich, panoramic portrayal of contemporary Seattle using a mystery story to tell some uncomfortable truths about Indian-white relations and racism in all its forms. A member of the Spokane/Coeur d'Alene tribe, Alexie lives in Seattle, Washington. This program was presented as part of the 1997 series of Racing Toward the Millennium: Voices from the American West.

David Mas Masumoto is a third-generation Japanese-American peach and grape farmer. His book Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm is a chronicle of family, farm travails, and his struggle to market an old variety of peach. In addition to being a writer and farmer, Masumoto is a farm activist and a member of the California Council for the Humanities. His book was awarded the Julia Child Cookbook Award for best book in the Literary Food Writing category. He lives in Del Rey, California. This program as presented as part of the 1997 season of Racing Toward the Millennium: Voices from the American West in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.