About Our Speakers
Election 2008
With Chris Matthews
Chris Matthews hosts Hardball with Chris Matthews weeknights on MSNBC, and is also the host of The Chris Matthews Show, a syndicated weekly news program produced by NBC News and distributed by NBC Universal Television Distribution. Matthews is a regular commentator on NBC's Today show.
A television news anchor with remarkable depth of experience, Matthews has distinguished himself as a broadcast journalist, newspaper bureau chief, Presidential speechwriter, and best-selling author. Matthews covered the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first all-races election in South Africa, and the Good Friday Peace Talks in Northern Ireland. In 1997 and 1998, his digging in the National Archives produced a series of San Francisco Examiner scoops on the Nixon presidential tapes. Matthews has covered American presidential election campaigns since 1988, including the five-week recount of 2000. In 2005, Matthews covered the funeral of Pope John Paul II.
In March 2004, Matthews received the David Brinkley Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism. He has also been awarded The Abraham Lincoln Award from the Union League of Philadelphia, and in 2005 he received the Gold Medal Award from the Pennsylvania Society.
What to Eat: Nutrition for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention
With Marion Nestle
Marion Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University's Steinhardt School. She is the author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (2002) and Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism (2003), both from University of California Press. In 2003, Food Politics won awards from the Association for American Publishers (outstanding professional and scholarly title in nursing and allied health), James Beard Foundation (literary), and World Hunger Year (Harry Chapin media). Safe Food won the Steinhardt School's Griffiths Research Award in 2004.
Nestle's latest book, What to Eat (North Point Press), was published in May 2006.
Literary Cafe: Readings, Coffee, and Conversation
With E.L. Doctorow
E. L. Doctorow's many novels include Welcome to Hard Times (1960), The Book of Daniel (1971), Ragtime (1975), Loon Lake (1980), World's Fair (1985), Billy Bathgate (1989), The Waterworks (1994), and City of God (2000). His play Drinks Before Dinner (1978) was originally produced at the New York Shakespeare Festival Theater. His latest collection of essays is titled Reporting The Universe (2003). His most recent book of short stories is Sweet Land Stories (2004) and his latest novel is The March, winner of the 2005 Pen/Faulkner award. His work has garnered the National Book Critics Circle Award three times, the National Book Award, the Pen/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, and the William Dean Howells medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 1998 he received the National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Clinton. His novel Ragtime was made into a musical which opened on Broadway in January, 1998. Professor Doctorow currently holds the Lewis and Loretta Glucksman Chair of English and American Letters at New York University.
Yusef Komunyakaa
Yusef Komunyakaa's numerous books of poems include Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part 1 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004); Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999 (Wesleyan University Press, 2001); Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000); Thieves of Paradise (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989 (1994), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Magic City (1992); Dien Cai Dau (1988), which won The Dark Room Poetry Prize; I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Award; and Copacetic (1984). Komunyakaa's prose is collected in Blues Notes: Essays, Interviews & Commentaries University of Michigan Press, 2000). He also co-edited The Jazz Poetry Anthology (with J. A. Sascha Feinstein, 1991) and co-translated The Insomnia of Fire by Nguyen Quang Thieu (with Martha Collins, 1995).
His honors include the William Faulkner Prize from the Universite Rennes, the Thomas Forcade Award, the Hanes Poetry Prize, fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Louisiana Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam, where he served as a correspondent and managing editor of the Southern Cross. In 1999 he was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Yusef Komunyakaa was recently appointed as the Senior Distinguished Poet in the Graduate Writing Program at NYU.
Toi Derricotte
Cave Canem co-founder Toi Derricotte, a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, has published four books of poems: The Empress of the Death House; Natural Birth; Captivity; and Tender, winner of the 1998 Paterson Poetry Prize. Her literary memoir, The Black Notebooks, was a recipient of the 1998 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Nonfiction Award, and was nominated for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. It was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
She has won numerous awards, including The Lucille Medwick Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts Award from the United Black Artists, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two Pushcart Prizes. Her essay "Beginning Dialogues" was published in The Best American Essays 2006.
Lila Zemborain
Lila Zemborain, an Argentine poet who moved to New York in 1985, is the author of the poetry collections, Abrete Sésamo Debajo del Agua, Usted, Guardianes del Secreto, Malvas Orquídeas del Mar - Mauve Sea-Orchids, Rasgado, and the chapbooks Ardores and Pampa. She has been included in the anthologies Mujeres Mirando al Sur. Her work, translated by Rosa Alcalá and Mónica de la Torre, has appeared in the anthologies The Light of City and Sea: An Anthology of Suffolk County Poetry, Corresponding Voices, in the art catalogues Alessandro Twombly, Heidi McFall, and in publications such as Ecopoetics, Rattapallax, The Brooklyn Rail, A Gathering of the Tribes, The Poetry Project Newsletter and Mandorla, as well as in numerous magazines in Latin America and Spain. She has authored the book-length essay Gabriela Mistral: Una Mujer sin Rostro.
Zemborain is the director and editor of the Rebel Road Series and the curator of the KJCC Poetry Series at NYU. A John Simon Guggenheim fellow (2007), she is a Clinical Assistant Professor in Creative Writing in Spanish at NYU.
Get a Financial Life: Personal Finance in your Twenties and Thirties
With Beth Kobliner
Beth Kobliner has been writing and speaking on personal finance for more than fifteen years. She is the author of Get a Financial Life: Personal Finance in Your Twenties and Thirties (Simon & Schuster, 1996, revised in 2000)--a New York Times, USA Today and Business Week bestseller. She has written for Glamour magazine and the New York Times. In addition, she has appeared on several television shows, such as World News This Morning, Oprah, and Today.
Kobliner has addressed a Senate policy committee on the topic of educating young people about retirement security and has spoken to groups at Harvard, Ohio State University, MTV Networks, and other organizations. In all of these capacities, she has been a spokesperson for the financial concerns of Americans in their twenties and thirties.
Self-Assembly: How Nature Puts Itself Together
With David Grier
David Grier is a Professor of Physics and a founding member of the Center for Soft Matter Research at New York University. A graduate of Harvard College, he received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Michigan and was hired as a postdoctoral member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories. He spent twelve years on the faculty of Physics at the University of Chicago before coming to NYU, and was a member of the James Franck Institute and director-elect of the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics.
Grier's experimental research program focuses on the fundamental processes by which simple objects interacting in simple ways organize themselves into sophisticated hierarchies of structure, and on how collective properties emerge in the process. This field ranges from the evolution of structure in living biological systems to the origin of photonic properties in natural and artificial opals. Both the results of this research and the techniques developed to pursue them have been recognized with multiple awards and honors, including a Technology Pioneer Award from the World Economic Forum, a Scientific American 50 Award, and an R&D 100 Award. Grier also was named a David and Lucile Packard Fellow and was one of the Discover magazine's Top 20 Scientists Under 40.
Computer Hacking: New Media, Old Ethics
With Gabriella Coleman
Gabriella Coleman, Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt, is an anthropologist, specializing in the role of the law and new media technologies in extending liberal values and sustaining new forms of political activism. She conducted ethnographic research on computer hackers primarily in San Francisco and the Netherlands, as well as those hackers who work on the largest free software project, Debian. She is completing a book manuscript, Coding Liberal Freedom: Hacker Pleasure and the Ethics of Free and Open Source Software, and is starting a new project on patient activism on the Internet with a focus on psychiatric survivors and consumers. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including support from the National Science Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.
Wine Tasting
With "Dr. Vino," a.k.a. Tyler Colman
In the past year, Tyler Colman has written in Food & Wine, Wine & Spirits, and the New York Times on the subject of wine and wine tasting. He teaches wine classes at NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies and the University of Chicago, tastes about 2,000 wines a year, and gives talks and tastings for individuals and corporations. On July 1, 2008, the University of California Press will publish his first wine book, Wine Politics: How Governments, Environmentalists, Mobsters, and Critics Influence the Wines We Drink.
Colman is the winner of several notable awards, including Best Wine Blog and Best Wine Blog Writing from the American Wine Blog Awards in 2007. He was also nominated for the Best Website Focusing on Food, Beverage, Restaurant or Nutrition from the James Beard Foundation Awards in 2007. His blog may be found at http://drvino.com/.
Screening of Home
With Dawn Scibilia (TSOA '95)
Filmmaker Dawn Scibilia was born and raised in Brooklyn and is a graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. In 2006, Scibilia received the Best Documentary award at Magners Boston Irish Film Festival at the Harvard Film Archive for Home, which she co-produced, directed, filmed, and edited.
Scibilia worked as a screenplay analyst for Deborah Schindler at Fox Studios while attending NYU. She then went on to work as a production assistant on numerous productions, including Law & Order, to television commercials and major Hollywood feature film productions, giving her the opportunity to work with directors such as Martin Brest (Meet Joe Black), Patrice Leconte (Une Chance Sur Deux), and Michael Ritchie (A Simple Wish).
Scibilia previously produced, directed and edited the surreal short comedy film, Muela, which screened at the Los Angeles Short Film Festival and the Howl Festival in New York's East Village. Her short film noir, Disposing Fear, screened at the Independent Feature Film Market and at the Anthology Film Archives' New Filmmaker Series. Scibilia also directed numerous one act plays and the period full length play, The Little Oasis. She is currently developing her original screenplay.
Can Exercise Help the Brain Remember?
With Wendy Suzuki
Wendy Suzuki is an Associate Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at New York University. She earned her undergraduate degree in Physiology and Anatomy from the University of California at Berkley and received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of California at San Diego. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health before joining the faculty at NYU's Center for Neural Science in 1998.
Suzuki's research focuses on understanding how our brains allow us to form and retain new long-term memories for facts and events. Her recent work has characterized the specific patterns of temporal lobe brain activity as new memories are initially being formed. These findings have provided some of the strongest direct evidence for clear and dynamic changes in brain cell activity underlying new memory formation.
Suzuki's research has been recognized with numerous awards and honors, including the Donald B. Lindsley Prize for meritorious research in the area of behavioral neuroscience and the Troland research Award from the National Academy of Sciences, which honors research in the area of experimental psychology done by researchers under the age of 40.