Voices from Our Archives
Tracy K. Smith with Joy Harjo
Wednesday 6 February 2019
Tracy K. Smith served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. During her first term, Smith gave readings and led discussions as a part of a pilot project in rural communities in New...
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Colson Whitehead with Kevin Young
Wednesday 9 May 2018
Colson Whitehead is the author of seven novels including The Nickel Boys, which won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, and was a New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Critics...
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Angela Y. Davis with Barbara Ransby
Wednesday 2 November 2016
Angela Y. Davis is a distinguished professor emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and has been an...
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Bryan Stevenson with Liliana Segura
Wednesday 15 January 2014
Bryan Stevenson is the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama. Under his leadership, EJI has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive...
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Michelle Alexander with Liliana Segura
Wednesday 12 September 2012
Michelle Alexander is a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, and legal scholar. She is the author of the bestselling book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which won the 42nd...
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Anthony Ray Hinton with Ben Harmon
Sunday 10 January 2016
At the age of 29, Anthony Ray Hinton was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama and charged with two capital murders based on flimsy and faulty firearms evidence. Despite having no criminal background, a confirmed alibi, and...
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Claudia Rankine with Saskia Hamilton
Wednesday 6 May 2015
Claudia Rankine is a poet, essayist, and playwright. She is the author of five collections of poetry including the acclaimed Citizen: An American Lyric, Don't Let Me Be Lonely, and Just Us; three plays including...
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Rev. William Barber II with Khury Petersen-Smith
Thursday 11 October 2018
The Reverend William Barber, pastor at Greenleaf Christian Church and president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, led the Moral Mondays movement of weekly protests and civil disobedience against the...
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Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor with Donna Murch
Wednesday 20 January 2016
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a scholar, author, and activist. She is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, which won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is...
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Marlon James with Russell Banks
Wednesday 10 May 2017
Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings was the winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, making him the first Jamaican writer to receive the UK’s most prestigious literary award. It was also a finalist...
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The Fire This Time: A Tribute to James Baldwin with Nikky Finney, Randall Kenan, Kevin Young, et al.
Wednesday 11 February 2015
Nikky Finney is the author of five books of poetry and a collection of short stories, including On Wings Made of Gauze, Rice, Heartwood, and her latest collection Lovechild’s Hot Bed of Occasional Poetry: Poems and...
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Roxane Gay with Tressie McMillan Cottom
Wednesday 14 March 2018
Roxane Gay is an author and cultural critic. Her works include the story collection Difficult Women and Ayiti, a blend of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry interwoven into a tale of the Haitian diaspora. In her essay...
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Ta-Nehisi Coates with Michele Norris
Wednesday 8 April 2015
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a distinguished writer-in-residence at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He is the author of the bestselling books The Beautiful Struggle; We Were Eight Years in Power, winner of the...
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Eve L. Ewing with Wayne Au
Wednesday 13 November 2019
Eve Louise Ewing is a sociologist of education whose research is focused on racism, social inequality, and urban policy, and the impact of these forces on American public schools and the lives of young people. She is an...
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Boots Riley with Robin D. G. Kelley
Wednesday 11 September 2019
Boots Riley is a provocative and prolific poet, rapper, songwriter, producer, screenwriter, director, community organizer, and public speaker. He is the lead vocalist of The Coup and Street Sweeper Social Club. His...
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Edwidge Danticat with Aja Monet
Wednesday 27 March 2019
Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Krik? Krak!, a collection of short stories that encompass both the cruelties and the high ideals of Haitian life. Danticat's 2004 novel The Dew Breaker spins a...
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore with Rachel Kushner
Wednesday 17 April 2019
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Co-founder of many grassroots...
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Nothing Personal: The Dark Room Collective Reunion Tour
Thursday 12 December 2013
Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry: Monument (2018); Thrall (2012); Native Guard (2006), winner of...
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Teju Cole with Amitava Kumar
Wednesday 3 February 2016
Teju Cole—writer, art historian, photographer, and photography critic for the New York Times Magazine—is the author of the novella Every Day Is for the Thief, named a book of the year by the New York Times....
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Isabel Wilkerson with John Stauffer
Wednesday 10 April 2013
Isabel Wilkerson is the author of The Warmth of Other Suns, an epic story of the Great Migration, chronicling the journey of over six million black Americans from the South who migrated north and west between World War...
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Dinaw Mengestu with Penn Szittya
Wednesday 16 November 2011
Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and immigrated with his family to the United States at the age of two. He is the author of three novels, all of which were named New York Times Notable Books: All Our...
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie with Binyavanga Wainaina
Wednesday 28 September 2011
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria and burst onto the literary scene with her remarkable debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, hailed by critics as “one of the best novels to come out of Africa in years” (Baltimore...
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Kwame Dawes with Chris Abani
Wednesday 29 September 2010
Kwame Dawes is a writer of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays. Born in Ghana in 1962, Dawes spent most of his childhood and early adult life in Jamaica. As a poet, he is profoundly influenced by the rhythms and...
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Jamaica Kincaid with Robert Faggen
Wednesday 16 October 2013
Jamaica Kincaid is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She has published five novels including most recently See Now Then (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) and five works of...
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Dr. Cornel West with Amy Goodman
Wednesday 25 June 2003
Dr. Cornel West is a philosopher, author, activist, social critic, and one of America’s most vital public intellectuals. He has published more than 20 books, including the ground-breaking Race Matters; Democracy...
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Elizabeth Alexander with Maureen Corrigan
Wednesday 30 September 2015
Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, essayist, playwright and president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is the author of the acclaimed memoir The Light of the World, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in...
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Kevin Young with Colson Whitehead
Wednesday 14 November 2012
Kevin Young is poetry editor for the New Yorker and the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, including, most recently, Brown; Blue...
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Aminatta Forna with Laila Lalami
Wednesday 11 November 2015
Aminatta Forna is the award-winning author of the novels The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones, and a memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water. She was born in Scotland, raised in Sierra Leone and...
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Derek Walcott with Glyn Maxwell
Wednesday 20 November 2002
Derek Walcott (1930-2017) was a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, and essayist whose works were informed by Caribbean, English, and African traditions. He was born in St. Lucia, West Indies, and educated at the University...
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Cave Canem Evening
Wednesday 15 November 2006
Toi Derricotte is the author of I: New & Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), a 2019 National Book Award finalist; The Undertaker’s Daughter (2011), and four earlier collections of poetry,...
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Caryl Phillips with Glyn Maxwell
Wednesday 1 November 2006
Caryl Phillips was born in 1958 in St. Kitts, West Indies, and went with his family to England that same year. He was brought up in Leeds and educated at Oxford. He has written numerous scripts for film, theatre, radio...
Event DetailsNews from Lannan Foundation
22 April 2022 – Lannan Foundation today announced plans to close by 2032 and spend out all assets.
For more information, please read our announcement.
Upcoming Event: Arthur Sze with Forrest Gander
Wednesday, May 11 2022, 7:00 pm MT
2021 Lannan Literary Awards & Fellowships
Lannan honors established and emerging writers of distinctive literary merit:
Yusef Komunyakaa: Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement
Rabih Alameddine: Literary Award
Deborah Levy: Literary Award
Afia Atakora: Literary Fellowship
Cameron Awkward-Rich: Literary Fellowship
Eduardo C. Corral: Literary Fellowship
Kirstin Valdez Quade: Literary Fellowship
Recent Event: Taking Children, Taking the Land
Nick Estes and Rebecca Nagle had an urgent discussion of the ongoing attack on Indigenous children and Indigenous land. This was a virtual event in partnership with Haymarket Books.
Recent Event: Abolition, Cultural Freedom, Liberation
Angela Y. Davis, Mike Davis, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore joined author Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor for an urgent conversation on abolition, cultural freedom, and liberation. Watch it here.
Recent Event: Consequences of Capitalism
Hear Noam Chomsky's recent talk and conversation with E. Tammy Kim on the brutal realities laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic—and the urgent need for an alternative to capitalism.
Bookworm Interview with Atsuro Riley
Lannan is a supporter of Michael Silverblatt’s long-running interview series on KCRW, Bookworm. In this interview, Michael speaks with poet Atsuro Riley about his latest collection Heard-Hoard.
Follow this external link to listen to the full episode at KCRW.
Photo by Sven Wiederholt.
Lannan Art Collection: Recent Acquisition
Lannan has recently acquired the entire Relicarios collection from Erika Diettes of Bogotá, Colombia. Shown here are #54 and #43, from the series of 56.
Medium:
Mixed media with objects embedded in rubber tripolymer encased in a lighted Plexiglas urn
Marfa Public Radio
West Texas Talk — Marfa Public Radio’s flagship program — features discussions about regional issues as well as conversations with writers, musicians, filmmakers, and artists, including interviews with Lannan poets and writers in residence. Visit their archive here.