10/28/02, Monday

Ira Glass

Glass is the co-founder, producer and host of "This American Life," a radio program built around a single theme. He is heard by more than one million NPR listeners nationwide on over 400 stations. The show features first-person stories, documentaries, short fiction, and poetry, found tapes and music, in its four acts built around a common idea. Glass began his reporting in 1990 when he did a series about race relations in Chicago's Lincoln Park High School. Time magazine named Glass America's Best Radio Host a year ago.

02/05/03, Tuesday

Frances Mayes

Mayes, whose novel Swan has just been released, is the author of three best-selling Frances Mayes photo books about Italy. Under the Tuscan Sun remained number one on the New York Times best seller list for more than two years. It is currently in production as a motion picture. Her memoir, Bella Tuscany, and In Tuscany, a collaborative photo-text book, are also highly personal. In them, she talks about taking chances, living in Italy, loving and renovating an old Italian villa, and the pleasure of food as well as the "voluptuousness of Italian life." A widely published poet and essayist, Mayes has written five books of poetry. She is also the author of The Discovery of Poetry, a college textbook. Formerly professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University, where she directed The Poetry Center and chaired the Department of Creative Writing, Mayes now devotes herself fulltime to writing. She and her husband continue to divide their year between San Francisco and Cortona, Italy.

03/03/03, Tuesday

Sandra Cisneros

Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street, has just completed Caramelo, her first novel in nearly 20 years. Noted as the country's leading Latina author,Sandra Cisneros photo Cisneros has received the coveted MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant and an American Book Award. Since its publication in 1984, Mango has sold more than 2 million copies and become a perennial title on library and classrooms reading lists across the country. Cisneros, who grew up in Chicago and Mexico with a family of six brothers, now lives in San Antonio and writes for an audience that crosses ethnic and national lines. It is "what I was put on this planet to do," she says

04/12/03, Tuesday

David Sedaris

In April, 2001 Sedaris appeared in Boise to a sold out crowd. The Log Cabin Literary Center brought him back by mutual agreement: "He reported having had a great audience here," Shaffer says. Sedaris, who is frequently a guest on Glass' "This American Life", writes about his strange-but-true life experiences, whether as a Christmas elf at Macy's or as the American patient of a French dentist. He is the author of the best-selling books Naked and Barrel Fever and was named Humorist of the Year by Time magazine in 2001.