2005-2006 Speakers
09/27/05, Tuesday
Hailed as "one of the nation's finest writers" by The Boston Globe, Walter Mosley is best-known for his popular mystery series featuring private investigator Easy Rawlins. The series began with Devil in a Blue Dress in 1990 and was made into a movie with Denzel Washington. Mr. Mosley is the author of 19 books, including essays and nonfiction. As a voice for the black community, he examines ways the African American perspective can contribute to political, economic, and social progress in the United States. Little Scarlet, which is set in Watts following the 1965 riots, is the 2005 choice for One Book, One City L.A., Los Angeles' version of Boise's Read the Same Book. Other books by Mosley: » The Man in My Basement
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11/15/05, Tuesday
Anne Garrels works as a roving foreign correspondent for National Public Radio from the very center of the storm. She has reported from Tiananmen Square to Chechnya, and from Bosnia Kosovo, and Israel. Ms. Garrels reported events leading up to the Gulf War from Saudi Arabia in 1990 and covered the former Soviet Union. Her most recent assignments have been from Baghdad. Naked in Baghdad, her book aabout her experiences as one of 16 journalists left in the city during the war in 2003, won her the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the 2003 Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women's Media Foundation. In 1999, Ms. Garrels did an award-winning series on water issues around the globe. Garrels' reports can be heard on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition Saturday, and Weekend Edition Sunday.
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01/17/06, Tuesday Marilynne Robinson
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03/13/06, Tuesday
Not since Robert Frost has a poet managed to combine high critical acclaim with the broad popular appeal of Billy Collins. He has published eight collections of poetry and edited two anthologies. His awards include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. A United States Poet Laureate (2001-2003), he says his work "is suburban, it's domestic, it's middle class, and it's sort of unashamedly that." John Updike says Mr. Collins' poems are "more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides." Books by Collins: » Questions About Angels
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Walter Mosley
Anne Garrels
Marilynne Robinson is the author of Gilead, for
which she won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She was born and
raised in Sandpoint, Idaho, the model for the fictional setting for
her first novel, Housekeeping. Boiseans selected Housekeeping for the
inaugural Read the Same Book in 2001, but the events of 9/11 prevented
Ms. Robinson visiting then. The novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award, was
nominated for a Pulitzer, and has come to be regarded by many critics
as a modern classic. She has written two books of nonfiction including,
Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State and
Nuclear Pollution, a
finalist for the National Book Award. The book explored the extensive
environmental degradation caused by a British nuclear reprocessing
plant.Ms. Robinson also teaches at the University of Iowa Writers'
Workshop. 
