MARCIA DeSANCTIS - Author of “A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life"

MARCIA DeSANCTIS - Author of “A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life"

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Journalist, Essayist, Author of A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life
100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go

I started looking over the stories that I had done. I would say the majority of the essays were not really about travel. They were more about aging and marriage and memory and all of those things, but I did find in the travel essays those kernels of things that I wanted to explore - bigger kernels of things that were sort of scratching at me from the inside like a piece of sand in my pocket that was irritating me and that I wanted to explore. What I found was that the theme of coming and going, the theme of arrivals and departures, the theme of entrances and exits, and the theme of home and away seemed to repeat itself. I felt that whenever I was somewhere, there was always a tide home. And when I was home, there was always the urge for going. And so I just weeded out and weeded out and really wanted to keep this theme of home and away.

MARGE PIERCY - NYTimes Bestselling Novelist, Poet & Activist

MARGE PIERCY - NYTimes Bestselling Novelist, Poet & Activist

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Novelist, Poet & Activist

People who take care of sick people and AIDS and teachers and garbage collectors and people who work in daycare…all the things that have to happen in society we pay shit for. We pay an enormous amount of money to people who can throw a ball through a hoop. We pay an enormous amount of hedge fund people. All the people who take over corporations go in and destroy get immensely rich while the people who do what we actually need doing, what we must have to survive, the people who grow food, the independent farmers that used to exist…

LAURIE ANDERSON - DICKIE LANDRY - "HOME OF THE BRAVE"

LAURIE ANDERSON - DICKIE LANDRY - "HOME OF THE BRAVE"

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I still have problems today. Some people call it stage fright. I don't know what it is, but I'm always right before a concert thinking, Why am I doing this? I should be doing this. I should be doing that. Why am I here? What am I going to do? And I walk up to the microphone, I'm still thinking this, and I start playing. And I'm still thinking, What am I doing here? Why, why, why? All the questions of how I'm going to sustain playing for 45 minutes or an hour, and I'm still playing and playing. And then all of a sudden I go, Well, Mr. Landry, you've got people sitting in the audience. You're getting paid for this. So enjoy yourself. So the next thing I know, the concert is over, and I don't know where I've been.

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ALICE NOTLEY - Poet & Artist - Academy of American Poets Award Winner

ALICE NOTLEY - Poet & Artist - Academy of American Poets Award Winner

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Poet

It's all-inclusive – poetry– and everything is poetry in a certain way, and poetic measure is like what we're composed of. It's what we are. I mean, we're poetry.

Speaking Out of Place: DR. JENNIFER M. GÓMEZ discusses “The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women and Girls”

Speaking Out of Place: DR. JENNIFER M. GÓMEZ discusses “The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women and Girls”

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Author of The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women and Girls: A Black Feminist Approach to Healing from Sexual Abuse
Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work · Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Innovation in Social Work & Health at Boston University,

So many of us have experienced things along this vein, and when we know that, then the feelings of isolation can be interrupted with this understanding that many of us have been through these things. And if that person over there can experience joy, well maybe I can experience joy too, and maybe this is a different kind of harm and cultural betrayal. Sexual trauma and abuse as a collective community-level harm, that means community-level healing and personal healing.

Highlights - JANE ALEXANDER - Tony & Emmy Award-Winning Actress, Conservationist, Author

Highlights - JANE ALEXANDER - Tony & Emmy Award-Winning Actress, Conservationist, Author

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Tony & Emmy Award-Winning Actress · Conservationist
Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts 1993-97

I did not seek out these roles like All the President's Men. I know that I was very interested in social and political issues from childhood. I don't know whether there was something in me that translated that I was politically and socially conscious when I was a young actress because these roles came to me. I didn't go out begging for them. And I was so grateful to have them because I thought they had a depth to them.

JANE ALEXANDER- Tony & Emmy Award-Winning Actress, Conservationist, Author

JANE ALEXANDER- Tony & Emmy Award-Winning Actress, Conservationist, Author

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Tony & Emmy Award-Winning Actress, Conservationist, Author
Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts 1993-97

I did not seek out these roles like All the President's Men. I know that I was very interested in social and political issues from childhood. I don't know whether there was something in me that translated that I was politically and socially conscious when I was a young actress because these roles came to me. I didn't go out begging for them. And I was so grateful to have them because I thought they had a depth to them.

ALICE FULTON - Poet - Recipient of MacArthur “Genius”, NEA & Guggenheim Fellowships

ALICE FULTON - Poet - Recipient of MacArthur “Genius”, NEA & Guggenheim Fellowships

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Alice Fulton’s books include Barely Composed, a poetry collection; The Nightingales Of Troy, linked stories; and Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems. Her book Felt received the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, awarded to the best book of poems published within a two-year period. She has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, and Ingram Merrill Foundation.  Her other books include Sensual Math, Powers Of Congress, Palladium, Dance Script With Electric Ballerina, and an essay collection, Feeling As A Foreign Language. She lives in Ithaca, NY. 

E.J. KOH - Award-Winning Memoirist & Poet - “The Magical Language of Others”, “A Lesser Love”

E.J. KOH - Award-Winning Memoirist & Poet - “The Magical Language of Others”, “A Lesser Love”

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Award-winning Memoirist & Poet
The Magical Language of Others · A Lesser Love

I had delayed speech, and I had quite a bit of trouble with speaking. I think I must have been five before I was uttering some of my first words and trying to articulate. Simple communication was very difficult for me and my family, especially in a family where we were speaking several languages. They hoped to instill English. It’s the language of survival. There was a lot of frustration and fear in my relationship to language, and the relationship these languages had to each other, that was something I felt very sensitive to since I was young. Since before I could speak.

Highlights - DITTE LYSGAARD VIND - Circular Economy & Design Expert - Founder of The Circular Way

Highlights - DITTE LYSGAARD VIND - Circular Economy & Design Expert - Founder of The Circular Way

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Circular Economy & Design Expert · Founder of The Circular Way
Author of Danish Design Heritage & Global Sustainability

Putting design first, it really enables us to shape a future that we don't yet know. But we need to be super tactile and practical about it as well. And then seeing that is something that design very much has the ability to do. And at the same time, having this growing frustration that wherever you go, wherever you talk about sustainability, it was a compromise. It was something that meant uglier, less convenient, more expensive, all these different things, but then diving into the Danish Design heritage, seeing that what set them apart was that after the World Wars, they had a social purpose of democratizing and rebuilding the welfare state, and that was not something that lessened the final result. On the contrary, it heightened the ambition, the final design, and the solutions.

DITTE LYSGAARD VIND - Circular Economy & Design Expert - Author of Danish Design Heritage & Global Sustainability

DITTE LYSGAARD VIND - Circular Economy & Design Expert - Author of Danish Design Heritage & Global Sustainability

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Circular Economy & Design Expert · Founder of The Circular Way
Author of Danish Design Heritage & Global Sustainability

Putting design first, it really enables us to shape a future that we don't yet know. But we need to be super tactile and practical about it as well. And then seeing that is something that design very much has the ability to do. And at the same time, having this growing frustration that wherever you go, wherever you talk about sustainability, it was a compromise. It was something that meant uglier, less convenient, more expensive, all these different things, but then diving into the Danish Design heritage, seeing that what set them apart was that after the World Wars, they had a social purpose of democratizing and rebuilding the welfare state, and that was not something that lessened the final result. On the contrary, it heightened the ambition, the final design, and the solutions.

ADA LIMÓN - U.S. Poet Laureate - Host of The Slowdown podcast

ADA LIMÓN - U.S. Poet Laureate - Host of The Slowdown podcast

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U.S. Poet Laureate · Host of The Slowdown podcast

This poem was written when I was having a real moment of reckoning, not that I hadn't had it earlier, but where I was doing some deep reading about the climate crisis and really reckoning with myself, with where we were and what was happening, what the truth was. And I felt like it was so easy to slip down into a darkness, into a sort of numbness, and I didn't think that that numbness and darkness could be useful.

Highlights - RACHEL ASHEGBOFEH IKEMEH - Whitley Award Winner - Founder of Southwest Niger Delta Forest Project

Highlights - RACHEL ASHEGBOFEH IKEMEH - Whitley Award Winner - Founder of Southwest Niger Delta Forest Project

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Whitley Award-winning Conservationist
Founder/Director of the Southwest Niger Delta Forest Project

There's no question, we are in a state of conservation emergency. And we have a real situation on our hands and it's so fragile that if we take a step back, we could say goodbye to two types of chimpanzee species and the forest is also on the brink of disappearing forever. And when I started as a conservation researcher, there was kidnapping and insecurity throughout the Nile Delta region, and it was immersed in a lot of oil politics and civil conflicts. Kidnapping and insecurity ran throughout that region. Let's not forget that Nigeria is Africa's most populous nation now. We are over 200 million people in the country, and it's a growing population of young people who are looking for means of livelihood and on the lookout to find space to live. So parts of the forest within one year would suddenly become a new village.

RACHEL ASHEGBOFEH IKEMEH - Whitley Award-winning Conservationist - Founder/Director, Southwest Niger Delta Forest Project

RACHEL ASHEGBOFEH IKEMEH - Whitley Award-winning Conservationist - Founder/Director, Southwest Niger Delta Forest Project

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Whitley Award-winning Conservationist
Founder/Director of the Southwest Niger Delta Forest Project

There's no question, we are in a state of conservation emergency. And we have a real situation on our hands and it's so fragile that if we take a step back, we could say goodbye to two types of chimpanzee species and the forest is also on the brink of disappearing forever. And when I started as a conservation researcher, there was kidnapping and insecurity throughout the Nile Delta region, and it was immersed in a lot of oil politics and civil conflicts. Kidnapping and insecurity ran throughout that region. Let's not forget that Nigeria is Africa's most populous nation now. We are over 200 million people in the country, and it's a growing population of young people who are looking for means of livelihood and on the lookout to find space to live. So parts of the forest within one year would suddenly become a new village.

Highlights - MADELEINE WATTS - Author of The Inland Sea

Highlights - MADELEINE WATTS - Author of The Inland Sea

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Author of The Inland Sea
Professor of Creative Writing at Columbia University

I was reading ecological history and also reading about violence against women and how violence perpetuates itself over many generations. And there was something about this European sort of supremacy of ideas about nature, their ideas about rationality, all of this stuff that sort of came from the Enlightenment. John Oxley's diaries made no mention of the Indigenous Australians who were at the time subject to genocide. So I was interested in these ideas about how they tried to tame the land, which is often talked about as "a woman" and the way that the kind of violence that comes from a particular kind of European colonial project that is enacted on the land intertwines with the way that violence is enacted upon women. And it was something that I felt growing up in Australia.

MADELEINE WATTS - Author of The Inland Sea - Creative Writing Professor, Columbia University

MADELEINE WATTS - Author of The Inland Sea - Creative Writing Professor, Columbia University

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Author of The Inland Sea
Professor of Creative Writing at Columbia University

I was reading ecological history and also reading about violence against women and how violence perpetuates itself over many generations. And there was something about this European sort of supremacy of ideas about nature, their ideas about rationality, all of this stuff that sort of came from the Enlightenment. John Oxley's diaries made no mention of the Indigenous Australians who were at the time subject to genocide. So I was interested in these ideas about how they tried to tame the land, which is often talked about as "a woman" and the way that the kind of violence that comes from a particular kind of European colonial project that is enacted on the land intertwines with the way that violence is enacted upon women. And it was something that I felt growing up in Australia.

SAGARIKA SRIRAM - Founder of Kids4abetterworld, Youth Climate Change Initiative

SAGARIKA SRIRAM - Founder of Kids4abetterworld, Youth Climate Change Initiative

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Founder of Kids4abetterworld
Climate Activist & Educator

Sagarika Sriram is currently a student at Jumeirah College in Dubai. She founded the organization Kids4abetterworld when she was 10 years old with a mission to educate and encourage young children to lead a more sustainable life and reduce their carbon footprint. Children are the worst affected by the effects of climate change,  yet most children do not participate in climate change discussions or take actions to live more sustainably because they do not have the awareness and capability to do so. Kids4abetterworld conducts awareness workshops on sustainability aiming to Educate, Motivate and Activate young children to  conserve natural resources, protect biodiversity, and positively  impact climate change. As a UN Climate Advisor, she has participated in the global consultations that will ensure children are made aware of their environmental rights and that UN member states protect and uphold these.

Earth Month Stories - Part 2 - Environmentalists, Artists, Students & Teachers Speak Out & Share How We Can Save the Planet

Earth Month Stories - Part 2 - Environmentalists, Artists, Students & Teachers Speak Out & Share How We Can Save the Planet

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Environmentalists, Artists, Students & Teachers share their Love for the Planet

Today we’re streaming voices of environmentalists, artists, students, and teachers with music courtesy of composer Max Richter.

Highlights - DEBORA CAHN - Showrunner of The Diplomat starring Keri Russell - Exec. Producer Homeland, Grey’s Anatomy

Highlights - DEBORA CAHN - Showrunner of The Diplomat starring Keri Russell - Exec. Producer Homeland, Grey’s Anatomy

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Showrunner & Executive Producer of Netflix’s The Diplomat starring Keri Russell & Rufus Sewell
Exec. Producer Homeland · Grey’s Anatomy · Vinyl
Co-Producer The West Wing

So the idea was to look at what it's like to be an ambassador for the United States abroad and to do that in the context of a married couple, both of whom are in the same field. And what kind of tensions come from being in a relationship with somebody where you're both collaborators and personal partners and sometimes competitors? And what does that do to your life? What does it do to your work experience? And it felt like a military alliance and a marriage are not so different in many ways. You know, you get together under certain circumstances, and then time marches on and things change, and both parties change, and you're still in this relationship that either can or can't bend with you.

DEBORA CAHN - Showrunner & Executive Producer of Netflix’s The Diplomat starring Keri Russell & Rufus Sewell


DEBORA CAHN - Showrunner & Executive Producer of Netflix’s The Diplomat starring Keri Russell & Rufus Sewell


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Showrunner & Executive Producer of Netflix’s The Diplomat starring Keri Russell & Rufus Sewell
Exec. Producer Homeland · Grey’s Anatomy · Vinyl
Co-Producer The West Wing

So the idea was to look at what it's like to be an ambassador for the United States abroad and to do that in the context of a married couple, both of whom are in the same field. And what kind of tensions come from being in a relationship with somebody where you're both collaborators and personal partners and sometimes competitors? And what does that do to your life? What does it do to your work experience? And it felt like a military alliance and a marriage are not so different in many ways. You know, you get together under certain circumstances, and then time marches on and things change, and both parties change, and you're still in this relationship that either can or can't bend with you.