Alice Quinn, former editor at Alfred A Knopf and The New Yorker, Executive Director of the Poetry Society for almost two decades, beloved adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts for thirty-five years, with Victoria Wilson and Foster Hirsch talks about her large, exuberant life as a devoted reader-editor; about her fifteen years at Knopf, first as assistant to the legendary, singular, adored, advertising genius Nina Bourne (“no one wants irony in the desert, lovey”), then as editor of Deborah Eisenberg, Jane Smiley, Ann Arensberg,  Steven Millhauser, and Adrienne Kennedy along with seminal writers on American folk art. Quinn talks about the founding of the Knopf Poetry Series and furthering the major careers of  Amy Clampitt, Edward Hirsch, Marie Ponsot, Sharon Olds, and many more; about being hired by Mr. Shawn of The New Yorker as an editor at the magazine and becoming in Robert Gottlieb’s tenure and that of Tina Brown and David Remnick poetry editor, as well, one of the most influential positions in the world of poetry,  publishing more than two thousand poems by (among hundreds of others) Joseph Brodsky, Louise Glück, John Ashbery, Charles Simic, Zbigniew Herbert, Elizabeth Alexander, and Eavan Boland.

Quinn discusses her almost twenty years as head of the Poetry Society, producing more than 700 programs, many of them innovative, acclaimed multi-arts programs with actors, musicians and artists celebrating  poetry in partnerships with major cultural organizations including The New York Botanical Garden, the Los Angeles Public Library, and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, as well as advancing the restorative and spirit-saving Poetry-in-Motion series for transit systems across the country, chief among them, New York City.  

Quinn, Wilson and Hirsch discuss the work of Elizabeth Bishop and Quinn’s Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box, Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop (“A stupendous event.” ―John Ashbery) as well as her poetry anthology, Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic (“Quinn’s collection covers remarkable ground . . .” —Clare Bucknell, The New Yorker).

In this inspiring, endearing, rousing conversation, Alice Quinn enchants, teaches, informs and weaves a spell through the power of language and passion to bewitch and transform space and time.

Edna Ferber, Her Best-selling Novel of Texas, and the Making of a Classic American Film

Biographer Julie Gilbert with Victoria Wilson (Gilbert’s editor) and Foster Hirsch (cultural historian) discuss Gilbert’s Giant Love ("An extraordinarily illuminating account of the making of an essential literary and cinematic work and a vital portrait of brilliant, righteous, and gutsy Ferber.”—Booklist).  

In this fascinating conversation, Gilbert, Wilson and Hirsch explore up-close, Edna Ferber’s decade-long evolution that resulted in her generational saga about the Lone Star state, and about love, power, and the fight between land-loving cattle barons and newly rich oil tycoons.  Gilbertdiscusses Giant’s fraught, explosive publication that shook both the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and one of America’s largest publishers, and tells the story of the making of the Academy Award-winning epic film from director George Stevens that followed in the wake of Ferber’s best-selling novel.

 The fourth event in The Talk of the Town series of conversations with Victoria Wilson and Foster Hirsch at the Salmagundi Arts Club in New York City.

Author, art historian, biographer, Nicolas Fox Weber, with Victoria Wilson (Weber’s editor) and Foster Hirsch discuss Weber’s long-awaited, acclaimed biography ("A treasure-chest for art historians . . .”— ​Hilary Spurling, The Wall Street Journal) of the extraordinary and surprising life of Piet Mondrian (Knopf), part of the Wilson/Hirsch Talk of the Town series of conversations at New York’s Salmagundi Art Club.
 
Weber, cultural historian, director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, has written many books, among them on modernism, on the founders and artists of the Bauhaus, on each of the Albers themselves, on Corbusier, the Clarks of Cooperstown, on Balthus, on the evolution and making of the iPhone.  

In this fascinating, inspiring conversation, Weber talks of the artist who revolutionized modern painting, architecture, graphic art, fashion design and more, and who created some of the most recognizable abstract paintings of the 20th century, and in so doing changed the course of modern art forever.

Weber, Wilson and Hirsch talk about the piecing together and writing of this difficult, pure life and the life-long quest of this transformative artist whose work is still reverberating almost a century after Mondrian’s time.

The Legendary Rose Styron discusses her rich and fascinating memoir, Beyond This Harbor (Knopf).

 Styron talks about her life as poet, international human rights activist, founding member of Amnesty International USA, journalist, hostess; as mother of four; grandmother of eight; as friend to politicians, movie stars, the legendary; discoverer of Philip Roth, and longtime wife of Bill Styron, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and essayist. 

Here discussed are the famous and infamous who dropped in, summered, traveled with and played with, and the decades-long friendships with everyone from Truman Capote, George Plimpton and Robert Penn Warren to the Kennedys, John Hersey, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Lillian Hellman and many others.

“[Rose Styron] has lived a life in interesting times, among legendary characters, a life well worth telling—and reading about.” 

                            —The Washington Post