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THU, Feb 2, 7 PM
Reza Aslan
and Jack Miles
“The Coming Reformation of Islam:
A Conversation”
Who has the authority to define the faith and practice of over a billion people: the individual or the institution? Join two brilliant scholars of religion for a fascinating discussion on the internal conflict within Islam over the scope and outcome of the Islamic Reformation.

SAT, Feb 4, 2-4 PM
A Seminar with
Reza Aslan
“The Origins, Evolution, and History of Islam”
What is the essence of this ancient faith? Is it a religion of peace or war? Can an Islamic State be founded on democratic values such as pluralism and human rights? Join Reza Aslan, scholar of comparative religions and author of No God but God to learn more about a religion shrouded in the West by ignorance and fear.
Advance Registration Requested.
TUE, FEB 7, 7 pm
ZÓCALO
“Do Books have
a Future in
the Digital Age?”
Steve Wasserman, former Editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, will argue that books will survive as long as the human species is defined by its opposable thumb and its obsessive need to tell each other stories.
THU, FEB 9, 7 pm
Bernard Cooper
The Bill from My Father:
A Memoir
In conversation with
Kit Rachlis, editor-in-chief,
Los Angeles Magazine
Cooper, an award-winning writer, makes hilarious and exquisite sense of his father, a cantankerous octogenarian in a khaki polyester jumpsuit. “A glorious cornucopia of love and pain.”—Alice Sebold
MON, FEB 13, 7 pm
John Hope Franklin
and Tavis Smiley
“Mirror to America:
A Conversation about
History, Race, Politics,
and the Future of
America”
Franklin, one of the country’s great historians, has dedicated his life to the pursuit of equality. He discusses that odyssey with Smiley, one of America’s premier journalists.

THU, FEB 16, 7 pm
Nick Kotz
and Karl Fleming
“Good Bad Days
in America:
A Conversation about
How the Nation
Redeemed Lincoln’s
Legacy”
Two distinguished journalists who were on the front lines during the civil rights movement discuss the events that changed America in the 1960s, the unlikely partnership of black and white leaders who led that change, and how that crucial epoch continues to affect all of our lives.

WED, FEB 22, 7 pm
Geraldine Brooks
March: A Novel
In conversation with
Carla Kaplan,
Professor of English, USC
Brooks’ luminous second novel (after 2001’s acclaimed Year of Wonders) imagines the Civil War experiences of Mr. March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.

THU, Feb 23, 7 pm
Mark Salzman
and Joe Loya
“Dark Thoughts:
A Conversation”
It’s often assumed that getting someone to write is helpful, because it gets them to communicate. What if getting someone to write is a traumatizing event? Salzman (True Notebooks) and Loya (The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell : Confessions of a Bank Robber) explore the darker aspects of writing.
Thu, feb 16, 7 PM
Nick Kotz and
Karl Fleming
Top: Nick Kotz
Photo © Jack Kotz
Bottom: Karl Fleming
Photo © Judy Kessler
As a reporter for the Des Moines Register and the Washington Post, and as a freelance writer, Nick Kotz has won many of journalism’s most important honors, including the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Washington correspondence, the Raymond Clapper Memorial Award, and the first Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Award. His study of American military leadership won the National Magazine Award for public service. His book Wild Blue Yonder: Money, Politics, and the B-1 Bomber won the Olive Branch Award.

As a distinguished adjunct professor at the American University School of Communications, Kotz was honored as the university’s outstanding adjunct professor. His teaching includes a semester as senior journalist in residence at Duke University.

Kotz’ most recent book is JUDGMENT DAYS: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws That Changed America. The year 2005 marks the fortieth anniversary of one of the most important periods in the history of the American civil rights movement. The enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act was the defining event in a sweeping social revolution, and it succeeded in large part because of the uneasy alliance between Martin Luther King, Jr,. and Lyndon Baines Johnson. In Judgment Days, Kotz's fifth book examining American history and public policy, gives us the first definitive account of the relationship between these two great leaders.

Legendary civil rights reporter Karl Fleming began his life in the poverty-stricken tobacco landscape of eastern North Carolina. Raised from age eight to seventeen in a tough, all-white Methodist orphanage, Fleming learned to survive bullying in the rigid caste system among his peers. Largely isolated from the world around him until his first newspaper job in the small town of Wilson, North Carolina, Fleming went on to become Newsweek magazine’s chief civil rights reporter, covering all of the South’s hot spots throughout the 1960s: James Meredith’s enrollment at the University of Mississippi, Bull Connor’s suppression of the 1963 Birmingham marches, the Birmingham church bombings, Alabama Governor George Wallace’s protest against school integration, KKK rallies, the march on Selma, the assassination of Medgar Evers, and the murders of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Fleming’s recent memoir, Son of the Rough South: An Uncivil Memoir (Public Affairs, May 2005), describes Fleming’s own childhood and his coming of age as a man and a reporter during one of the nation’s most tumultuous periods.

Read/listen to interviews with Karl Fleming on NPR and Tavis Smiley archives:
Interview 01

‘Rough South': Chronicles of L.A.'s Violent Past by Karen Grigsby Bates

Interview 03