2022 Session videos
Sessions are listed below in order of appearance at CLF 2022
If you wish to search for a video by speaker, speakers are listed alphabetically in the dropdown below
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Amaker, Marcus
Ballerini, Edoardo
Beevor, Antony
Bouverie, Tim
Brenner, Marie
Brooks, Geraldine
Brown, Tina
Cambridge, Alyson
de Waal, Frans
Dudley, Renee
Glaude, Eddie S. Jr.
Gordon, Lyndall
Griffith, Elisabeth
Harpham, Geoffrey
Hornby, Nick
Jefferson, Margo
Keefe, Patrick Radden
Korelitz, Jean Hanff
McEwan, Ian
Miles, Tiya
Motion, Andrew
Newman, Sandra
Orringer, Julie
Perry, Imani
Prioleau, Betsy
Thottam, Jyoti
Williams, John Taylor
Williamson, Elizabeth
LITERARY LEGEND AND ROCKSTAR - NICK HORNBY with John Mullan
Recorded November 4, 2022
What do the great Victorian novelist Charles Dickens and the modern American musical icon Prince have in common? A great deal, according to bestselling author (Fever Pitch, High Fidelity, About a Boy) and screen writer (An Education, Brooklyn) Nick Hornby. In his new book, Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius, Hornby shares his passion for the two creative geniuses with his customary wit and originality. Delving into their unlikely similarities, he traces their extraordinary lives from poverty-stricken childhoods to global stardom and enduring cultural relevance. In conversation with John Mullan, Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature, University College, London.
APES AND US - FRANS DE WAAL with Jennifer Wilhelm
Recorded November 4, 2022
In his new book, Different, full of vivid stories about animal behavior, world-renowned primatologist Frans de Waal draws on his long career investigating chimpanzees and bonobos to argue with wit and humanity against assumptions about sex and gender that generate inequality. His conclusions pose thought-provoking questions about the relative significance of biology and cultural socialization in apes and humans. “Brilliant...brings a scientific, compassionate and balanced approach to some of the hottest controversies about sex and gender” (Yuval Noah Harari). In discussion with College of Charleston neuroscientist Jennifer Wilhelm.
POET LAUREATES - MARCUS AMAKER and ANDREW MOTION
Recorded November 4, 2022
A unique opportunity to hear Marcus Amaker, Charleston’s first Poet Laureate, and Andrew Motion, the UK’s 19th Poet Laureate, compare their roles and read from their work. Marcus Amaker was announced by Mayor John Tecklenburg as the first Poet Laureate of the City of Charleston in 2016. Andrew Motion was appointed by the Queen for a ten-year period in 1999. They discuss the contrasting expectations of being a pioneer and of following in a long tradition. Amaker’s ninth book is titled Black Music Is. Andrew Motion, Homewood Professor of the Arts at Johns Hopkins University, has published 13 collections of poetry.
DESPERATE HOURS - MARIE BRENNER with David Adams
Recorded November 5, 2022
Granted complete access to the New York Presbyterian hospital system, from the CEO to doctors, nurses, researchers and maintenance crews, Marie Brenner, award-winning Vanity Fair journalist, probed innumerable personal stories to discover how the staff persevered through the once-in-a-century Covid pandemic, even at great individual cost. Her investigation revealed medical heroism and corporate incompetence, prescient decisions and howling missteps, a shocking lack of supplies and lingering trauma akin to a war zone. Together with David Adams, Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Surgery at the Medical University of South Carolina, she considers what can be learned from the experience.
PRESS AND PALACE - TINA BROWN and BETSY PRIOLEAU with Amanda Foreman
Recorded November 5, 2022
Tina Brown’s The Palace Papers and Betsy Prioleau’s Diamonds and Deadlines feature remarkable women, in different eras, dealing with power, glamour, fame, scandal and intrigue. Despite flouting convention, Miriam Leslie, self-styled “Empress of Journalism” in the Gilded Age, wielded considerable influence through her numerous magazines. The British Royal family, with the late Queen at the helm, had to negotiate turbulent times and reinvent itself. Historian Amanda Foreman teases out their allure. Tina Brown is the former editor in chief of Tatler, Vanity Fair and New Yorker, and author of The Diana Chronicles. Betsy Prioleau’s previous book is Swoon: Great Seducers and Why Women Love Them.
THE LATECOMER - JEAN HANFF KORELITZ with Summer Anderson
Recorded November 5, 2022
By popular request, Jean Hanff Korelitz makes a return visit to the Festival to discuss her latest literary page-turner, The Latecomer, a compelling saga about family secrets and transgressions, revolving around IVF-created triplets, their unwelcome surprise sibling and haunted parents. “Read it now to get ahead of the forthcoming, inevitably star-powered TV version” (The Atlantic). Jean Hanff Korelitz is the bestselling author of The Plot, You Should Have Known (adapted by HBO as The Undoing) and other novels. She discusses The Latecomer’s twists and turns with Summer Anderson, reviewer for Books-A-Million.
THE ARTISTS WHO MADE ME - MARGO JEFFERSON with Belinda Gergel
Recorded November 6, 2022
In her new memoir, Constructing a Nervous System, Margo Jefferson, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and acclaimed author of Negroland, shares the influences and passions that contribute to her sense of self – an eclectic mix including jazz luminaries, dancers, writers, artists, athletes, stars, lovers and family. Infused with the criticism that is her métier, she interrogates race, class, family, identity and art. “Margo Jefferson is one of the great innovators in modern autobiographical narrative” (Darryl Pinckney). She reflects on the art of writing a memoir with Belinda Gergel, historian and Charleston Literary Festival Board member.
SOUTH TO AMERICA - IMANI PERRY with Dr. Tamara Butler
Recorded November 6, 2022
Imani Perry’s South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation is a physical and intellectual travelogue. Journeying from her home in the North to her roots in Alabama, she visits Southern cities and towns, including Charleston. In the process, she weaves together the rich tapestry of Black culture, and asserts its contribution to the identity of America. Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Join us as we follow her through the history, rituals and landscapes of the South together with Tamara Butler, Executive Director of the Avery Research Center for African American History at the College of Charleston.
RUSSIA: REVOLUTION AND CIVIL WAR - ANTONY BEEVOR with Margaret MacMillan
Recorded November 8, 2022
The four years of civil war in Russia (1917-1921) shook the world, reshaped Eastern Europe, and set the stage for conflicts whose consequences we are still living with today. In his gripping historical narrative, renowned British historian Antony Beevor conveys the drama of the civil war through the eyes of the people involved – the Czar, cavalry officers, doctors, workers on the streets, ordinary citizens – in a superb re-telling that illuminates and reframes that crucial period. He discusses the impact of the revolution and civil war on the conflagration of Europe with Margaret MacMillan, Emeritus Professor of International History, University of Oxford.
LESSONS - IAN McEWAN with Geoffrey Harpham
Recorded November 8, 2022
Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons, is a tour de force, with significant episodes based on his own, not uneventful, life. Following a man’s existence over eight decades of personal and global upheaval, the backdrop includes the Suez and Cuban crises, Chernobyl, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Covid pandemic and climate change. Ian McEwan discusses the epic and intimate range of Lessons, and the impact of world events on our lives, with Geoffrey Harpham, Emeritus Director of the National Humanities Center. Ian McEwan’s previous books, many of which have been adapted for the screen, include Atonement and On Chesil Beach.
HITLER AND PUTIN: THE ROAD TO WAR - TIM BOUVERIE with Jennifer Griffin
Recorded November 9, 2022
Tim Bouverie’s groundbreaking book, Appeasement, reappraises the years of indecision, failed diplomacy, infighting, blunders and wishful thinking that enabled the Nazi conquest and domination of Europe. What can we learn from history that can be applied to dealing with Putin and the West’s response to the war in Ukraine? Does his analysis have wider resonance for our times, as former democracies transmute into dictatorships? He considers the issues raised by the war in Ukraine with Jennifer Griffin, a national security correspondent for FOX News Channel who has extensively covered the Russian invasion, reporting live from Lviv and Kyiv.
FORMIDABLE - ELISABETH GRIFITH with Jennet Robinson Alterman
Recorded November 9, 2022
Elisabeth Griffith’s Formidable is “An essential history of the one-hundred years of struggle between 1920-2020 by both Black and White women in America to achieve equal rights” (Hillary Rodham Clinton). Griffith’s illuminating, inclusive book of women’s history recounts divisions alongside victories in her engaging, relevant and sweeping chronicle of women’s fight for equality, which is still a work in progress. She discusses how far women have come, as well as setbacks, with Jennet Robinson Alterman, long-time South Carolina women’s rights advocate and non-profit leader. Elisabeth Griffith currently teaches courses in women’s history at the Smithsonian Associates.
THE EMERGENCY RESCUE COMMITTEE - JULIE ORRINGER
with Elizabeth Meyer-Bernstein
Recorded November 9, 2022
In her thrilling book of historical fiction, The Flight Portfolio, inspired by actual people and events, Julie Orringer brings to life the work of the Emergency Rescue Committee, formed to aid prominent European refugees during the Second World War trapped in Vichy France under Nazi occupation. A riveting story of derring-do, it describes how its hero procured false documents and arranged escape routes for artists, writers and dissidents fleeing the Holocaust. She discusses the moral dilemma at the heart of the book - how does one choose who to save? - with Elizabeth Meyer-Bernstein, Dean of the College of Charleston Honors College.
RANSOMWARE HUNTERS - RENEE DUDLEY with Wenda Harris Millard
Recorded November 9, 2022
Renee Dudley’s revelatory book The Ransomware Hunting Team, co-written with Daniel Golden, traces the exploits of a band of unsung saviors who use their skills to save millions of ransomware victims from paying billions to cyber criminals. The informal group of dedicated code-crackers outwits underworld hackers who lock computer networks in hospitals, businesses, universities, and municipal government, and demand huge payments in return for the keys. She reflects on the reasons why the most effective force against an escalating global threat is an international coterie of social misfits with Wenda Harris Millard, digital marketing and advertising pioneer familiar with the media tech business, and Charleston Literary Festival Board member.
JAMES BALDWIN’S AMERICA - EDDIE S. GLAUDE JR. with Armand Derfner
Recorded November 10, 2022
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own is a defining book for our time, an eloquent essay that combines biography, literary and social criticism, and history to make the argument that America stands on the precipice of a decision about its identity. Baldwin’s life and writing serve as a pathway for Glaude to examine his own experiences, beliefs and feelings to interrogate racism in today’s America. He discusses the insights and inspiration he has gained from Baldwin with Armand Derfner, civil rights lawyer and co-author of Justice Deferred. Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor and chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.
CONSPIRACY PEDDLAR - ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON with Autumn Phillips
Recorded November 10, 2022
Elizabeth Williamson’s Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth is an indictment of the role of conspiracy theories in American society, told through the parents and relatives who upheld the truth of their children’s fate. The book’s starting point is the atrocity at Sandy Hook Elementary School, ten years ago, when twenty first graders and six educators were massacred by a gunman. What followed was a tsunami of misinformation, claiming the killings were a hoax, at the center of which was Alex Jones’s Infowars. She discusses his recent trial and legal rout with Autumn Phillips, Executive Editor of The Post and Courier. Elizabeth Williamson is a feature writer for the New York Times.
ROGUES - PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE with Ruth Streeter
Recorded November 10, 2022
In his “greatest hits” collection from The New Yorker: Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks, Patrick Radden Keefe, author of the acclaimed Empire of Pain—about the role of the Sackler family in triggering the opioid epidemic—stops at nothing in his pursuit of truth. He discusses how he chooses a target, the dangers he has faced (Rogues features ruthless drug lords), and how his view of the world has been affected by his mesmerizing investigations into bad behaviour, with Ruth Streeter, award-winning CBS News producer (including 60 Minutes) and Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow at Harvard.
THE SHORES OF BOHEMIA - JOHN TAYLOR WILLIAMS with Regina Marler
Recorded November 11, 2022
John Taylor Williams’ The Shores of Bohemia: A Cape Cod Story, 1910-1960, is a beguiling portrait of the unconventional would-be utopia on the beaches of Cape Cod created by artists and writers such as Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Mary McCarthy, Edward Hopper, Mark Rothko and Walter Gropius in the first half of the 20th century. Marriages, divorces, re-marriages, bar fights, and nude cocktail parties took place with dizzying frequency. Yet it was a crucible of creativity. John Taylor Williams, publisher and Charleston Literary Festival Board member, discusses the lure of bohemia with Regina Marler, who has written about the Bloomsbury Group, the British equivalent of the Cape Cod milieu.
ASHLEY’S SACK - TIYA MILES with Shannon Eaves
Recorded November 11, 2022
Tiya Miles’ All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake, was the recipient of the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2021. It is the poignant story of one object’s capacity to symbolize the history of a family and the experience of slavery: a rough cotton sack containing basic essentials given by a mother to her young daughter before their enforced separation, then passed down through generations. She discusses “the tears of things” with Shannon Eaves, Assistant Professor of African American History at College of Charleston. Tiya Miles is the Michael Garvey Professor of History at Harvard University.
THE MEN - SANDRA NEWMAN with Regina Marler
Recorded November 11, 2022
Sandra Newman’s novel The Men imagines a world in which half of humanity - anyone with a Y-chromosome - mysteriously vanishes. How the left-behind women deal with this liberation, this bereavement, this flawed utopia, gives the novel its dramatic tension. Her previous fiction includes The Heavens and The Country of Ice Cream Star. She is currently working on a feminist re-telling of Nineteen Eighty-Four, approved by the Orwell Estate. She discusses why she is drawn to conjuring up utopias and dystopias with Regina Marler, New York Review of Books critic.
SISTERS - JYOTI THOTTAM with Adam Shoemaker
Recorded November 12, 2022
Jyoti Thottam’s Sisters of Mokama is a never-before-told story about two pioneering groups of women in the 1940s: six intrepid nuns from the Appalachians and a set of young Indian trainee nurses, including Thottam’s mother, who joined them to establish a hospital in one of the poorest states in India. She discusses their struggles, accomplishments and legacy (the hospital they created still exists) with Adam Shoemaker, Rector at St. Stephens Church Charleston, who recently undertook his own quest to meet Muslim members of his family in Egypt. Jyoti Thottam is a senior opinion editor at the New York Times.
HORSE - GERALDINE BROOKS with Anne Blessing
Recorded November 12, 2022
In her sixth novel, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks’ subject is the famed Kentucky thoroughbred Lexington, king of the antebellum racetrack and beyond (he was the greatest sire of his age), as well as an exploration of the racism on which the horseracing industry was built. Although a triumphant feat of her creative imagination, blending different time periods, art, science and athleticism, many of the novel’s themes and characters are based on fact. She discusses the passions that horses can inspire in humans with Anne Blessing, horse-lover and Charleston Literary Festival Board member.
T.S. ELIOT’S HIDDEN MUSE - LYNDALL GORDON with Bill Goldstein
Recorded November 13, 2022
In The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse, British biographer Lyndall Gordon draws on dramatic new material – 1,131 recently unsealed letters he wrote to Emily Hale – to reveal a hidden Eliot. Born and educated in America, Eliot met Emily Hale, a drama teacher, before he left for Europe in his early 20s. They continued their relationship by letter and occasional meetings over 25 years and she inspired some of his most famous poems. Lyndall Gordon discusses with Bill Goldstein, author of The World Broke in Two, the new light the letters shed on Eliot and his work.
THE WASTE LAND - EDOARDO BALLERINI
Recorded November 13, 2022
In a unique appearance for the Festival, Edoardo Ballerini performs T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land and some of his other best-known poems. Ballerini was commissioned by the Estate of T.S. Eliot and his publisher, Faber & Faber, to record the Centenary Edition of the landmark poem. Originally published in 1922, The Waste Land was the most revolutionary poem of its time, offering a devastating vision of modern civilization that has lost none of its power. Ballerini is widely regarded as the brightest star of the audiobook era, one of the finest narrators of literature today.
PORGY AND BESS REASSESSED - GEOFFREY HARPHAM and ALYSON CAMBRIDGE with Harlan Greene
Recorded November 13, 2022
George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess is rooted in Charleston. DuBose Heyward, on whose 1925 novel Porgy the opera is based, centered on the Gullah community in Catfish Row, was born in Charleston. In 1934, he and Gershwin spent several weeks in Charleston working on the opera. We bring three cultural figures together to discuss their perspectives on Porgy and Bess. Geoffrey Harpham, Emeritus Professor of the National Humanities Center, discusses this iconic work in his new book Citizenship on Catfish Row. Renowned American soprano Alyson Cambridge first sang the role of Bess at the 2016 Spoleto Festival. Historian Harlan Greene, native of Charleston, worked on the papers of DuBose Heyward and his collaboration with Gershwin on Porgy and Bess.