10 Feb Listening to Place
Hosted by Melissa Holbrook Pierson
Where we are—the places we move through, the places that move through us—profoundly informs personal and public experience. We will consider the role of whereness in writing with two authors whose books take different approaches to a fundamental idea. Ben Ratliff’s Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening examines the way moving through space affected his appreciation of the music that accompanied his runs. Alex Hannaford’s Lost in Austin: The Evolution of an American City confronts how financial and political decisions not only change a cityscape, but society itself. The conversation is facilitated by Melissa Holbrook Pierson, critic and author of The Place You Love Is Gone.
Melissa Holbrook Pierson is the author of five books, including The Perfect Vehicle and The Place You Love Is Gone: Progress Hits Home, and The Secret History of Kindness. Her essays and reviews have appeared in many anthologies and publications, starting with the Village Voice in the olden days and more recently the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Hyperallergic. She teaches writing with Writers in the Mountains.
Born in London, Alex Hannaford cut his teeth in journalism on the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong and newspapers on the south coast of England before joining London’s Evening Standard as a feature writer and later commissioning editor. Since moving to the US in 2003, he has written about the death penalty, crime, harsh sentencing, immigration and refugees, religion, culture and human rights issues for publications like British GQ, The Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph magazines, The Guardian & Observer, The Independent, The Atlantic, and The Texas Observer. He co-wrote and hosted Dead Man Talking, a crime podcast for Audioboom, which won a British Podcast Award, Battleground, about the 2020 presidential election, and The Innocents, about wrongful conviction. He wrote and directed The Last 40 Miles, an award-winning animated short film about the death penalty. Alex is an Ochberg Fellow at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University. His most recent book is Lost In Austin.
Ben Ratliff is the author of Every Song Ever and Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His new memoir is Run The Song: Writing about Running About Listening. A former music critic for the New York Times, he lives in New York City and teaches at New York University.
Get a Full Festival pass and you’ll get to take in the Story Slam on Thursday night. Then sail into the weekend: attending all the wonderful panels, both parties, and both evening events. And share the bounty from our always-stuffed goody bag.