Aloud @ Los Angeles Public Library

Ivan Doig has described the Pacific Northwest in a number of well-known nonfiction books and novels, including Bucking the Sun (1996), Heart Earth (1993), Winter Brothers (1980), This House of Sky (1984), and the trilogy English Creek (1984), Dancing at the Rascal Fair (1987), and Ride with Me, Mariah Montana (1990). Born in White Sulpher Springs, Montana, Doig has been a ranch hand, newspaperman, magazine editor, and writer. Doig received the Distinguished Achievement Award of the Western Literature Association in 1989. He lives in Seattle, Washington. "Ivan Doig is one of the best we've got, a muscular and exceedingly good writer who understands our hunger for stories."  - Annie Proulx. This program was originally produced as part of the 1997 season of Racing Toward the Millennium: Voices from the American West, in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

This program includes readings and discussion among writers in exile from their native countries. Majid Naficy, an Iranian poet who fled Khomeini's regime at great risk, has lived in Los Angeles since 1985. He has published three collections of poems and holds a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from UCLA. Chinese novelist Anchee Min was born in Shanghai in 1957. At seventeen she was sent to a labor collective, where talent scouts discovered her and recruited her to work as a movie actress at the Shanghai Film Studio. Her memoir Red Azalea, about life during the Cultural Revolution, was an international bestseller. SAID, born in Tehran in 1947, was forced to leave Iran at age seventeen, and has lived in exile in Munich, Germany since 1964. His publications include Poems of Love, Then I Will Scream Until Silence, and his most recent work, The Long Arm of the Mullahs: Notes from My Exile.This program was co-presented with Villa Aurora and produced in conjunction with the exhibition "Exiles and Em

In 1997, Sherman Alexie had just been named one of America's "Best Young Novelists" by GRANTA Magazine, and had won the American Book Award. Alexie's work resonates with the collision between white and Native American cultures and, while his subjects are serious, Alexie himself is often scathingly funny. In his work Indian Killer, Alexie creates a rich, panoramic portrayal of contemporary Seattle using a mystery story to tell some uncomfortable truths about Indian-white relations and racism in all its forms. A member of the Spokane/Coeur d'Alene tribe, Alexie lives in Seattle, Washington. This program was presented as part of the 1997 series of Racing Toward the Millennium: Voices from the American West.

David Mas Masumoto is a third-generation Japanese-American peach and grape farmer. His book Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm is a chronicle of family, farm travails, and his struggle to market on old variety of peach. In addition to being a writer and farmer, Masumoto is a farm activist and a member of the California Council for the Humanities. His book was awarded the Julia Child Cookbook Award for best book in the Literary Food Writing category. He lives in Del Rey, California. For more information on the Masumoto Family Farm, please visit www.masumoto.com. This program as presented as part of the 1997 season of Racing Toward the Millennium: Voices from the American West, in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.