Santa Barbara Book and Author Festival

T. Coraghessan Boyle is the author of nineteen books of fiction, including, most recently, After the Plague (2001), Drop City (2003), The Inner Circle (2004), Tooth and Claw (2005), and Talk Talk (2006). He received a Ph.D. degree in Nineteenth Century British Literature from the University of Iowa in 1977, his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1974, and his B.A. in English and History from SUNY Potsdam in 1968. He has been a member of the English Department at the University of Southern California since 1978. His books are available in a number of foreign languages, including German, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, Korean, Japanese, Danish, Swedish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish, Hungarian and Bulgarian. His stories have appeared in most of the major American magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, The Paris Review, GQ, Antaeus, Granta and McSweeney's, and he has been the recipient of a number of literary awards. He currently lives near Santa Barbara with his wife and three children.


Award-winning author Naomi Klein will deliver a compelling lecture titled The Shock Doctrine – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism on Saturday, September 29 at 8 pm at the Victoria Hall Theater. Klein coined the term “disaster capitalism” to describe the economic exploitation of communities who, still reeling from catastrophe - natural or otherwise - lose their land and homes to aggressive corporate makeovers. In her revealing new book, The Shock Doctrine, Klein argues that through capitalizing on crises the disaster capitalism complex exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for 50 years. Klein’s insightful examination of America’s “free market” policies and their impact on disaster-shocked people from Iraq to Louisiana exposes the thinking and the financial trail behind some of the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades. Celebrated historian Howard Zinn has called The Shock Doctrine “brilliant.” A respected journalist, syndicated columnist and author, Klein is best-known for the international bestseller, No Logo – Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (2000), an incisive report on the mounting backlash against multinational corporations. Dubbed “a movement bible” by The New York Times, No Logo takes on the ubiquitous imagery of consumer culture, from Nike’s swoosh to sweatshop labor. With a surprisingly optimistic outlook, Klein demonstrates the pervasive marketing ploys that penetrate not only the media and large retail outlets, but public school cafeterias. The Village Voice called No Logo, “A complete, user-friendly handbook on the negative effects that the 1990s überbrand marketing has had on culture, work, and consumer choice,” while Newsweek.com reported, “Klein is a sharp cultural critic and flawless storyteller. Her analysis is thorough and thoroughly engaging.” Klein is a former Miliband Fellow at the London School of economics and holds an honorary Doctor of Civil Laws from the University of King’s College, Nova Scotia. She was the highest ranked woman (number 11) on Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines’ “The World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals.”

Alejandro Morales, Chicano/Latino studies professor and novelist, is the 2007 recipient of the Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature. Sponsored by the University of California - Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara City College, and the Santa Barbara Book Council, the award recognizes Morales' contributions to Chicano/Latino literature and his
accomplishments as a major American writer.

Considered by many a pioneer of Latino literature written in Spanish and published abroad, Morales has authored several biographical novels in which he tells the fictional story of a character's life using historical events, bringing together his love for both history and writing.

"A lot of my ideas for novels come from real life experiences," he explains, referencing his fourth novel, The Brick People, in which he tells the story of an immigrant family who settles in Simons, California in the early 1900s, and begins working for Simons Brick Co. Morales' parents lived in Simons and worked for the same factory, he says, and their experiences were a driving force behind his book.

Morales has published a total of seven books with his newest title, The Captain of All These Men of Death, forthcoming from Bilingual Review Press, Arizona State University. Included among his publications are Barrio on the Edge, Death of an Anglo, The Rag Doll Plagues, Pequena Nacion, Reto en el Paraiso, and Waiting to Happen. He is currently working on his next title, a love story set in the 1920s centered around the Los Angeles River and the city's downtown bridges.

"Professor Morales' fiction engages the formation of the Mexican American experience from Mexico through Southern California. He brings alive the roots of Mexican American culture and shows different paths for its evolution in the future," says Louis DeSipio, department chair and professor of Chicano/Latino studies at UC Irvine. "In all cases, this shared history and culture is presented in an engaging manner that speaks to both readers seeking an engaging read and to scholars seeking a deeper understanding."

Morales will receive the Leal award at the 2007 Santa Barbara Book & Author Festival in September, joining past recipients Helena Maria Viramontes, Oscar Hijuelos, Rudolfo Anaya, and Denise Chavez for their accomplished writings on the Chicano/Latino experience.

One of Time magazine’s 100 most important people in the world, Harvard
professor Steven Pinker will deliver an informative lecture titled The Stuff of Thought – Language as a Window into Human Nature on Saturday, September 29 at 4 pm at the Victoria Hall Theater. His newly released book, The Stuff of Thought, is a fascinating look at word choice and human nature. Pinker provides lucid explanations of deep and powerful ideas, from what swearing discloses about emotions to what a baby’s name can say about its parents’ relationship to children and society. Time magazine has called Pinker’s illuminating work, “Sweeping, erudite, sharply argued, and fun to read."

Best known for his landmark workThe Blank Slate– The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research on language and cognition through examining how everyday speech reveals the thoughts and emotions that populate our mental lives. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Blank Slate explores the political, moral and emotional colorings of the concept of human nature. The Wall Street Journal remarked, “Pinker points us in the direction of a more productive debate, a debate in which the implications of science are confronted forthrightly and not simply wished away by politicized scientist’s text.”

Pinker’s groundbreaking research is presented with irreverent wit, elegant style, and a deft use of examples from popular culture: Why is bulk e-mail called spam? Why do romantic comedies get so much mileage out of the same, tired ambiguities and storylines? The Seattle Times raved, “[Pinker’s work] ranges from Charles Darwin to Abigail Van Buren, from scientific studies to Annie Hall. It is less about science than what science implies for our most cherished beliefs.”

The Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Pinker’s research on the psychology of language has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the American Psychological Association. He has received four honorary doctorates and writes for multiple publications such as The New York Times, The New Republic, and Slate. He has been named Humanist of the Year and is listed in Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines’ “The World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals.”

Born May 31 1939 at Ocean Springs, Mississippi on the Gulf Coast near Biloxi, Al Young grew up in the South and in Detroit. From 1957-1960 he attended the University of Michigan, where he co-edited Generation, the campus literary magazine. In 1961 he emigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area. Settling at first in Berkeley, he held a variety of colorful jobs (folksinger, lab aide, disk jockey, medical photographer) before graduating from U.C. Berkeley with a degree in Spanish. From 1969-1976 he was Edward B. Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford near Palo Alto, where he lived and worked for three decades. In 2000 he moved back to Berkeley.

Young has taught poetry and fiction writing at U.C. Berkeley, U.C. Santa Cruz, U.C. Davis, Foothill College, the Colorado College, Rice University, the University of Washington, the University of Michigan, the University of Arkansas, and San José State University. In the spring of 2003 he taught poetry at Davidson College (Davidson, NC), where he was McGee Professor in Writing. In the fall of 2003, he will be Coffey Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC.

His honors include Wallace Stegner, Guggenheim, Fulbright National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the PEN-Library of Congress Award for Short Fiction, the PEN-USA Award for Non-Fiction, two American Book Awards, the Pushcart Prize, and two New York Times Notable Book of the year citations.Young's many books include novels, collections of poetry, essays, memoirs and anthologies. His work has appeared in the Paris Review, Ploughshares, Essence, the New York Times, Chicago Review, Seattle Review, Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz and Letters, Chelsea, Rolling Stone, and the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. He has written film scripts for Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, and Richard Pryor. In 2001 he traveled to the Persian Gulf to lecture on African American literature and culture in Kuwait and in Bahrain for the U.S. Department of State.

Al Young travels internationally and extensively, reading, lecturing and often performing with musicians. His poetry and prose have been translated into Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, German, and other languages. Current projects: A Piece of Cake (a novel), Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know: Or, Opus de Funk (an account in verse of Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb's infamous romance), a screen adaptation of Seduction By Light, his 1988 Hollywood novel); volume two of The Literature of California, co-edited with scholar-critic Jack Hicks, and novelists James D. Houston and Maxine Hong Kingston, and CitiZen: Spirit & Democracy, a collection of column-length dialogues between Young and O.O. Gabugah on the current state of democracy in the U.S. (inspired by Langston Hughes' Simple Speaks His Mind).