Bea Kreloff, Director of Art Workshop International, knows a lot of people in the art/writing world. And to demonstrate that, here’s a photo of her with Tony Kushner and Mark Harris.

Watch an introductory video that describes the courses that writer Bob Hughes, who covered varied cultural events for the Wall Street Journal for many years.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will attend the March 12th opening night in New York of a three-day summit, Women in the World: Stories and Solutions, co-hosted by The Daily Beast, Vital Voices Global Partnership, Diane von Furstenburg, and the UN Foundation. Secretary Clinton will introduce an exclusive one-night reading at the Hudson Theatre of SEVEN, the documentary play created for Vital Voices Global Partnership to honor the courage of brave female activists from Afghanistan, Cambodia, Guatemala, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Pakistan, and Russia.

Seven acclaimed actors have volunteered their time to dramatize the issues highlighted in the play: Meryl Streep heads the line-up, which includes Marcia Gay Harden, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Stephanie Okereke, Archie Panjabi, Julyana Soelistyo and Lauren Velez.

The reading is directed by celebrated Broadway director Julie Taymor. SEVEN is a collaboration by playwrights Paula Cizmar, Catherine Filloux, Gail Kriegel, Carol K. Mack, Ruth Margraff, Anna Deavere Smith, and Susan Yankowitz.

Said Daily Beast Founder Tina Brown; “We are all delighted that Secretary Clinton, who has done so much throughout her career to further the goals and aspirations of women around the world, will be joining this remarkable gathering of inspirational voices.”

Said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “The play powerfully portrays the transformative way that seven courageous women have changed their societies for the better - from peace-building, to fighting corruption to combating violence against women.”

Secretary Clinton led the Vital Voices initiative when it was a program of the State Department and she was First Lady. Secretary Clinton personally knows and admires the women depicted in the play.

Alyse Nelson, President and Chief Executive Officer of Vital Voices Global Partnership said; “The most powerful thing about SEVEN is that it gets to the heart of some of the most critical issues facing our world today. It reminds us of the power of the human spirit to rise up when faced withadversity and as we rise…it reminds us that we have a responsibility to bring others along with us.”

Summit participants include Valerie Jarrett, Her Majesty Queen Rania of Jordan, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, Fatima Bhutto, Cherie Blair, Luis CdeBaca, Thomas L. Friedman, Edna Adan Ismail, Christine Lagarde, Molly Melching, Somaly Mam, Frances Townsend, and Zainab Salbi.
Moderators include Christiane Amanpour, Mika Brzezinski, Katie Couric and Barbara Walters.

Food is the ultimate subject to write about.
It speaks to us all because we all eat…we’re all in contact with food everyday. And whether that’s a pleasant experience or a troubling one it is part of our basic connection to life.
I think that’s why the subject is so good at eliciting fiction, essays, memoirs, and poetry: stories. Readers know about food and are eager to know the experiences of other individuals. Food inspires interaction with the world around you. And interactions always come with stories.
Food writer (and fiction writer) Laurie Colwin said: “For the socially timid, the kitchen is the place to be. At least, it is a place to start.”
Here is a little taste of food literature: a recipe poem of my own, and two excerpts from pieces that appeared in the journal I publish: Alimentum.
Peas
Peas are a strange animal. Two peas in a pod. Peas on earth. Grandma at the farm shelling peas into a bowl while rocking on the back porch. I grew up well away from any farm. My mom bought Le Seur petite peas in a can. They were green, but really a kind of grey-green. Still we thought they were the most excellent. Never being an advocate of frozen food I finally realized that the best peas are frozen peas (if you don’t have a back porch on a farm). You can even get petite frozen peas. I like them in a bag rather than a box because you can squish the frozen peas around in there. Not squish to pop them, just to juggle them a little. I sauté some cut up pancetta and thin sliced onion half-moons in a little olive oil. Add a splash of white wine and let it evaporate then pour in the peas (with a bit of water if they need it) and salt and pepper. This recipe gives peas a little lift. Makes them feels European. Lots of things improve when they feel European.
Excerpt from The Art of Eating Alone by Scott Seward Smith
. . . I sat there waiting for my food and feeling quite proper in my loneliness, quite relaxed. I felt the propriety of my loneliness. It’s all in the attitude: don’t keep recrossing your ankles, don’t bite your cuticles, don’t twist your glass so much, but don’t look catatonic either. Just look like you know something everyone else doesn’t.
Excerpt from The Freedom of Found Food by Ellen Morris Prewitt
We roamed the pastures of Mamo’s farm, we weaved in and out of neighbors’ trees, we even sampled from our own front yards. Like the scavengers we were, we’d examine, but not eat, the onions at the end of the onion grass. We ate flower petals—velvety—and, on our walk to Power Elementary School, we’d lick the pollen butter from the buttercups—a dry, powdery disappointment. Likewise for wild strawberries—the little knots had no taste at all. At least the mimosa beans that we crunched while Mother was learning to play tennis on the public courts tasted like dirt. But taste wasn’t the point, was it, or why tackle the bitter persimmon?
Alimentum news:
We’ve named our 2009 Poetry Contest Winners…
For April National Poetry Month we’re once again publishing menupoems for diners to enjoy with their meals (and their menus). This year we’re inviting you to video your reading of a menupoem and we’ll post it on Alimentum’s Youtube channel.
AND: We just got word that Alimentum won Best Food Magazine in the World from the 2010 International Gourmand Awards!

More news, samples, and food fun on Alimentum’s website:
http://www.alimentumjournal.com/
Paulette Licitra

Dinitia Smith’s new play “Dirty Pictures” just had a highly-successful reading at the Actors Studio, with the well-known theater actor actor, Austin Pendleton, in the lead role. There are hopes for a production the play soon.

“Dirty Pictures” is the story of a little-known piece of American history, the arrest in 1960 of the gay literary critic Newton Arvin and two younger colleagues at Smith College as part of a government crackdown on homosexuals that occurred at the end of the McCarthy period. Gays were targeted as security risks because they were supposedly vulnerable to blackmail by Communists. Prior to the arrests of Arvin and his friends, nearly 1,000 Federal workers in Washington, D.C. had lost their jobs for “sexual perversion” under Executive Order 10450 from President Eisenhower.

The play is a reimagining of these incidents based on interviews, trial transcripts, and historical documents.

NOTE: A leading agent is now taking the lead. We will watch for upcoming developments! — Chris Spencer

A Tale About a Tiger and Other Mysterious Events from “The American Culture”

Crippen & Landru Publishers
Paper: 243 pages
ISBN (cloth): 978-1-932009-89-7 … (paper): 978-1-932009-90-3
$42.00 (cloth) … $17.00 (paper)

Multiple-award-winning private eye (p.i.) author S. J. Rozan is equally at home writing novels or short stories. Crippen & Landru has collected together some prime examples of her work in the short form.

Rozan’s tone in these stories varies from decidedly grim to lightly humorous, but she never strays very far from what is usually called the “real” world — or at least the world typically envisioned by private eye authors (i.e., that environment of unremitting sin and corruption in high and low places which p.i. writers have created by common consent and inhabited with sinful and corrupt characters who are never more than one step removed from being stereotypes) — a world, in brief, that is as real and yet as unreal as Middle Earth.

All of which in no wise detracts from Rozan’s story-telling skill; when it comes to p.i. fiction, she may be one of its foremost contemporary practitioners.

“Night Court” takes us to an unexpected place, almost to another universe, yet it’s where we live daily:

Murph took his seat on the bench, after which the assembled multitudes, who had been bidden by Rossi to stand, sat also. Not that they were all that multitudinous: night court didn’t allow spectators. The only people here were directly connected with the case. The attorneys, the witnesses, Rossi, the guards. And the defendant. Murph watched Leopold squirm. The guy looked pale. Well, he ought to. He was in big trouble.

Rozan gives a p.i. named Smith in one story and Bill Smith in another two cases (“Hoops” and “Childhood”) keyed to the shortcomings of the social system:

”Why me?” I asked. “Curtis knows every piece of black slime that ever walked the earth, but he sent you a white detective. Why?”
”Cause the slime we looking for,” Raymond said evenly, “I don’t believe they black.”

“Passline” is a departure for Rozan, not a p.i. story but a character study of a man, a compulsive gambler, under extreme pressure:

And the people who built this place (not the first time, not the old days, but now), they knew, too. They built everything huge and so obviously fake because of it. No one talked about it (that was part of it, the shared secret) but they didn’t want you to forget it. They knew the rush was better because of the desert. They knew the illusion only worked because of the truth.
And the truth was, if he didn’t come home with $400,000 for Bennie, Taylor was a dead man.

In “Seeing the Moon,” Chinese-American private eye and fine art connoisseur Jack Lee gets involved in an art swindle:

”Molly told me he gives you the hives.”
”Hives, he makes me itch? Yah, that’s good, Jack! Yes, it’s bad enough, the people who buy and sell art as a commodity, with no love. But to cheat also, this is abhorrent. Such men must be avoided. You cannot win against a man like that.”

The remaining four stories in A Tale About a Tiger feature Rozan’s famous series character, Chinatown p.i. Lydia Chin, who sometimes joins forces with her “barbarian” partner Bill Smith. The first one is “Film at Eleven,” where Lydia is on the trail of a murderer who seems to have gotten away with it:

As it had been when our eyes first met, my skin crawled now, so near Mitch Ellman. The way he leaned a little too close; the way his teeth seemed pointed when he smiled; the way his eyes held mine too long every time they met: I wanted to get up and move, to put actual, physical distance between us.

In “Subway,” a rape case escalates into murder — of the witnesses:

“I told you, no one was sure-sure. Or if they were, they wouldn’t say. And they can’t get DNA without a court order if he don’t want to give it. They can’t get a court order unless they arrest him, which they can’t without probable cause. They got no conviction in the prior and no i.d., they got no probable cause. Besides,” she added, shaking her head, “they lost him.”
“What do you mean, lost him?”
“He disappeared. After the line-up. He’s scum but I guess he’s not stupid.”

With “A Tale About a Tiger,” folk lore leads to fraud — and also to gunplay:

“Fifteen, Ho. That’s a cool $135,000, in good American cash. Take it and run.”
“That will barely cover my expenses,” Ho objected, “much less compensate me for the risks I’ve taken in obtaining these items, and bringing them into this country.”
Meaning, I thought, bribing and poaching and smuggling.

Finally, in “Double-Crossing Delancey,” Lydia must outcon a consummate conman:

Well, that would be like Joe: giving away as little as possible, even to his business partner. Controlling the information minimizes the chance of error, misstep, or deliberate double-cross. As, for example, what Charlie and I were up to right now.

If you like your private eyes both hard- and soft-boiled but imbued with a social conscience, A Tale About a Tiger should satisfy you. S. J. Rozan strikes a fine balance between the extremes of Miss Marple and Mike Hammer, and for that reason — as well as her smooth prose — these stories will be of interest.

(Parental warning: Strong language, not for children.)

—Mike Gray

“As a member of the Danish group Corners, I am joining 8 other members to teach at an art school in Inner Mongolia. The school is part of a museum. We will also show at the museum. I am bringing a CD with 80 images that will be shown on a loop and left with them. The group will first meet in Beijing and go together to Houhot, the capitol of Inner Mongolia.

Award-winning author Rosellen Brown teachers “Many Ways to Tell a Story” July 22 to August 4 in Assisi, Italy

“I was the moderator of a panel on the short story at the Chicago Tribune’s Printers’ Row Literary Festival in June featuring four very diverse writers in lively conversation. This year I’ve been publishing a series of stories from a book in progress to be called Late Loves. (Seven of Rosellen’s stories have been included in the annual O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prizes.)

One more thing: Though I do a lot of contest judging, this year I chose a few prize-winners for one of the most interesting magazines I’ve run into: The Bellevue Review is published out of NYU’s medical school; it’s devoted entirely to stories and poetry about health, healing, illness, the mind, and the body and it’s amazing how much good work it contains. Check it out at www.blreview.org.”

For Summer Sleuths: Best Mystery, Crime Novels

by Maureen Corrigan (National Public Radio)

Ethnicity aside, Lydia Chin, the protagonist in S.J. Rozan’s The Shanghai Moon, is a private investigator very much in the brisk Nancy mold (that is, if Nancy were grown up and Chinese-American). In her ninth novel in the terrific Edgar Award-winning series, Rozan elegantly riffs on the stolen jewels plot that constitutes about 99 percent of the classic Nancy Drew mysteries.

Lydia is hired to trace a cache of jewels that’s recently been unearthed in a garden in Shanghai and swiped by a corrupt Chinese official who’s now believed to be hiding in New York’s Chinatown. The box containing the jewelry had been buried since World War II and may contain a brooch called the Shanghai Moon, which, in the intervening decades, has become the stuff that dreams are made of.

Lydia’s race to find the stolen gems before various plug uglies can lay their paws on them constitutes one plotline; another takes readers back to wartime Shanghai. As The Shanghai Moon demonstrates, there’s plenty of possibility lurking in the old missing-jewels plot. It just takes a master like S.J. Rozan to restore the luster of a classic.

Ellen’s work is noted for her sensitive portrayal of a person - and capturing their spirit.
-Chris Spencer

“Ellen Eagle is a loving magician with color, light, shadow, and form, and with the very soul and essence of the people she paints. She captures their humanity, their vulnerability, and their deepest persona as she transforms pastel into a truly painterly medium. Her portraits are filled with raw emotion and a depth of feeling that are astonishing and breathtaking to behold. Take her wondrous portrait class and discover not only how to make your own portraiture breathe, but how to uncover the passionate spirit and heart of your work. Be embraced by Ellen Eagle’s sensitivity and empathy — and you will see your work take flight.” www.artworkshopintl.com/visual_arts.aspx
—N. Cohen