The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes

Kendrick Lamar (pitchfork.com)

Yesterday, the Pulitzer Prize Foundation announced its 2018 honorees, and this year list brought a particularly unexpected surprise: in the traditionally most aesthetically narrow arts category, Music, the prize committee threw prize watches for a complete loop and selected Kendrick Lamar, the platinum record-selling, Grammy-nominated hip hop artist, for his 2017 album DAMN. The Pulitzer jury noted that Lamar's work was a:

Recording released on April 14, 2017, a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.

With his win, Lamar became the first musician not working in a classical/Euro-American or jazz idiom to receive the award, and only the fifth African American since the Music prize was initially awarded in 1943. In fact, there was no Black winner at all until classical composer George Walker won in 1996 for Lilacs, for voice and orchestra. Since then, the other recipients have been Wynton Marsalis in 1997 for Blood on the Fields, the first strictly jazz composition to win; Ornette Coleman's jazz LP Sound Grammar, which won in 2007; and Henry Threadgill's In for a Penny, In for a Pound, in 2016.

Indeed, the Music category award roll was, until Walker's award, notorious for excluding not just Black musicians, but all music not falling under the general rubric of "classical music," and in particular, academic classical compositions. Some of the greatest American musicians, including Duke Ellington (posthumously, in 1999), George Gershwin (posthumously, in 1998), John Coltrane (posthumously, in 2007), Thelonious Monk (posthumously in 2006), and Scott Joplin (posthumously, in 1976!), received "Special Citations," but were otherwise ignored, as were all forms of popular music, however symphonic or orchestral, in the Music category.

Interestingly enough, musical theater, beginning with Of Thee I Sing, by George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, and Ira Gershwin, was honored in the Drama category as far back as 1932, and over the years, other musicals, like Richard Rodgers' and Oscar Hammerstein II's South Pacific in 1950, were recognized, as "Drama," but not as "Music." This was about as close as the Pulitzer Music juries got to the popular music of the moment.




The honoring of hip hop marked an immense shift and might be a harbinger of things to come, as judges in this category, joining their peers in others, may now decide to take a broader view of the contemporary artistic landscape. Lamar is the real thing; about as far as you can get from hip hop-lite and user-friendly lyrics, he's insistently innovative and political, and very much grounded in the language and culture of his native South Central Los Angeles. (None of this year's music judges were hip hop musicians, but adding some now may also help to shake things up in the future.) But we will, I guess, see what happens going forward. The two finalists in the Music category fell into the more traditional classical/art music vein: Michael Gilbertson, for his string composition Quartet, and Ted Hearne, for his cantata for chamber orchestra, electric guitar, and percussion Sound from the Bench. In past years, either might have won.

I can imagine, however, that some classical musicians, who may already feel beleaguered by the shifts in the music industry as a whole and the reported declines in attendance at classical concerts, may now feel concern that what was their protected sphere, as far as widely known US national awards go, no longer exists. That may be true, but then perhaps the award should not have been called "Music," but more strictly named to reflect how much music and how many musicians had been excluded from consideration. Some prior classical music winners--Aaron Copland (1945), Charles Ives (1947), Virgil Thomson (1949), Gian-Carlo Menotti (1950), Samuel Barber (1958), Steve Reich (2009), and of course Marsalis and Coleman, have been in the ears of the wider public, or some of their music has (I recently heard one of Reich's most famous pieces, "Come Out," sampled in a hip hop song, and Barber's Adagio for Strings has been performed more than once on TV, etc.), but in general, far too many of the Music winners remained mostly unheard and unknown to a degree unlike anyother category, including Poetry or Drama.

Other winners in the "Letters, Drama & Music" section included poet Frank Bidart, for Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 (Farrar Straus & Giroux), a nod towards his status as one of the senior, major figures in American poetry, and someone who had never received a Pulitzer before. I was very happy to see that the two finalists were two poets I know and admire, and collections I thought were stellar: Patricia Smith, for her collection Incendiary Art (TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press), and Evie Shockley, for her collection semiautomatic (Wesleyan University Press). Given the threats university presses are facing these days, this was also a good vote of confidence in publishing in a genre that has remained the least commercial.

The poetry citation

The Fiction winner was novelist Andrew Sean Greer, for his comic novel Fiction Less (Lee Boudreaux Books/Little, Brown and Company), and the finalists were In the Distance, by Hernan Diaz (Coffee House Press), and The Idiot, by Elif Batuman (Penguin Press).  In the Drama category, Maryna Majok's Cost of Living received the award; the two finalists were Everybody, by the very brilliant and talented young playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and The Minutes, by actor and playwright Tracy Letts. Bidart's and Greer's awards may have marked one of the rare times that the poetry and fiction winners were both out, gay male writers; had Jacobs-Jenkins also been honored, it would have marked a very rare trifecta.

In the History category, Jack E. Davis's The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, by Jack E. Davis (Liveright/W.W. Norton), an exploration of the history of the Gulf of Mexico, received the committee's nod. The two finalists were Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics, by Kim Phillips-Fein (Metropolitan Books), and Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America, by Steven J. Ross (Bloomsbury). The Biography recipient was Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser (Metropolitan Books); the two finalists in that category were Richard Nixon: The Life, by John A. Farrell (Doubleday), and Kay Redfield Jamison's Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character (Alfred A. Knopf).

Lastly, under the arts and letters aegis, in the category of General Nonfiction, the winner was the highly praised study Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, by James Forman Jr. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The two finalists were Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-America World, by Suzy Hansen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us, by Richard O. Prum (Doubleday)

I must admit that I have tended to pay less attention to the News winners, but some did catch my eye this year. First, art critic and provocateur--and former reality show judge!--Jerry Saltz received the Pulitzer in Criticism for his commentary in New York Magazine. I sometimes strongly disagree with Saltz's readings of exhibits and the general culture, but I do think he knows how to get readers to think about art and society.

In the Public Service category, the recipients were The New York Times, for coverage led by Jodi Kantor, and The New Yorker's Ronan Farrow, for their exploration of the sexual predation, harassment and abuse in Hollywood and other realms of US life, in response to the #MeToo moment and movement. The Washington Post won in the category of Investigative Reporting for its coverage of the Alabama Senate race, and its revelations of the Republican candidate Roy Moore's sexual abuse of an underage teenager; in part because of this necessary reporting, he may have been defeated by Democrat Doug Jones.

I must admit to some skepticism about the dual award in the National Reporting category, however; while the Washington Post rightly deserved a Pulitzer for its thoroughgoing attempts to enlighten the American public about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, the Pulitzer board moved the New York Times into contention for this award as well, and then jointly named that paper as a winner. Yet the Times has never explained its bizarre October 31, 2016 report that the FBI had determined there was no Russian interference in the election, which we now know was completely wrong based on multiple accounts, and not long after former public editor Liz Spayd attempted to answer the strange report--who gave the Times this information?--she was let go. Will we ever know what or who was behind that Times report, which provided official establishment and news ballast and support for the Trump campaign? Should the Times have been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for this work given this massive blunder?

Oscars Whiteout (Again)

Who really cares about the Oscars? Clearly some of us care about the Oscars. Should we care about the Oscars? Should we care about the fact that the #Oscars(Are)SoWhite--again?

For the second year in a row, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization that awards out the annual gold-plated Oscar statuettes, considered the pinnacle of the multibillion-dollar American film industry's honors, have nominated an all-white slate of actors in the Best and Supporting categories. Ten slots, ten white women and men, and even in two films, Creed and Straight Outta Compton, with black leading actors, only a white supporting actor and the white scriptwriters respectively received nominations. No leading actors of other races or ethnicities were nominated, nor were any films in which they played the leading roles.

While this might not have drawn much notice fifty years ago in 1966 (which in fact did have an all white roster of nominees) or, in 1936 (unsurprisingly), closer to the Oscars' establishment in 1929, it does stick out in 2016, at a time when the United States is growing increasingly more diverse in racial, ethnic, religious, and other ways, and when industry figures themselves note that 46% of Hollywood movie ticket buyers in 2013 alone were people of color (designated as black, Latinx and "other" in the marketing study linked above), and Latinxs in particular are the most enthusiastic moviegoers. And the Academy has a black woman, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, as its president.

2013 in fact was supposed to be "turning-point year" for black filmmakers. In his The Dissolve article "New study puts numbers to the lack of minority representation in film," Vadim Rizov quotes producer Harvey Weinstein uttering a quintessentially post-racial (and deeply deluded) paean to America's changing political and thus social terrain, noting that the micro-burst of black directed and starred films "signals, with President Obama, a renaissance. He’s erasing racial lines. It is the Obama effect." How wrong he was and is. Hollywood cinematic representations lag behind those on TV, which has certainly improved since the heyday of the 1970s, and those "racial lines" Weinstein spoke of are as present today as they were in 2013 or before.

As it turns out, 2013 was more of a mirage than anything else. The USC Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism study that Rizov cites makes clear, diverse racial and ethnic representation in Hollywood cinema is still a problem:

Examining 500 top-grossing films released in the U.S. from 2007 to 2012, the study considers some 20,000 characters and finds diversity is sorely lacking. “Across 100 top-grossing films of 2012, only 10.8 percent of speaking characters are Black, 4.2 percent are Hispanic, 5 percent are Asian, and 3.6 percent are from other (or mixed race) ethnicities,” the paper notes at the outset. “Just over three-quarters of all speaking characters are White (76.3 percent). These trends are relatively stable, as little deviation is observed across the five-year sample.”

I observe this not only when I catch previews during my increasingly rare visits to see movies in theatrical release but on TV, where film after film appears to reflect a very narrow, usually white, upper-middle-class, coastal perspective. Innumerable stories not just from the present but the past remain offscreen, at least those screens commandeered by Hollywood studios. Non-traditional casting has improved somewhat, but people of color are still relegated to secondary or subsidiary, and often stereotypical roles, and even though blackface performance thankfully is rare to nonexistent in Hollywood these days, whitewashing source characters happens regularly, and yellowface characterizations crop up. Far more frequent, though, are stereotypes.  Quoting Rizov again:

Among the other conclusions reached: “Hispanic females are more likely to be depicted in sexy attire and partially naked than Black or White females. Asian females are far less likely to be sexualized.” While women got assigned the same kind of domestic status regardless of their race or ethnicity, “Hispanic males are more likely to be depicted as fathers and relational partners than males in all other racial/ethnic groups. Black males, on the other hand, are the least likely to be depicted in these roles.”

Some actors of color, like Kevin Hart--who has become the current go-to black sidekick-enabler in comedies--continue to make careers out of this situation. What exacerbates the problem is the lack of diversity behind the camera, with the ratio of white directors dwarfing directors from any other racial background. Thinking intersectionally, given the sexist and ageist challenges women in Hollywood still face (articulated without intersectionality last year by Patricia Arquette and again this year by media darling Jennifer Lawrence), things are even worse for women of color.

Meanwhile certain plotlines, including "white men battling adversity"; an older white man paired with a younger white woman; younger upper-middle-class white people facing relationships hurdles; and all or mostly white historical scenarios characterize a great many of the plots of Hollywood films. Yes, pace Vladimir Propp, there are a limited number of plots out there, but still a far greater array of narrative configurations, inflected by cultural difference, which is to say stories and experiences, in the US and across the globe, that rarely if ever make it through Hollywood's system.

Sylvester Stallone and Michael B. Jordan
in Creed (moviepilot.com)

This imaginative narrowness, which I would only partially chalk up to racism, only magnifies the inequities the Academy members' racial and gender makeup (94% white and 77% male) and voting patterns produce. Fewer and less culturally and narratively diverse film opportunities mean fewer roles in which actors of color appear on screen, whatever their acting skill level. I should also note that most of the black actors who have won Oscars in recent years have usually been honored for performances involving strong elements of abjection and spectacle, which also points to Academy voting biases.

Ultimately it comes back to gatekeepers at all levels of the movie industry who fail to approve and advance scripts and films that might offer a richer portrait of the society, or who tend to view issue of race and ethnicity, religious difference, and so on, through a narrow lens, are one major source of the problem. The revelations emerging from the Sony hack made this very clear. Moviegoers who support the status quo are another, but while it is conceivable that Americans could boycott Hollywood standard offerings (and excuses), films are a global business, circulating from Canada to Argentina, the UK to South Africa, Russia to New Zealand--and China is the largest single market of all. Hollywood's representations are not just a domestic problem.

Actress Jada Pinkett Smith, supported by her husband actor and musician Will Smith, who starred in the film Concussion (which I did not see) and did not garner a nomination this year, has called for a boycott of the Oscars ceremony, as has director Spike Lee. Actor and comedian Chris Rock, the event MC, may be considering boycotting the proceedings as well, though it appears he will show up and, I hope, skewer the debacle. Other actors, including 2013 Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong'o and actor Idris Elba have called out the movie and TV industry's failings, and in the Briton Elba's case, the UK's parallel problems with cinematic and TV racial representations.

April Reign, creator of the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, has challenged one of the default excuses behind the film industry's ongoing whiteout, male domination and this and the previous year's nominations: "Don't tell me that people of color, women can't fill seats." But Hollywood, which pays attention to the bottom line, apparently isn't as concerned about who fills those seats as it is with endlessly replicating its tiny store of self-regarding visual narratives. It's not about the money, but rather systemic and structural problems that need to be dismantled completely. Perhaps beginning with a boycott of the Oscars this year, and from now on all movies with retrograde casting approaches and stories.

As important, filmmakers, actors and movie audiences must proactively devise ways to build systems to enable domestic filmmakers of color to create, distribute and screen not just more, but better films, and perhaps if people desire an awards system, as in the case in the literary world and other artistic areas, create that as well. The technology is increasingly there, as are the rival film bases Bollywood and Nollywood (whose films I increasingly watch). Given that Hollywood's earnings have taken a dip in recent years, the studios will change--or they'll realize too late that they could have but did not.

Fall Classes Underway + Congratulations All Around

UPDATE: The Edward Baugh reading, scheduled for October 31, 2014 at Rutgers-Newark, has been canceled. I send Dr. Baugh my very best wishes for a swift recovery.

***

A few weeks month (!) ago I had a wonderful lunch with a senior colleague who was visiting the New York area. He teaches on the quarter system and so has had not yet begun his own fall schedule, and he asked how my classes were thus far, which made me realize that unlike in previous years, I haven't posted on or around the first day about the term's classes. As I noted a few posts ago, I have had a health challenge this summer that spilled into September, but I am feeling increasingly better, and do hope to post more regularly.

I am again serving as the Acting Chair of African American and African Studies, an enjoyable post, and having undertaken this post once, it is a lot easier and smoother the second time around. On of my favorite aspects of it involves planning events for the upcoming year, and thus far we have several events on the schedule, including the visit of the great Jamaican poet and scholar Edward Baugh on October 31 (it's Halloween, yes, but it worked best for his overall travel plans to the US), and next semester, scholar, poet and performer Rosamond  S. King on February 4 and the Kùlú Mèlé Dance & Drum Ensemble on February 11, 2015.

My course for the fall is my first graduate fiction workshop at Rutgers-Newark; thus far I have only taught undergraduate and graduate literature, reading and writing, and African American studies courses, so it is exciting to again be working directly with the MFA writing students, who are sharp, talented and hard-working. Each will be writing four stories, so I've geared my eyes up for a lot of reading. Our class discussion focus will be on short-story cycles/novels-in-stories/composite novels, so we're perusing stories, chapters and excerpts by a wide range of authors that include Sherwood Anderson, Sandra Cisneros, J. M. Coetzee, Jennifer Egan, Louise Erdrich, Karl Taro Greenfield, Ayana Mathis, David Mitchell, Gloria Naylor, and Nami Mun, to name just a few. It took me a few years to internalize all the novella reading-and-writing, so perhaps a novel-in-stories will be a possibility in the future, who knows?

***

Congratulations are in order to so many colleagues and friends on recent awards. I probably will be missing someone, so forgive me in advance.

Congratulations to my Rutgers-Newark colleague Rigoberto González on winning the Academy of American Poets' 2014 Lenore Marshall Prize for his highly praised and belauded collection Unpeopled Eden (Four Way Books, 2013).

Congratulations to my fellow Dark Room Collective member, Tracy K. Smith, on receiving the Academy of American Poets' 2014 Fellowship in poetry, adding her to a distinguished list of major American poets.

Congratulations to fellow CC poet Terrance Hayes on receiving a 2014 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowship for his acclaimed poetry and future promise.

Congratulations to fellow CC poet Ruth Ellen Kocher on being one of two winners of the 2014 PEN Open Book Award for her collection domina Un/blued (Tupelo Press, 2013); Nina McConaghy also won for her book Cowboys and East Indians (FiveChapters Books).

Congratulations to fellow CC poet Rickey Laurentiis on becoming the newest winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize; his collection Boy with Thorn was selected by Terrance and will be published in 2015 by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

and for two awards in which I had a hand:

Congratulations to poet Ed Pavlić, whose powerful manuscript Let's Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno I selected for the 2014 National Poetry Series, to be published in 2015 by Fence Books.

A belated congratulations to fellow CC poet and Chicagoan Ladan Osman, who received this year's Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets from the African Poetry Book Fund. Her beautiful début collection The Kitchen Dweller's Testimony will be published by the University of Nebraska Press and Amalion Press in Senegal.

Congratulations also to poets Fred Moten and Claudia Rankine for making the National Book Award in Poetry long list! I'm sure there'll be many more congratulations for these and other friends soon!

American Academy of Arts and Letters Ceremonial

I have heard of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which is headquartered in New York City, but until I ventured up to its annual ceremonial, as the guest of a guest (+1 of scholar and critic Dorothy Wang) of a recent prize recipient, I had no idea where it was located or what its programs entailed. To put it simply, it's a big deal, or rather, a big financial deal, as it annually awards many thousands of dollars (this year, I believe I heard the figure in the hundreds of thousands), in prizes and ceremonial awards to artists working in the fields of literature, the visual arts and sculpture, European art music (and perhaps other genres), and architecture. It's an august institution too: a closed honor society of 250 members selected and elected by standing members without outside nomination, it grew out of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, founded in 1898, consisting eventually of 200 members, from which the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a smaller and more elite sub-organization of 50 of the most eminent figures in their fields, emerged in 1904. US President William Howard Taft signed a Congressional act that incorporated the Institute of Arts and Letters in 1907, and the Academy in 1916. In 1976 the two organizations merged, and in 1993, all 250 members merged into one entity now known as the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The seating chart

Who belongs to the American Academy, which operates like an Academie Française only without the single focus on language and with a far broader narrower mandate, at least ideally? The president is architect Henry Cobb, Vice Presidents for Literature include writers Ann Beattie, Yusef Komunyakaa and Tony Kushner, Vice Presidents for Music include composers John Corigliano and John Harbison, the secretary is architect Billie Tsien, and the Treasurer is composer Charles Wuorinen. Members include a number of major scholars and artists, ranging from Daniel Aaron, Edward Albee, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Isabel Allende to Gary Wills, Olly Wilson, Terry Winters, and Ellen Taaffe Zwillich. Every year in the spring, a subset of these members, constituting committees in various fields, award lucrative prizes to selected artists without nomination, and present them at the annual "Ceremonial"--awards ceremony--at the Academy's building at Aububon Terrace, in Washington Heights, across a courtyard from the Hispanic Society of America, and next to what used to be the old headquarters of the national Museum of the American Indian, which is now located at Bowling Green in downtown Manhattan, and which Boricua College has replaced.

The stage, with numbered seats

Having never been to one of these shindigs I had no idea how it operated, but it appears that a certain number of members show up, along with the prize recipients, and are seated in a set order onstage, in order that an annual photograph be taken, and so that family members and friends can figure out who's who if you don't know them by sight. Also, distinguished figures in a given field hand out awards to peers and up-and-comers, so it was the case that Louise Glück, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, gave out awards to many of the literature awardees. There a few awards I'd heard of before, like the Rome Prize, which went to poet Peter Streckfus, and a number of others, including one for distinction on the radio, that went to Ira Glass, who gave one of the best brief speeches I've heard in a while, yet there were many others, with hefty awards attached, that went to creative people I'd never heard of. (No surprise there.) Also unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, as I commented to a friend, critic Dorothy Wang, and later to other writers and artists, very few winners were people of color; I think two black people (one writer, one artist), two asian-americans (both musicians), and a few latinos received awards, but most of the awardees were white, though at least half or more, like the presenters, were women, which is always a positive sign. I'm not sure if the proceedings are always so monochrome, because the membership does appear to be diverse, at least in certain fields, so I hope in other years a wider range of artists, reflecting the rich tapestry of this country, benefit.

Francine Prose and Garrison Keillor

Michael Chabon delivered the Blashfield Address, a smart, sometimes funny lecture that explored the relationship between literature and rock and roll. It even invoked both Bob Dylan, who was slated to receive a major award but could not attend, Frank O'Hara and Rakim, among others. A friend, poet Joanna Klink, received one of the literature awards, and a fiction writer whose first novel unfolds like poetry, Briton Adam Foulds, received a prize given specifically to writers from Britain and Ireland. The highlight of the event was witnessing the awarding of the Gold Medal for Literature, which Paul Auster presented to one of my former and very best professors, E. L. Doctorow. One of the leading contemporary American fiction writers, recipient the National Book Award for Fiction, three National Book Critics Circle Awards for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award, a longtime teacher at New York University and a former professional editor, Doctorow is perhaps best known for his inventive novelistic treatment of the life, trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, titled The Book of Daniel (1971), which pushed him to the front rank of American writers, and for his innovative, controversial novel Ragtime (1975), which later became an acclaimed film and a highly praised musical. Though mainly known for his novels that explore key historical moments through the depiction of society at multiple, overlapping levels, he is also a perceptive, suasive, politically pointed critic, and a superb short fiction writer. His speech, which concluded the event, was succinct and profound, and the perfect ending a ceremony of this type. 

The members, prize recipients and guests assembling

After the awards, there was a tented reception behind the main building, and in an adjoining one, an exhibition of artworks and other materials, including scores, manuscripts, and much more, by award recipients. I did not get an opportunity to offer my congratulations to Doctorow, but I did get to chat briefly with composer T. J. Anderson II and his wife, whom I met aeons ago when the Dark Room hosted and feted him, artist Richard Hunt and late writer Leon Forrest, at the African Meeting House in Boston. I also got an opportunity to say hello to Olly Wilson, another African American composer who ought to be better known. I did not, however, meet Darryl Pinckney, who received one of the literature prizes; I'm a fan of his criticism, so I hope one of these days to meet him in person. Below are some photos from the day.

Nearly full section (l-r) unknown man, dancer Edward Villella, Meryl Streep,
Lydia Davis (speaking with Francine Prose), E. L. Doctorow, Damon Galgut

The stage, filling

The photographer

Posing for the group photo

Louise Glück hugging recipient Joanna Klink

Composer Tania León, announcing awards in music

Meryl Streep, who subbed for Steven Sondheim
and also presented an award to Edward Villella

Artist Njideka Akunyili, receiving her award

Michael Chabon

Author and translator Lydia Davis receiving
the Award of Merit for literature

Ira Glass, receiving his award
and delivering a hilarious speech

Meryl Streep, honoring Edward Villella

Paul Auster, reading his introduction
and citation for E. L. Doctorow
(Garrison Keillor at left, in red tie,
Chuck Close at right, Alison Lurie behind him)

The statue of El Cid, at Audubon Terrace

The exhibition, with the works of
artist Njideka Akunyili on display

In the 157th Street station, Ira Glass, chatting
with Calvin Trillin