From the stage of the Charleston Gaillard Center, a distinguished panel of the Lowcountry’s cultural leaders and influencers will address the challenges of 2020, and aspirations for the future, but with a particular focus on the Lowcountry and its vibrant and important cultural community. Rebirth: Charleston will include the following panelists: internationally acclaimed artist Jonathan Green; Ken Lam, Music Director of the Charleston Symphony since 2015; Nigel Redden, General Director of Spoleto Festival USA, who has been a major contributor to Charleston’s cultural renaissance during his 35-year affiliation with Spoleto; Martha Rivers Ingram, business executive, entrepreneur, philanthropist and patron of the arts; and Grammy Award-winning musician Charlton Singleton, co-founder of the Charleston Jazz Orchestra, founding member of Ranky Tanky, and Artist-in-Residence at the Charleston Gaillard Center. Maura Hogan, the arts critic for The Post & Courier, will moderate the discussion. These speakers have been selected to represent the diverse and vibrant interests of Charleston’s cultural community.

This event will be brought to you with the generous support of The Charleston Gaillard Center, The Gaillard Performance Hall Foundation, and Sen. Tom Taft.

The Arts have been under siege during Covid: theaters, galleries, cinemas, concert halls, and bookshops are closed, festivals cancelled, and swathes of practitioners are out of work. But art is the soul of societies. It helps to keep us connected through the exchange of ideas, encouraging empathy, and providing entertainment, escapism and hope. Is it possible that the arts could not only survive, but emerge from the Covid crisis and recent uprisings stronger than before? Cultural leaders from the US and UK re-imagine the future of their art forms. Kwame Kwei-Armah, Director of the Young Vic theatre in London, Gail Rebuck, Director and former Chair and CEO of Penguin Random House UK, and Sheena Wagstaff, Head of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Met, chaired by Simon Schama, Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University, dare to dream and think afresh.

This event will be brought to you with the generous support of The Charleston Gaillard Center, The Gaillard Performance Hall Foundation, and Sen. Tom Taft.

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Monty Don, Britain’s most treasured horticulturalist and broadcaster, and Sue Stuart-Smith, prominent psychiatrist and psychotherapist, reflect on the life-affirming capacity of gardening and nature to soothe troubled minds in our disturbing world. Sue Stuart-Smith’s The Well Gardened Mind is an inspirational investigation into the effects of gardening and green spaces on our health and well-being. Monty Don’s My Garden World is a personal journey through the natural year. His most recent publication, American Gardens, includes Middleton Place in Charleston, South Carolina.

This event will be brought to you with the generous support of Benjamin and Cindy Lenhardt & the Garden Conservancy’s Lenhardt Education Fund.

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André Aciman, author of the acclaimed novel Call Me by Your Name (adapted into an award-winning film), its recent sequel Find Me, the memoir Out of Egypt, and novels Eight White Nights and Enigma Variations, discusses his influences (it is no coincidence that he is Editor of the Proust Project), connections between his varied books, and his path as a writer from his birth place in Alexandria, Egypt to teaching Comparative Literature at City University, New York. In conversation with Bill Goldstein, author of The World Broke in Two.

This event will be brought to you with the generous support of Samuel Easley and Jason Owen.

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Anne Applebaum, the Pulitzer prize-winning historian (for Gulag: A History) and journalist, analyzes the personal and ideological motives behind the current appeal of populist, nationalist and authoritarian regimes that have swept the world. She discusses her fresh understanding of the dynamics of public life with Elif Shafak, award winning British-Turkish novelist, essayist, freedom of speech campaigner, and TED Global speaker. Shafak’s current book is the powerful and uplifting How To Stay Sane In An Age Of Division.

This event will be brought to you with the generous support of Leigh and John McNairy and James and Pat Marino.

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Robert Skidelsky, eminent biographer of British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), whose ideas continue to reverberate and influence government policies across the world, and Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winning American economist, debate what Keynes might propose in the current climate of international economic turmoil. Can they interpret for our times Keynes’s belief that the political problem of humankind is to combine three things: “economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty?” Moderated by Mary Kaldor, Professor of Global Governance at the London School of Economics.

This event will be brought to you with the generous support of Kay Bachmann in honor of John Bachmann.

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Brit Bennett’s mesmerizing New York Times best-seller, The Vanishing Half, weaves together multiple generations and locations, from Louisiana to California, spanning the 1950s to the 1990s, to track the radically different lives of twin sisters whose paths diverge when one decides to pass as white and the other remains black. She explores the power of race and the price to be paid for changing identity with Sara Collins, author of the prize-winning gothic novel, The Confessions of Frannie Langton.

This event will be brought to you with the generous support of Michael and Sigrid Laughlin.

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Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet, set in an England stalked by a plague that kills the young son of William Shakespeare, won this year’s prestigious Women’s Prize for Fiction in the United Kingdom. A study of bereavement, the novel charts how life is transformed into art: the child at the center of Hamnet is believed to have inspired one of the world’s most famous plays. She discusses the origins of her fascination with Shakespeare’s son with Bernard Cornwell, author of Fools and Mortals, a fictionalized account of the relationship between Shakespeare and his brother.

This event will be brought to you with the generous support of Kathryn Salmanowitz.

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Sandra Newman’s novel, The Heavens, is a mind-expanding and entertaining fantasy set between different worlds and times: a utopian 21st Century New York and plague-ridden Elizabethan England, where the heroine imagines herself to be Emilia, the “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Can she and Will (as in Shakespeare) avert the imminent disaster of September 11, 2001, by the power of creativity? She discusses the inspiration for her bewitching novel with Regina Marler, author or Bloomsbury Pie.

This event will be brought to you with the generous support of Walter and Gerry Fiederowicz.

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Kirk Curnutt, Sarah Churchwell and Petina Gappah compare F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zora Neale Hurston’s portrayal of the American South. F. Scott Fitzgerald is renowned for recording the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age in his novels. Zora Neale Hurston, best known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, chronicled racial struggles in her work. Kirk Curnutt is editor of All of the Belles, Fitzgerald’s Montgomery stories (inspired by his wife Zelda). Sarah Churchwell is author of Murder Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby. Novelist Petina Gappah’s most recent book is Out of Darkness, Shining Light.

This event will be brought to you with the generous support of Dr. Jack Schaeffer & 20 South Battery.

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Claire Tomalin, biographer of Charles Dickens, re-visits the inimitable author’s two trips to America on the 150th anniversary of his death, together with John Mullan, author of The Artful Dickens. Dickens’ travel book, American Notes, resulting from his trips, revealed his love/hate relationship with the continent, including the social reformer’s abhorrence of slavery. Claire Tomalin’s award-winning biographical subjects include Hardy, Pepys and Austen. John Mullan is Professor of English at University College, London.

This event will be brought to you with the generous support of Dr. Ann Maners and Dr. Alex Pappas.

Pre-order John’s book

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Susan Rice, former National Security Advisor to President Obama and former United States Ambassador to the United Nations, recalls pivotal moments from her dynamic career on the front lines of American diplomacy and foreign policy in her unflinching, best-selling memoir Tough Love. “She shares with bracing honesty her challenges with family, motherhood, and leadership in the most demanding of male-dominated fields.” (Former United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright) In conversation with Richard Wolffe, best-selling author, journalist, and digital media and marketing executive.

This event will be brought to you with the generous support of The College of Charleston Alumni Association, Explore Charleston, and Wenda Harris Millard and Jay Millard.

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Kim Darroch, Britain’s ambassador to the United States from January 2016-December 2019, provides a wry, astute and entertaining account of how he managed to fall afoul of both President Trump and Boris Johnson as a result of leaked diplomatic cables and a highly classified letter which outlined his all-too candid assessment of the first six months of the Trump regime. A unique opportunity for behind the scenes insights into the White House of his time. In conversation with Paul Adamson, chairman of Forum Europe and Forum Global, publisher of the online magazine Encompass, and founder of the EU-UK Forum.

This event will be brought to you with the generous support of Bernard and Judy Cornwell.

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Richard Ford, the Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicler of contemporary American life and nuanced relationships between men and women, discusses his writing career and his new collection of short fiction, Sorry for Your Trouble. “ Acutely described settings, pitch-perfect dialogue, inner lives vividly evoked.” (The New York Times Book Review). His novels include Independence Day, The Sportswriter and Canada. In conversation with Geoffrey Harpham, Senior Fellow at Duke University and former President of the National Humanities Center.

This event will be brought to you with the generous support of Orton and Martha Jackson.

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Jenny Offill’s Weather, a novel about modern family life set against the backdrop of the acute anxieties caused by climate change, political fracture, rampant social media, and addiction, is told with beguiling laugh-out-loud humor. “Weather solidifies the author’s place among the vanguard of writers who are reinvigorating literature.” (The Oprah Magazine). She analyzes our contemporary obsessions with one of the smartest recorders of US culture, New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino, author of the dazzling collection of essays Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion.

This event will be brought to you with the generous support of Marion Rivers Cato and Mr. and Mrs. William P. Sanford, Jr.

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Mark Honigsbaum’s The Pandemic Century: A History of Global Contagion from the Spanish Flu to Covid-19, is both a fascinating story of the last hundred years of deadly plagues and a medical thriller. However, are pandemics caused by germs alone? In conversation with Carl Zimmer, author of A Planet of Viruses, he considers whether an understanding of the history of contagion gives us a chance to stop repeating mistakes. Mark Honigsbaum is a medical historian, journalist and author of five books. Carl Zimmer is Adjunct Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University.

This session will be brought you you with the generous support of the Waring Historical Library of the Medical University of South Carolina.

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Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars must be the most accidentally timely novel of the year. Although completed before the current pandemic, it is set in a Dublin maternity ward in 1918 during the Great Flu. Fear and camaraderie combine in a story narrated by a nurse whose experiences mirror those of our current front-line workers. Best known for her international best-seller Room, she discusses her novel with Bill Goldstein, editor of the New York Times books website and book critic for the weekend edition of WNBC’s Today in New York.

This event will be brought to you with the generous support of Bonnie and Peter McCausland & The McCausland Foundation.

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