Journalists Marc Steiner and Jessica Phillips

Discussing their Award Winning Series
Just Words: The Stories of Working People in Our Community

October 17, 2008
7:30 pm
Leonardtown Campus
Building A Auditorium

One voice not often heard on the airwaves, if at all, is that of the working poor. Through the radio series Just Words, we hear from gang members, ex-cons, low wage workers, mothers of murdered children, inner city kids, daycare workers, waitresses and more, all from Baltimore. As Executive Producer Marc Steiner notes, Just Words offers “an honest examination of the life of all types of disenfranchised and marginalized people who told their own stories, in their own words. They shared their hopes and fears. They opened their lives and showed what it means to be poor and nameless in America.”

In 2008, the series won the highest award in broadcast journalism: A Peabody Award.

In a time when it is assumed that only flashy images and quick cuts can keep the attention of an audience, Marc Steiner and Series Producer Jessica Phillips show how “just words” can bring listeners to the heart of a situation. Steiner and Phillips will speak about how the program was conceived and created, and what it has to say about media and society. They will address not only the subjects covered by Just Words, but describe how a radio program obtains and conducts interviews and shapes them into an effective narrative.

Student Resources

• Study Guide (PDF, 14 KB)

 

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Iraq War Veteran, Poet Brian Turner

Reading from his award-winning collection of poems
Here, Bullet

November 14, 2008
7:30 pm
La Plata Campus
BI Building, Room 113

A harrowing, beautiful first-person account of the Iraq War by a soldier-poet. Adding his voice to the current debate about the US occupation of Iraq, in poems written in the tradition of such poets as Wilfred Owen, Yusef Komunyakaa (Dien Cai Dau), Bruce Weigl (Song of Napalm) and AJB’s own Doug Anderson (The Moon Reflected Fire), Iraq war veteran Brian Turner writes powerfully affecting poetry of witness, exceptional for its beauty, honesty and skill. Based upon Turner’s year-long tour in Iraq as an infantry team leader, the poems offer gracefully-rendered, unflinching description but, remarkably, leave the reader to draw conclusions or moral lessons. Here, Bullet is a must-read for anyone who cares about the war, regardless of political affiliation.

“The day of the first moonwalk, my father’s college literature professor told his class, ‘Someday they’ll send a poet, and we’ll find out what it’s really like.’ Turner has sent back a dispatch from a place arguably more incomprehensible than the moon—the war in Iraq—and deserves our thanks…”
—The New York Times Book Review

Here, Bullet
If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.

Student Resources

• Study Guide (PDF, 23 KB)

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Friday, December 5, 2008
7:30 pm
La Plata Campus
LR /Building, Room 102
Free

“Connections” Literary Magazine Publication Reading

Local authors and artists read from and discuss their works featured in the latest issue.

• Division of Languages and Literature
• Division of Distance Learning and Faculty Development
• CSM College Store
• Cafe des Artistes