Thalia Book Club: Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird 50th Anniversary Celebration

Authors and actors including Stephen Colbert, Libba Bray (award winning young-adult novelist Going Bovine, winner of 2010 Printz Award), Oskar Eustis (Artistic Director at The Public Theater), Kurt Andersen (novelist and Studio 360 Host), Jayne Anne Phillips (novelist and National Book Award finalist Lark & Termite), filmmaker Mary McDonagh Murphy (author of the upcoming book Scout, Atticus, and Boo), and others pay tribute to the Pulitzer prize-winning classic novel about racial injustice and loss of innocence in a small Southern town. One of the most taught -- and frequently challenged -- books of the last 50 years, the book was voted the best novel of the twentieth century by librarians. The evening includes readings, discussion and audience Q&A.



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Performance playlist:

Kurt Andersen, Libba Bray, Stephen Colbert, Oskar Eustis, Mary McDonagh Murphy, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Isaiah Sheffer
Readings and Conversation
A Discussion with the Audience

Kurt Andersen is the author of the novels Heyday, winner of the 2007 Langum Prize in American Historical Fiction, and Turn of the Century. Last year he published Reset, a book-length essay on possible positive change following the financial crisis. In addition to writing, Andersen co-created and hosts Studio 360, the Peabody Award-winning cultural magazine show produced by Public Radio International and WNYC. As an editor, he co-founded the independent magazine SPY, which was nominated for two National Magazine Awards; served as editor-in-chief of New York; co-founded Inside, an online and print publication covering the media and entertainment industries; and oversaw the 2004 re-launch of Colors magazine.

Libba Bray is the author of such young adult novels as A Great and Terrible Beauty, Rebel Angels, The Sweet Far Thing, Kari, and Going Bovine, the winner of the 2010 Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. Visit her on the web at libbabray.com.

Stephen Colbert is the host and executive producer of the Emmy-nominated Comedy Central series, The Colbert Report. He was a member of Chicago’s Second City improv comedy troupe with Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello. The three have developed two separate series for Comedy Central: Exit 57, and Comedy Central’s first live action series, Strangers with Candy. Colbert has written for numerous television shows, including, Saturday Night Live and the Peabody Award-winning The Daily Show, for which he also served as a correspondent. His first book, I Am America (And So Can You!), debuted at #1 on The New York Times Bestseller List. Most recently, he voiced President Hathaway in DreamWorks’s Monsters vs. Aliens.

Oskar Eustis is the artistic director at the Public Theater and has worked as a director, dramaturge, and artistic director for theaters around the country including Eureka Theater Company in San Francisco and Trinity Rep in Providence, Rhode Island. He directed the premieres of Rinne Groff’s The Ruby Sunrise; Paula Vogel’s The Long Christmas Ride Home, which won an Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Production; Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Part I: Millenium Approaches, for which he won an Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Director; as well as Angels in America, Part II: Perestroika. In addition to his duties at the Public, Eustis serves as a professor of Dramatic Writing and Arts and Public Policy at New York University.

Harper Lee was born and continues to live in Monroeville, Alabama. She studied law at the University of Alabama and Oxford University, Wellington Square, but did not finish her studies, moving instead to New York to pursue a literary career. Lee worked as an airline reservation clerk during the 1950s. Then in 1959 she accompanied childhood friend, Truman Capote, to Holcomb, Kansas as a research assistant for his “nonfiction novel,” In Cold Blood. To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee’s first, and so far only, novel was awarded the 1961 Pulitzer Prize among other numerous awards, and has been translated into more than forty languages. In 2007, Lee was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Mary McDonagh Murphy is an independent writer, director, and producer. Most recently, she wrote Scout, Atticus, and Boo: a Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird, a book of interviews to be published in June, and she completed, Hey, Boo: Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird, a documentary film about the impact of the book, coming out this summer. Murphy is the recipient of six Emmy awards. Her documentaries include Digital Days, Before Your Eyes, and Cry for Help, which aired nationally on PBS. She spent 20 years as a producer at CBS News, and her writing has appeared in New York magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and other publications. She lives in Scarborough, New York.

Jayne Anne Phillips was born and raised in West Virginia. She is the author the story collections Black Tickets, winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, and Fast Lanes, as well as the novels Machine Dreams, Shelter, Motherhood, and most recently Lark and Termite, finalist for the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, Granta, Doubletake, and the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction among others. Currently she serves as a professor of English and the director of the Rutgers-Newark Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program.

Isaiah Sheffer is a founder and the artistic director of Symphony Space, as well as host and director of Selected Shorts live at Symphony Space, on tour and on public radio nationwide. He is also a co-creator of The Thalia Follies political cabaret.