Francesca Wade – joyous winner of the BIO Plutarch Award
Friday, May 29, 2026 - 2:30 p.m. - CUNY Graduate Center Auditorium - Her surprise was electric and her victory well-deserved. It was my pride and privilege to capture, from the first row, the captivating moment when -- to gasps of appreciation throughout the crowded...
Publisher & Artistic Director Phong H. Bui expressing his “cosmic optimism” to the delighted Charles Simonds…
..during the celebratory (and, as it soon transpired, serendipitous) party for the release of the May 2026 issue of The Brooklyn Rail at 15 Orient Gallery, on the third floor of 72 Walker Street in Tribeca. Phong took the occasion to "introduce" me to Charles;...
Melding two great dance companies to unleash one epic work by Anna Sokolow
11:30 a.m., Friday, April 24, 2026 - in the ninth floor studio of Ballet Hispanico on West 89th Street - bearing witness to a transcendent offering, ODES by Anna Sokolow (Tel Aviv Lyric Theatre 1964, with music by A.U.Boskovich; Juilliard Concert Hall,1965, with music...
Graham100 GALA @ The New York Public Library Celeste Bartos Forum – April 17, 2026
What an inspiration! - to witness and applaud the All-City Panorama set by Teens @ Graham Director Amelie Benard - a magnificently energized testimony to the Martha Graham Company's future-facing legacy on the eve of the Centennial - a pivotal look - back at the...
William Carlos Williams, MD, delivered three thousand babies. I finally met one of them.
Thursday evening, February 26, 2026, The Black Box Theatre, Columbia High School, Maplewood. I was introducing myself to the audience for my talk on William Carlos Williams, the first in a series called In, Around, About...Essex County 2026, presented by the South...
“It is difficult/to get the news from poems” – a lesson from William Carlos Williams
On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs - by Renee Nicole (Macklin) Good i want back my rocking chairs, solipsist sunsets, & coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches. i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores...
Amanda Seyfried’s Testament (2025) & Doris Humphrey’s The Shakers (1930)
Thrilled at all the well-deserved attention for director Mona Fastvold's sensational new film, The Testament of Ann Lee, starring the luminous and daring Amanda Seyfried, her frenzied devotional swirlings bringing an 18th century religious icon to life -- in the same...
Richard Serra @ Gagosian – Meditations on the Monumental
Thursday afternoon - December 4 - Gagosian - 522 West 21st Street - NYC. I've lost track of the number of times I have seen the work of Richard Serra. One memory leaps to mind: A sunny afternoon in May, 2007, I am walking east from Sixth Avenue along 54th Street when...
In memory of ARCADIA at Montclair State University. November 18-21, 2009
November 29, 2025 - Recalling with melancholy and exultation the life and works of Tom Stoppard, who died today, I thought of the production of ARCADIA that the Department of Theatre & Dance presented sixteen years ago at Montclair State University, directed by...
Christian Boltanski at the Jewish Museum – “seeing my work…somebody that I don’t know…is going to be sad for two minutes…”
...and indeed, emerging from the elevator at the Jewish Museum in NYC at mid-day on Friday, November 14, 2025, I came face to face with this striking piece by Christian Boltanski (1944-2021) -- an artist I have admired over four decades for his elegaic, memory-laden...
MG at the Salmagundi Club – Fifth Ave – NYC
Wednesday evening, October 22, 2025 - On the occasion of the third anniversary of the publication of MARTHA GRAHAM - WHEN DANCE BECAME MODERN what a delight to speak at the venerable Salmagundi Club/Coffee House, in animated conversation with my editor at Knopf,...
PRIDE AND PLEASURE in many ways at the Morristown Festival of Books
Saturday, October 11. 2025, mid-day. My bemused friend and literary comrade Amanda Vaill is seen here poised to sign copies of her new book, Pride and Pleasure - The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution at the Morristown (N.J.) Festival of Books, where she was a...