CDS auditorium before Roger Hodge's talk in 2009. Photograph by Christopher Sims.

documentary narrative speaker series: roger hodge (march 5), rebecca skloot (march 24), and wells tower (april 23)
Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University

DIRECTIONS: http://cds.aas.duke.edu/about/here.html
All events held at CDS unless otherwise noted.

The Documentary Narrative Speaker Series is presented in conjunction with the CDS course Documentary Writing, taught this spring by Duncan Murrell. The course, along with this speaker series, explores reporting and writing in the long-form documentary tradition.

friday, march 5, 7 p.m.
“my rise and fall: roger hodge on the state of magazines”
Center for Documentary Studies Auditorium
Roger Hodge, until recently the editor of Harper’s Magazine, will discuss the prospects of long-form journalism into the future as he recounts his experiences working with writers and offers his perspectives on the shifting landscape in the publishing industry.

Hodge began his journalism career as a freelance writer in 1989. After a lengthy detour through the thickets of academic philosophy, Hodge was hired by Harper’s Magazine as a fact checker in 1996. He joined the magazine’s acclaimed Readings section in 1997 and edited the section from 1999 to 2003. Under his leadership the Readings section strengthened its political and literary focus while continuing to publish outrageous comic and historically significant primary documents, as well as a judicious selection of the best poems and essays to be found in the little magazines and forthcoming books. Hodge also brought a new emphasis on contemporary art to the magazine, and came to treat the artwork published in each issue of the Readings section as a carefully curated exhibit of paintings and photographs drawn from galleries all around the world. In December 2000 Hodge orchestrated the relaunch of the magazine’s website, Harpers.org, and created the popular “Weekly Review,” a deadpan satire of the twenty-four hour news feed. In the fall of 2003 Hodge left the Readings section to devote more of his attention to long-form journalism. In December 2003 he oversaw another radical redesign of Harpers.org; that month he also began writing a monthly print column, “Findings,” a sardonic portrait of recent medical, scientific, and environmental developments. Hodge was named Deputy Editor of the magazine in November 2004 and became Editor in April 2006.

Hodge was born in 1967 and raised in Del Rio, Texas, where his family has been in the ranching business for five generations. He attended the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and eventually made his way to New York City in pursuit of a Ph.D. in philosophy at The New School for Social Research. Hodge received a master’s degree for a thesis on the logic of Aristotle’s metaphysics but abandoned his dissertation on Spinoza’s theory of freedom to work at Harper’s Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and their two sons.

wednesday, march 24, 5:30 p.m. (off-site)
“henrietta lacks and current issues in medical ethics”
The 2010 Crown Lecture in Ethics by Rebecca Skloot
Presented by the Sanford School of Public Policy
fleishman commons, sanford building, west campus

Award-winning writer Rebecca Skloot will talk about her just-published book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Skloot became fascinated with the story of Henrietta Lacks in high school, and spent ten years researching what happened.

In 1951, Lacks died of cervical cancer, but cells from her tissue biopsy, taken without her knowledge, still live. The cells, known as HeLa, are one of the most important tools in medical research, vital to the development of the polio vaccine, cancer research, in vitro fertilization, and gene mapping. Yet, for twenty-five years her family knew nothing about Henrietta’s immortality. HeLa cells launched a multimillion-dollar industry in the sale of human biological material, but Henrietta’s family never saw any of the profits and still struggles to afford medical care.

In her reporting, Skloot traveled from state-of-the-art research labs to the tobacco fields of Virginia where Henrietta, a descendant of slaves and the mother of five children, had lived. In her dealings with the Lacks family, especially Henrietta’s youngest daughter, Deborah, Skloot faced her own ethical issues as a writer.

Skoot’s articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine; O, The Oprah Magazine; Discover; and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor for Popular Science magazine and has been a correspondent for NPR and PBS. A former vice president of the National Book Critics Circle, she is on the faculty at the University of Memphis, where she teaches creative nonfiction.

read more: http://sanford.duke.edu/events/inaugural/special/news/lecture_skloot.php

friday, april 23, 7 p.m.
“truth out of artifice: a talk with wells tower”
Center for Documentary Studies Auditorium
Wells Tower, author of the much-acclaimed book of short stories Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned and many other stories and articles, will discuss his development as a writer and especially the affinities between fiction and nonfiction. The conversation will be moderated by Alexa Dilworth, publishing director at the Center for Documentary Studies.

Writing in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani proclaimed: “This arresting debut collection of stories decisively establishes Mr. Tower — a magazine journalist who has also won two Pushcart Prizes — as a writer of uncommon talent, a writer with Sam Shepard’s radar for the violent, surreal convolutions of American society; Frederick Barthelme’s keen ear for contemporary slang; and David Foster Wallace’s eye for the often hilarious absurdities of contemporary life.

Wells Tower’s short stories and journalism have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, The Washington Post Magazine, and elsewhere. He received two Pushcart Prizes and the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review. He divides his time between Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Brooklyn, New York.

read more: http://us.macmillan.com/everythingravagedeverythingburned