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Encounters at the Heart of the World

Elizabeth Fenn

While most Americans know Native American tribes like the Lakota or Cherokee, the Mandan are less well known. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book Encounters at the Heart of the World, historian Elizabeth Fenn recounts the story of the Plains Mandan tribe as they rose to a population of 12,000, before being nearly wiped out in a few short years. Fenn turns to untraditional sources from archeology to climatology to tell a history that supposedly couldn’t be written.

28 mins

The Wondrous Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz

“The half-life of love is forever,” writes Yunior, the serial-cheater protagonist of Junot Díaz’s This Is How You Lose Her. In this special episode, we talk with the Pulitzer Prize winning author about love, loss, and his New Jersey childhood. Díaz’s characters are not perfect people—they’re nerds, outsiders, and antiheroes–but their stories are written to perfection.

24 mins
Audio for this episode will be available November 25, 2017. This program is funded in part by the Pulitzer Prize Centennial Campfires Initiative, which seeks to focus on journalism and the humanities, to imagine their future and to inspire new generations to consider the values represented by Pulitzer Prize-winning work. For their generous support for the Campfires Initiative, we thank the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Pulitzer Prize Board, and Columbia University.

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