Scripps College announced today its fall public events season that features a series of lively discussions with some of today’s most compelling figures on topics at the heart of America’s public discourse this presidential election year. The fall 2016 Scripps Presents season will feature personalities such as former MSNBC host and race and social justice professor/speaker/author Melissa Harris-Perry; restaurateur, chef, and writer/TV star Eddie Huang, whose book “Fresh Off The Boat” inspired the TV sitcom by the same name; artist and provocateur Molly Crabapple; and hip hop journalist Jeff Chang.
“We anticipate exploring timely issues of race and politics in fascinating and thoughtful ways with the lineup of speakers and public figures we are hosting this fall,” Corrina Lesser, director of public events and community programs at Scripps College, said. “We have journalists and commentators, like Melissa Harris-Perry and Maria Hinojosa, who are talking every day with people whose lives have been profoundly impacted by immigration policy, voting laws, and racial profiling. Hip-hop scholar Jeff Chang is concerned with race in America and his new essay collection, We Gon’ Be Alright, provides powerful perspective on social change and activism,” Lesser added.
Lesser noted that visual artist Molly Crabapple, who has spent time in Guantanamo Bay and the labor camps of Abu Dhabi, will headline an event in early October, and the season will top off with Eddie Huang, who asks questions of identity in his memoir Fresh Off the Boat, which is the inspiration for the hit ABC show and is the first-ever representation of an Asian-American family on mainstream television. Huang is also a foodie, and hosts his own television show Huang’s World on ViceTV.
Tickets to the fall 2016 Scripps Presents season will be available to the general public beginning August 17.
Events take place on the Scripps College campus and are FREE and open to the public. For tickets, information, and directions, visit scrippscollege.edu/scrippspresents or call (909) 607-8508.
Highlights for Scripps Presents Fall Season:
Sister Citizen: A Conversation with Melissa Harris-Perry
Thursday, September 1, 6pm
Garrison Theater
“One of our most trenchant readers of modern black life.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
When it comes to race and politics, there are few as incisive as Melissa Harris-Perry. Moving effortlessly from Beyoncé to Black Lives Matter, feminism to Flint, Michigan, the former MSNBC host, editor-at-large at ELLE.com, and BET correspondent brings her insightful and provocative cultural critique to the Scripps Presents stage.
Melissa Harris-Perry is the Maya Angelou Presidential Chair, the executive director of the Pro Humanitate Institute, dedicated to exploring social justice in a global and local context, and the founding director of the Anna Julia Cooper Center, focused on the intersections of gender, race, and place, at Wake Forest University.
This program is presented in partnership with SCORE (Scripps Communities of Resources and Empowerment), Scripps 360: The First Year Experience at Scripps College, and the Laspa Center for Leadership. This program is made possible by the Alexa Fullerton Hampton ’42 Endowed Speaker Fund.
Levitt on the Lawn: The Leftover Cuties
Saturday, September 9, 6:30pm
Bowling Green
“Jazz-pop that’s sweet as pie, but strong as whiskey.” —Buzzbands.la
Featuring the sultry vocals and lilting ukulele of Shirli McAllen, this Los Angeles–based quartet is beloved for its retro-infused tunes backed by upright bass, horns, and the occasional accordion. Picnic on the lawn with local food truck fare and end-of-summertime treats and then make your way to the dance floor.
This program is part of an ongoing series supported by Levitt Pavilions and Elizabeth Levitt Hirsch ’74.
Substitute: In the Classroom with Nicholson Baker
Wednesday, September 14, 6pm
Balch Auditorium
“A gripping and indispensable time-capsule of teaching and learning in the 21st century.” —Publishers Weekly
Whether in fiction or non, Nicholson Baker’s varied but genuine obsessions—music, newspapers, literature, familial dynamics, video game culture—find their way into his smart, deft, and hilarious prose. In Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids, he turns his eye to public education, detailing his spring as a substitute teacher. Writer and Pomona faculty member Jonathan Lethem joins him for a deconstruction of one of our most essential, and problematic, institutions.
Nicholson Baker is the author of 10 novels and five works of nonfiction, including The Anthologist, The Mezzanine, and Human Smoke. He has won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Hermann Hesse Prize, and a Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Maine with his wife, Margaret Brentano; both his children went to Maine public schools.
Celebrated for his novels, short stories, and essays, Jonathan Lethem is recognized today as one of America’s foremost contemporary writers. His works include nine novels, five short-story collections, six nonfiction books and an array of essays published in such publications as Rolling Stone, Harper’s, and The New Yorker. His novel Motherless Brooklyn was named Novel of the Year by Esquire magazine and won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Salon Book Award as well as the Macallan Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005.
We Gon’ Be Alright: Jeff Chang
Thursday, September 15, 6pm
Garrison Theater
“His issues are our issues: this changing America, this complicated, polyglot future that some are already living in, while some are fighting to tear apart.” ―Novelist Daniel Alarcón
For Jeff Chang, the need to address racial violence in America is an urgent necessity. In We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation, the author of the seminal history of hip-hop, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, and Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post–Civil Rights America, delivers a poignant plea, an invocation for hope, and a thoughtful reflection on how activists and social media have emerged as the greatest catalysts for protest and, ultimately, change. USC’s Josh Kun, editor of Black and Brown Los Angeles, joins him for a conversation.
Jeff Chang has been a hip-hop journalist for more than a decade and has written for The San Francisco Chronicle, The Village Voice, Vibe, The Nation, URB, Rap Pages, Spin, and Mother Jones. He was a founding editor of Colorlines Magazine, senior editor at Russell Simmons’s 360hiphop.com, and cofounder of the influential hip-hip label SoleSides, now Quannum Projects. He lives in California.
Josh Kun is professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, where he is director of the Popular Music Project of the Norman Lear Center. He is an author and editor of several books, including Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America, Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border, and Songs in the Key of Los Angeles.
This program is presented in partnership with Scripps 360: The First Year Experience at Scripps College.
Owning Your Voice: Latino USA’s Maria Hinojosa in Conversation
Tuesday, October 4, 6pm
Garrison Theater
From the Puerto Rican comic book hero La Borinqueña to George Takei’s take on exactly who is an American today, the NPR radio program “Latino USA,” delves into the perspectives that are often overlooked by traditional media. For the past 25 years, Maria Hinojosa has been the inquisitive mind and sage interlocutor behind these explorations. Hinojosa visits Scripps to reflect on the 2016 election and a career in media dedicated to diverse and revelatory storytelling. Alex Cohen of Southern California Public Radio will interview Hinojosa.
This program is presented in partnership with Scripps 360: The First Year Experience at Scripps College, the Laspa Center for Leadership. This program is made possible by the Alexa Fullerton Hampton ’42 Endowed Speaker Fund.
Drawing Blood: Molly Crabapple
Thursday, October 6, 7pm
Garrison Theater
“A punk Joan Didion, a young Patti Smith with paint on her hands, a twenty-first century Sylvia Plath.” —Booklist
Art, sex, politics, and survival in our times: For Molly Crabapple, this has been her life’s work. And it’s taken her from New York City’s burlesque scene, to the torture trials in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the Occupy protests on Wall Street. In her memoir, Drawing Blood, she explores the role of the contemporary artist, all the while reflecting on the particular and very real challenges of being a woman in a medium (and a society) where men and their work are often privileged.
Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer. She is a contributing editor for Vice and has written for the New York Times, the Paris Review, and the Guardian, among other publications. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. She lives in New York City.
This program is presented in partnership with the Scripps College Humanities Institute.
Bessie Bartlett Frankel Concert: Ensemble Dal Niente
Wednesday, October 29, 8pm
Garrison Theater
“A superb contemporary-music collective.” —New York Times
Adventurous and ambitious, Ensemble Dal Niente’s take on new music is redefining listeners’ aural experience and pushing the art form in unexpected directions. The Chicago-based contemporary music collective will bring its 13-musician ensemble to Scripps to perform a punk-inspired, cutting-edge experimental program that celebrates four of the most innovative composers working today, including Deerhoof.
Noted for its presentation of “bracing sonic adventures” (Chicago Tribune), Ensemble Dal Niente aims to drive musical discourse with adventurous projects that exhibit an ambitious range of aesthetic values tied to contemporary life and culture. The ensemble presents repertoire in various configurations with relentless attention to interpretation. Recent projects include a collaboration with Deerhoof and Marcos Balter; a tour of Latin American countries; performances and recordings of works by George Lewis; an East Coast tour of German music; and their annual “Hard Music, Hard Liquor” and “Party” series.
This program is presented in partnership with the Bessie Bartlett Frankel Chamber Music Festival, the Scripps College Department of Music, J.C. Harper Lecture Funds, and the Joint Music Program of CMC, HMC, Pitzer, and Scripps.
Eddie Huang
Thursday, November 3, 6pm
Garrison Theater
“Huang is determined to tease out the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which Asian Americans give up parts of themselves in order to move forward.” —The New Yorker
Restaurateur, chef, and writer Eddie Huang’s memoir, Fresh Off the Boat, was a rowdy and hilarious take on race and assimilation in America. It also became the first program on a major network to feature an Asian American family. For Huang, all this success raised a question: “How Chinese am I?” His quest to find the answer is at the heart of his latest memoir, Double Cup Love.
Eddie Huang is the proprietor of Baohaus, a restaurant in New York City. He’s also the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Fresh Off the Boat (now an ABC sitcom) and the host of Huang’s World on ViceTV.
This program is presented in partnership with Scripps 360: The First Year Experience at Scripps College. It is made possible by the Alexa Fullerton Hampton ’42 Endowed Speaker Fund.