UPDATE: “The Writers Studio” ended its season on Saturday, with a great conversation with Eric Bogosian.  If you missed the series, hosted by Catherine Cuellar and Randy Gordon, don’t fret. You can still stream or download the interviews right here. Many, many thanks to Thea Temple and her team at Writers Garret, the producers of The Writers Studio. Enjoy!

Art&Seek is excited to once again present “The Writers Studio” on KERA FM. This series of conversations with major authors is brought to us by The Writer’s Garret.  Catherine Cuellar and Randy Gordon are your hosts.

Tune in Saturday at 9 p.m. Here’s the schedule:

• Saturday, March 29, 9pm – 10pm. Jay McInerney.

Jay McInerney. Photo: Marion Ettlinger.

McInerney is best known for the ground-breaking Bright Lights, Big City, which established his reputation as part of “The Brat Pack,” a new generation of writers that included Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz, and others chronicling urban life for young people during the Reagan era. A versatile writer, he also penned the screenplays for the film adaptation of Bright Lights, Big City, and for “Gia,” known as Angelina Jolie’s breakout role. McInerney also edited The Penguin Book of New American Voices and is the author of Ransom, Story of My Life, Brightness Falls, and The Last of the Savages. McInerney’s most recent novel, The Good Life, is described as his “most fully imagined…most ambitious and elegiac” by The New York Review of Books. His latest book, How It Ended, a collection of short stories spanning his entire career, was named one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times.

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The complete list:

BONUS: Richard Price. This episode will be available on ArtandSeek.org on Saturday.

Richard Price

Price is a novelist and screenwriter whose works are critically acclaimed for their stark, realistic look at the urban world. Several of his novels have been adapted for film including The Wanderers, Bloodbrothers, Sea of Love, Mad Dog and Glory, Clockers, and Ransom. In 1986, Price was nominated for an Academy Award for “Best Screenplay” for The Color of Money starring Paul Newman and Tom Cruise. He has also written teleplays for the HBO series The Wire for which he shared an Edgar Allen Poe Award and a Writers Guild of America (WGA) Award. His most recent novel is Lush Life.

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• Saturday, April 5, 9pm – 10pm. Ann Patchett.

Ann Patchett. Photo: Melissa Ann Pinney

Patchett wrote her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, during a residential fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her second novel, Taft, won the 1994 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and her third, The Magician’s Assistant was short-listed for England’s Orange Price and earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her best-selling Bel Canto won the PEN / Faulkner Award and Orange Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and she has written two acclaimed novels since: Run and State of Wonder. In 2011 she purchased a bookstore and has since gone on to be a spokesperson for independent booksellers, talking about books and bookstores on The Colbert Report, NPR, The Martha Stewart Show, and The CBS Early Show. In 2012 she was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.

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• Saturday, April 12, 9pm – 10pm. Robert Olen Butler.

Robert Olen Butler

Butler has published twelve novels and six volumes of short fiction, one of which, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Butler has also published a volume of his lectures on the creative process, From Where You Dream. Among his numerous other awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His stories have appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Playboy, and The Paris Review and been included in such major annual compilations as The Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South. His works have been translated into nineteen languages, and over the past fifteen years he has lectured in universities, and met with writers groups in seventeen different countries as a Literary Envoy for the U. S. State Department.

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• Saturday, April 19, 9pm – 10pm. Jane Smiley.

Jane Smiley. Photo: Jack Canning

Smiley is the best-selling author of 13 works of fiction and three books of nonfiction, including The Age of Grief, The Greenlanders, Ordinary Love and Good Will, Horse Heaven, and the 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres, which was made into a major motion picture starring Michelle Pfeiffer. She has written for magazines such as Vogue, The New Yorker, Practical Horseman, Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine and the New York Times travel section, Victoria, Mirabella, Allure, The Nation and others. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001 and is a three-time O. Henry Prize-winner for short fiction. Her latest novel, Private Life, was chosen as one of the best books of 2010 by The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post.

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• Saturday, April 26, 9pm – 10pm. Marilynne Robinson.

Robinson has been called by the London Times, “The world’s best writer of prose”—a bold statement considering she has written only eight books in nearly thirty years. Her first novel,

Marilynne Robinson. Photo: Nancy Crampton

Housekeeping, came out in 1980 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her next novel, Gilead, arrived 24 years later, and garnered both the Pulitzer AND National Book Critics Circle Award. While uniquely focused on American traditions and way of life, these books bring to light the struggles of everyday humanity, as illustrated in her most recent novel, Home, which received the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is also the author of four nonfiction books, including Mother Country, which was nominated for a National Book Award. In 2012 Robinson received the National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for “her grace and intelligence in writing.”

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• Saturday, May 3, 9pm – 10pm. Eric Bogosian.

Eric Bogosian. Photo: Susan Johann

Bogosian is best known for writing and starring in the play, Talk Radio, as well as its film adaptation. For this work, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and received the Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear Award. He received three Obie awards for solo performances Off-Broadway between 1980 and 2000, and in recent years starred on Broadway in Donald Margulies’ Time Stands Still. Bogosian has written a number of full-length plays including subUrbia, Griller, Red Angel, and Humpty Dumpty. He is the author of three novels, Mall, Wasted Beauty, and Perforated Heart, and a novella, Notes from Underground, which has also been produced multiple times as a play. As an actor, Bogosian has appeared in numerous films and television programs including The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, Ararat, Under Siege II, and Wonderland and worked with many acclaimed directors, including Woody Allen, Robert Altman, and Taylor Hackford.

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