Forum Network

Robert Pinsky is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of which are collections of his own poetry. His published work also includes critically acclaimed translations, including a collection of poems by Czesław Miłosz and Dante Alighieri. He teaches at Boston University and is the poetry editor at Slate. Photo credit to Michelle DeBakey.

Richard Geldard holds his doctorate in dramatic literature and classics from Standford University and was previously an adjunct professor of philosophy at Yeshiva University. Some of his most recent titles are *Remembering Heraclitus*, *Traveler's Key to Ancient Greece*, and *God in Concord*.

**Eric Jackson** began hosting a weekly radio show on WGBH 89.7 in the fall of 1975. Since 1981, he has been the host of *Jazz with Eric in the Evening*, the region's most respected jazz program.

Frederick Ilchman is the Mrs. Russell Baker Assistant Curator of Paintings in the Art of Europe department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He began his curatorial career at the MFA in 2001, following five years living in Venice, with his research supported by a Fulbright fellowship and grants from the Metropolitan Museum and Save Venice Inc. His specialty is Italian Renaissance painting, specifically Tintoretto and his contemporaries. He was part of the curatorial team responsible for the Museo del Pradoís Tintoretto exhibition in 2007 in Madrid and a contributor to its catalogue.

Francis Bok is a refugee from Sudan and a survivor of child slavery. At the age of seven, he was captured and enslaved during an Arab militia raid on the village of Nymlal in Southern Sudan. Bok saw adults and children brutalized and killed all around him. He was strapped to a donkey and taken north to Kirio. For ten years, he lived as the family slave to Giema Abdullah, forced to sleep with cattle, endure daily beatings, and eat rotten food. Called "abeed" (black slave), Bok was given an Arabic name Dut Giema Abdullah and forced to perform Islamic prayers. In 2000, Mr. Bok spoke out for the first time at a Capitol Hill ceremony with senators and congressmen, sharing his message: "We cannot rest until my people are free." Soon after, at the Boston Freedom Award ceremony, Bok spoke alongside Coretta Scott King, widow the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On September 28, 2000, Bok became the first escaped slave to testify before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in hearings that were broadcast live on C-SPAN. Bok has spoken to tens of thousands at colleges, faith communities and grassroots organizations across the country, including heading a panel on slavery at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government ARCO Forum. He has been featured on the front page of *The Wall Street Journal*, in *The New York Times* and *Essence *magazine and by dozens of other newspapers, radio, and television shows, including National Public Radio and Black Entertainment Television. Bok launched the website iAbolish.com while appearing on stage before an audience of 40,000 with the band Jane's Addiction. He has been honored by the Boston Celtics as a "Hero Among Us" for community service, and in December 2001 he carried the Winter Olympic Torch on its national relay tour. His autobiography, *Escape From Slavery* received outstanding reviews from *Publisher's Weekly*, *The Boston Globe* and the *San Francisco Chronicle*.

Diane Ravitch is Research Professor of Education at NYU. She is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. Ravitch shares a blog called Bridging Differences with Deborah Meier, hosted by Education Week. She also blogs occasionally for Forbes.com and Huffingtonpost.com. Her articles have appeared in many newspapers and magazines.

Erica E. Hirshler is Croll Senior Curator of Paintings, Art of the Americas, at the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston.

Tina Howe is an American playwright best known for her plays Painting Churches and Coastal Disturbances. The latter received a Tony Award nomination for best play in 1987. She has received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a Rockefeller grant, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a Guggenheim fellowship. She currently teaches playwrighting at Hunter College in New York City and has been a member of the council of The Dramatists Guild of America since 1990.

Richard Rodriguez was born on July 31, 1944, in San Francisco, California, to Mexican immigrants Leopoldo and Victoria Moran Rodriguez, the third of their four children. When Rodriguez was still a young child, the family moved to Sacramento, California, to a small house in a comfortable white neighborhood. Optimism and ambition led them to a house many blocks from the Mexican side of town. He is the author of *Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez*, his well-received 1981 autobiography. Rodriguez, who could barely speak English when he started elementary school, finished his academic efforts as a Fulbright scholar in Renaissance literature with degrees from Stanford University and Columbia University. Perched on the edge of a brilliant career in academia, but uncomfortable with what he viewed as the unwarranted advantage given him by affirmative action, Rodriguez refused a number of teaching jobs at prestigious universities. He felt that receiving preference and assistance based on his classification as a minority was unfair to others. This dramatic decision, along with a number of anti-affirmative action essays published in the early to mid-1970s, made Rodriguez a somewhat notorious national figure. After leaving academia, Rodriguez spent the next six years writing the essays that comprise *Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez*, aided for part of that time by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Before being compiled into book form, many of the essays appeared in publications such as *Columbia Forum*, *American Scholar*, and *College English*. Since 1981, Rodriguez has continued his writing career, occasionally serving as an essayist for the PBS series *MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour* and also working as an editor with the Pacific News Service in California. In 1992, he published *Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father*, another collection of previously issued autobiographical essays. The book, which did not receive the same acclaim and admiration as his first book, covers such topics as Rodriguez's Mexican and Indian heritage, his homosexuality, and the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco.