Sam Weller (@Sam__Weller) is the two-time Bram Stoker Award-winning biographer of Ray Bradbury. He worked with Bradbury for 12 years. Weller’s latest, Dark Black, is a collection of 20 Gothic short stories. He teaches in the English Department at Columbia College Chicago.

Sam Weller

Ray Bradbury and the Last Global Pandemic

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

Dana Gioia is an award-winning poet. Former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia is a native Californian of Italian and Mexican descent. He received a B.A. and a M.B.A. from Stanford University and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. In 2015 Gioia was appointed the State Poet Laureate of California by Governor Jerry Brown. Gioia has published five full-length collections of poetry, most recently <a href="http://danagioia.com/book/99-poems-new-selected/">99 Poems: New &amp; Selected</a>. His poetry collection, <a href="http://danagioia.com/wp/book/interrogations-at-noon/">Interrogations at Noon</a>, won the 2002 American Book Award. An influential critic as well, Gioia’s 1991 volume <a href="http://danagioia.com/wp/book/can-poetry-matter-essays-on-poetry-and-american-culture/">Can Poetry Matter?</a>, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, is credited with helping to revive the role of poetry in American public culture. In 2014 he won the Aiken-Taylor Award for lifetime achievement in American poetry. Gioia’s many literary anthologies include Twentieth-Century American Poetry, 100 Great Poets of the English Language, The Longman Anthology of Short Fiction, Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing, and Literature for Life. His poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared in many magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, and The Hudson Review. Gioia has written three opera libretti and is an active translator of poetry from Latin, Italian, and German. In 2011 Gioia became the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California where he teaches each fall semester. In 2015 Gioia was appointed the State Poet Laureate of California by Governor Jerry Brown.

Dana Gioia

Ray Bradbury at 100: A Conversation Between Sam Weller and Dana Gioia

"The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it." — Frank Herbert

The Intuitive Thing: Ray Bradbury on the Arts

"Art is making something out of nothing and selling it." — Frank Zappa

Art &amp; Architecture

Sam Weller (@Sam__Weller) is the two-time Bram Stoker Award-winning biographer of Ray Bradbury. He worked with Bradbury for 12 years. Weller’s latest, Dark Black, is a collection of 20 Gothic short stories. He teaches in the English Department at Columbia College Chicago.