Hour 1
JEANNETTE WALLS is a writer and journalist who rose to prominence as a gossip columnist for MSNBC.com. Her previous book, "The Glass Castle," was a very successful memoir of her family's peripatetic wanderings during her childhood, and stayed on the New York Times Best Seller list for 100 weeks. Her book, "Half Broke Horses," shares another courageous life story, that of Walls' maternal grandmother, who died when Walls was only 8, and left her New Mexico home at 15, riding 500 miles alone on her pony to teach in the frontier town of Red Lake, Ariz. She survived everything from droughts to floods to the Great Depression.

Filed under: author |

Hour 2
Novelist, poet, film-maker and National Book Award-winning writer, our guest Sherman Alexie grew up on an Indian Reservation fifty miles north of Spokane Washington. "War Dances" is Alexie's latest book, a collection of short stories filled with characters dealing with complex issues as wide reaching as a failed marriage, alcoholic death, hate crime, obituary writing and courtship. Alexie has received many awards including the O Henry Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award and the 2007 National Book Award in Young People’s Literature for "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian."

Filed under: author, family issues |