Anna Deavere Smith, the award-winning playwright and actor, has spent a lifetime listening—really listening—to the people around her. As a child in the segregated Baltimore of the early 1960s, Smith absorbed the words of her parents, teachers, neighbors—even train conductors—and realized that there was something more being communicated than the actual words: The conductor's voice had a mild kind of grandeur that was a cousin to the vocal tones I had heard at funerals—"Ashes-to-ashes"—and at christenings and weddings. These are words that have been said many times, but the person who speaks them understands that each time it must be said as if it matters, because it does matter. We never know what lies ahead, and we never know what just happened, and all words must house respect of those two unknowns. In Talk to Me, Smith looks back at a singular career as a seeker and interpreter of language in America, revealing the methodology behind her extraordinary search for the truth and nuances of verbal communication. For thirty years, the defining thesis of Smith's work has been that how we speak is just as important in communicating truth and identity as what we say. Everything from individual vocal tone to grammar, Smith demonstrates, can be as identifiable and revealing as a fingerprint. Her journey has taken her from the rarefied bastions of academia to riot-torn streets; she has conducted hundreds of interviews with subjects ranging from women prisoners to presidents of the United States. In 1995, her ongoing investigation led her to Washington, D.C. After all, what better place to wage an inquiry into the power of language and the language of power than in the city where "message" is a manufactured product? What happens when we as citizens accept—which we seem to be doing more and more—our chosen leaders' failure to tell the truth? And how can we know that we are hearing what Washington really has to say when everything we receive is filtered through the media? Armed with a blazing intellect and a tape recorder, Smith tackled these questions head-on, conducting more than four hundred interviews with people both inside and outside the power structure of Washington. She recorded these sessions in her trademark verbatim transcripts, which include every tic and verbal utterance of her subjects. More than thirty of these remarkable documents appear in this book, including interviews with Bill Clinton, Anita Hill, Studs Terkel, George Bush, Mike McCurry, and Helen Thomas. After five years of searing investigation into the world of the politicians, spin doctors, and power brokers who are steering the course of our country from inside the beltway, Smith has come away with a revelatory assessment—by turns devastating and hopeful—of the lexicon of power and politics in America. Talk to Me is a landmark contribution from a woman whose pioneering insights into language speak volumes.

Talk to Me: Listening Between the Lines

Biographies & Memoirs

Smith, Anna Deavere

Leaders & Notable People

Random House]

Derived from interviews with a wide range of people who experienced or observed New York's 1991 Crown Heights racial riots, Fires In The Mirror is as distinguished a work of commentary on black-white tensions as it is a work of drama. In August 1991 simmering tensions in the racially polarized Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood of Crown Heights exploded into riots after a black boy was killed by a car in a rabbi's motorcade and a Jewish student was slain by blacks in retaliation. Fires in the Mirror is dramatist Anna Deavere Smith's stunning exploration of the events and emotions leading up to and following the Crown Heights conflict. Through her portrayals of more than two dozen Crown eights adversaries, victims, and eyewitnesses, using verbatim excerpts from their observations derived from interviews she conducted, Smith provides a brilliant, Rashoman-like documentary portrait of contemporary ethnic turmoil.

Fires in the Mirror

Humor & Entertainment

Anchor

The author's latest work of documentary theater uses the words of people who experienced the Los Angeles riots to show a city in turmoil

Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

Literature & Fiction

Dramas & Plays

DOUBLEDAY

From acclaimed playwright Anna Deavere Smith, a captivating work of dramatic literature and a unique first-person portrait of a pivotal moment in American history: the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Twilight is a stunning work of "documentary theater" that explores the devastating human impact of the five days of riots following the Rodney King verdict. From nine months of interviews with more than two hundred people, Smith has chosen the voices that best reflect the diversity and tension of a city in turmoil: a disabled Korean man, a white male Hollywood talent agent, a Panamanian immigrant mother, a teenage black gang member, a macho Mexican-American artist, Rodney King's aunt, beaten truck driver Reginald Denny, former Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates, and other witnesses, participants, and victims. A work that goes directly to the heart of the issues of race and class, Twilight ruthlessly probes the language and the lives of its subjects, offering stark insight into the complex and pressing social, economic, and political issues that fueled the flames in the wake of the Rodney King verdict and ignited a conversation about policing and race that continues today.

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Vintage

Anna Deveare Smith's award-winning one-woman shows were borne of her uniquely brilliant ability to listen. In Talk to Me she applies her rare talent to the language of political power in America. Believing that character and language are inextricably bound, Smith sets out to discern the essence of America by listening to its people and trying to capture its politics. To that end she travels to some of America's most conspicuous places, like the presidential conventions of 1996, and some of its darkest corners, like a women's prison in Maryland. And along the way she interviews everyone from janitors to murderers to Bill Clinton himself. Memoir, social commentary, meditation on language, this book is as vastly ambitious as it is compellingly unique.

Talk to Me: Travels in Media and Politics

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Anna Deavere Smith’s extraordinary form of documentary theater shines a light on injustices by portraying the real-life people who have experienced them. In Notes from the Field, she renders a host of figures who have lived and fought the system that pushes students of color out of the classroom and into prisons. (As Smith has put it: “Rich kids get mischief, poor kids get pathologized and incarcerated.”) Using people’s own words, culled from interviews and speeches, Smith depicts Rev. Jamal Harrison Bryant, who eulogized Freddie Gray; Niya Kenny, a high school student who confronted a violent police deputy; activist Bree Newsome, who took the Confederate flag down from the South Carolina State House grounds; and many others. Their voices bear powerful witness to a great iniquity of our time—and call us to action with their accounts of resistance and hope.

Notes from the Field

Derived from interviews with a wide range of people who experienced or observed New York's 1991 Crown Heights racial riots, Fires In The Mirror is as distinguished a work of commentary on current Black-White tensions as it is a work of drama.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Random House Audio |

This drama was originally written to be performed by one but flexible casting is available. In 1991, in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, an Hasidic man's car jumped a curb, killing Gavin Cato, a seven-year-old black child. Later, in what appears to have been an act of retaliation on the part of a faction of the black community, Yankel Rosenbaum, an Hasidic rabbinical student, was stabbed and killed. The ensuing riots that wracked Crown Heights' previous atmosphere of tolerance for its divergent cultures made national headlines and pointed to the growing friction in racial and cultural relations across America. Drawing verbatim from a series of over fifty interviews with Crown Heights' residents, politicians, activists, religious leaders, gangs, street dwellers, victims and perpetrators alike, Anna Deavere Smith has created a theatrical event distilling the lives and voices of twenty-six of the incident's survivors into a visionary amalgam, the import of which touches upon every A

Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights and Other Identities (Acting Edition for Theater Productions)

Anna, Deavere Smith

Dramatist's Play Service

[An] engrossing collection of testimonials about life, death and the care of the ailing body...Ms. Smith has created avivid compendium of life experienced at its extremes, drawn about equally from the suffering and the ministering sides of the story.” New York TimesVitally important, wide-ranging and ultimately very moving” Los Angeles TimesFor over thirty years, Anna Deavere Smith has created her own unique form of theatre by exploring the events that have shaped the American psychea theatre that documents real-time events through the actual words of those most closely involved. In Let Me Down Easy, Smith creates an indelible gallery of portraits, from a rodeo bull rider to a prize fighter to a New Orleans doctor during Hurricane Katrina, as well as boldface names like former Texas Governor Ann Richards, legendary cyclist Lance Armstrong, network film critic Joel Siegel, and supermodel Lauren Hutton.Their stories are alternately humorous and heart-wrenching, and often a blend of both. Building upon each other with hypnotic force, her subjects recount personal encounters with the frailty of the human body, ranging from a mere brush with mortality, coping with an uncertain future in today’s medical establishment, to confronting an end-of-life transition. The testimony of health care professionals adds further texture to a vivid portrayal of the cultural and societal attitudes to matters of health.Anna Deavere Smith is an actor, playwright, and author. Smith's plays are written using the journalistic technique of interviewing her subjects and performing their testimonies. These works include the award-winning plays Twilight: Los Angeles and Fires in the Mirror, which was a finalist for the 1993 Pulitzer Prize. Both plays were broadcast on PBS as part of the American Playhouse series.

Let Me Down Easy

From the most exciting individual in American theater” (Newsweek), here is Anna Deavere Smith’s brass tacks advice to aspiring artists of all stripes. In vividly anecdotal letters to the young BZ, she addresses the full spectrum of issues that people starting out will face: from questions of confidence, discipline, and self-esteem, to fame, failure, and fear, to staying healthy, presenting yourself effectively, building a diverse social and professional network, and using your art to promote social change. At once inspiring and no-nonsense, Letters to a Young Artist will challenge you, motivate you, and set you on a course to pursue your art without compromise.

Letters to a Young Artist: Straight-up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts-For Actors, Performers, Writers, and Artists of Every Kind

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Smith, Anna Deavere. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Smith, Anna Deavere

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Smith, Anna Deavere. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Talk to Me: Listening Between the Lines

Fires in the Mirror

Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

Talk to Me: Travels in Media and Politics

Notes from the Field

Fires in the Mirror

Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights and Other Identities (Acting Edition for Theater Productions)

Let Me Down Easy

Letters to a Young Artist: Straight-up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts-For Actors, Performers, Writers, and Artists of Every Kind