Grammy-award winning singer Lani Hall Alpert talks about her career, growing up as the daughter of famed musician Herb Alpert, and her new book Emotional Memoirs and Short Stories.
Matt Southworth was a wrestler in high school, fought as a U.S. Army intelligence analyst in Iraq after graduation, and now conducts legislative battles for peace on Capitol Hill.
Anne Hills is a folk music gem, prominent and still too little known. She has recorded & toured with Tom Paxton, David Roth, Priscilla Herdman & other greats, and she writes with wonderful depth & color, singing with great beauty.
MEMEnomics: The Next-generation Economics System by Said Dawlabani explores an evolving, growing, & maturing of values systems, leading us to a better future, in spite of and fueled by the crises we go through. A further adaptation of the Spiral Dynamics theories of Don Beck, Memenomics may well be the lens to light our way forward.
Said Elias Dawlabani is the leading expert in the value-systems approach to economics and the founder of The Memenomics Group, an advisory organization that reframes economic issues through the prism of values systems and offers sustainable solutions based on this emerging science.
Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta's book, Refusing to be Enemies: Palestinian and Israeli Nonviolent Resistance to the Israeli Occupation delves deep into sides of the conflict that most US media never approach, and does it through the words of Palestinian & Israeli workers for peace, plus a few people outside of the Middle East. There's both more reality and hope in this work than we've been led to expect. Maxine has spent considerable time in the Middle East, both growing up as a North American Jew, and further as a peace activist and Quaker.
A more in-depth review of the book can be found in Friends Journal.
James Mudcat Grant is the Mudcat in Mudcat & the Bottomfeeders, an appropriate name for someone who has lived his life on the banks of the Mississippi. With 50 years of music making of rock, folk,country and other varieties, Mudcat has the chops and and heart for powerful music. Find him on Facebook, at the Great River Folk Festival, painting houses, or wandering the great outdoors.
James Loewen is a sociologist, historian and author. His writings include the renowned Lies My Teacher Told Me. In an effort to expose the truth and improve our world, James stirs the passion for knowledge that unbiased history can provide. His first history textbook had too much fact in it, was suppressed, and led to his successful First Amendment challenge to the censorship of free speech & press. If you have info about a Sundown Town in your area, you can email James at jloewen[at]uvm.edu
Harmonious Wail & their music defy simple categorization, but you're sure to find some Gypsy Jazz in their sets. Maggie Delaney-Potthoff is the voice most often at the front, and the vocal spotlight is well-deserved. Maggie's Method is the unusual technique used in the voice lessons she gives, and Harmonious Wail leads up the Midwest Gypsy Swing Fest twice a year, in Madison, WI.
Mediation is an art of practical peacemaking. Jennifer Beer, is co-author of the 4th edition of the The Mediator's Handbook, a skilled mediator and teacher of mediation, including teaching negotiation at Wharton. She has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology.
Inga Witscher is an organic dairy farmer and the star of a new Wisconsin Public TV program called Around the Farm Table, exploring a revolution in farming and connection to the Earth. Founding St. Isidore's Mead Organic Farm 7 years ago, Inga has fallen in love with the land & animals & a mission to transform the modern US view of agriculture (& cooking), assisted by, among others, her musician husband, Joe Maurer, who's been a Song of the Soul guest.