Archives for March 2025

It’s getting closer to our poetry reading at the Palace, where Florian Vetsch will host the poet Jan Heller Levi, winner of the Walt Whitman Award given by the Academy of American Poets, and yours truly, along with Clemens Umbricht. DJ Soulsonic will do his thing with the music we selected.

But he was much more than that: Bold spirit, world traveler, street-smart Chicago kid, precinct worker, union organizer, auto worker. Soldier, leftist, Hollywood agent, target of the McCarthy Red Scare. Journalist, novelist, winner of the National Book Award for his memoir, “Going Away.” Screenwriter of “Frida,” about the painter Frida Kahlo. Lover of Nobel laureate Doris Lessing who depicted him in her most significant novel, “The Golden Notebook.”