This week on Artists in Action we are joined by two writers visiting Iowa City as part of the International Writers Program. Lejia Jhang is a journalist, television producer and lecturer whose work has appeared in magazines and newspapers in Asia, Europe and the US, as well as on CNN, BBC and NPR.  Before this, she spent ten years working at a missile factory - an experience that inspired her to write her memoir “Socialism is Great!”.  Other publications include China Remembers, an oral history of the PRC, and Western Images of Chairman Mao, which is presently banned in China. 

 

For the second half of the show, we speak with Israeli poet and essayist, Efrat Mishori. Efrat has published a fairy tale in verse called Book of Dreams, as well as five collections of poetry including The Physical Lips, Sign and Sigh, and As Far as Efrat.  She is the recipient of the 2000 Rabinovich Art Foundation’s Scholarship for Poetry and the 2001 Prime Minister’s Award for Hebrew Writers. Efrat reads four of her poems:  Babblingwell, Metallic Wing,The Big Sea and the Little Shoe and The Candy Speech.  We’ll talk to her about how the voice in a poem can move, how poetry exists in the moment and we’ll ask her what she means when she says, “a poem is a tool with a one second guarantee”.