Authors and Poets

What It Takes is a podcast series featuring intimate, revealing conversations with towering figures in almost every field: music, science, sports, politics, film, technology, literature, the military and social justice. These rare interviews have been recorded over the past 25 years by The Academy of Achievement. They offer the life stories and reflections of people who have had a huge impact on the world, and insights you can apply to your own life. Subscribe to the What It Takes podcast series at iTunes.com/WhatItTakes

Hailed as the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world, South Africa's Athol Fugard has won international praise for creating theater of "power, glory, and majestic language." In more than 20 plays, written over six decades, he has chronicled the struggles of men and women of all races for dignity and human fulfillment. Born and raised in the Eastern Cape, he founded a multiracial theater company in the 1950s in defiance of the South African government's apartheid system. When he and a black colleague appeared as mixed-race brothers in his play The Blood Knot, it was closed after a single performance. In the 1960s, his work found an audience in other English-speaking countries, but after he appeared in The Blood Knot on BBC Television, the government seized his passport. Since the downfall of the apartheid system, Fugard has been honored by his country's government and by critics and audiences the world over. An Honorary Fellow of Britain's Royal Society of Literature, in 2001 he received Broadway's Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. His novel Tsotsi was adapted into the film of the same name, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film of 2006. He has appeared as an actor in the feature films Gandhi and The Killing Fields. In 2014, he returned to the stage for the first time in 15 years to act in his play Shadow of the Hummingbird at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut. In this podcast, recorded at the 2014 International Achievement Summit in San Francisco, he speaks of his youth in South Africa and his early adventures as a merchant seaman. Rather than dwelling on the persecution he suffered as an advocate of racial equality in his country, he focuses on the most basic and satisfying emotions that have informed his life, including the love of other human beings and of nature.

Vocalist, composer and instrumentalist Esperanza Spalding fell in love with music as a little girl in Portland, Oregon. She first drew acclaim as a child violinist before discovering the upright bass as a teenager. Within months she was playing in local clubs, exploring pop, rock, hip-hop and especially jazz. By age 20 she was an instructor at Boston's prestigious Berklee College of Music, and was performing with singer Patti Austin and a stellar roster of jazz greats. Her 2008 album Esperanza topped Billboard's Contemporary Jazz chart. The following year, she was invited to perform at the White House and the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Stockholm. At the 53rd annual Grammy Awards, she was honored as Best New Artist of the Year. With her 2011 album Chamber Music Society, she became the bestselling contemporary jazz artist in the world. On the follow-up, Radio Music Society, she played her own compositions alongside an eclectic selection of tunes by everyone from the Beach Boys to one of her heroes, jazz great Wayne Shorter. In this podcast, recorded at the 2014 International Achievement Summit in San Francisco, Esperanza Spalding performs solo, and in duet with Wayne Shorter. Excerpts from her interview with the Academy of Achievement are interspersed with highlights of that performance.

The most successful and admired female songwriter in the history of pop music, Carole King proves that one woman alone at the piano can be more powerful than a four-piece rock band or a 30-piece orchestra. She grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where her mother was a teacher and her father a firefighter. She learned to play the piano at age four and formed her first band in high school. At age 18, she scored her first Number One hit record ’Ŭ the first of 118 pop hits on the Billboard charts, including such classics as ’źWill You Love Me Tomorrow,’Ź ’źThe Loco-Motion,’Ź ’źUp on the Roof,’Ź It’Ŵs Too Late, Baby,’Ź ’źI Feel the Earth Move Under My Feet,’Ź ’źYou Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman’Ź and ’źYou’Ŵve Got a Friend.’Ź To date, she has recorded 25 solo albums, the most successful of which, Tapestry, sold 25 million copies, and for a quarter of a century held the record for a female artist for most weeks at the top of the charts. The recipient of the 2013 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and the 2013 Gershwin Prize, she is a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. For more than a half century, she has given voice to her innermost truth, and struck a resounding chord in the hearts of listeners around the world. Composer and performer, author and activist, she has brought the same passion, courage and unyielding honesty to her life, to her work, and to her defense of the woods and wildlife of her beloved Rocky Mountains. Carol King received the Gold Medal of the Academy of Achievement in a ceremony at the Academy's headquarters in Washington, D.C. on February 12, 2014. In this podcast, recorded on that occasion, Carole King discusses her life and career. Her remarks are interspersed with excerpts from her performance at the Academy earlier that evening.

This autumn, Natasha Trethewey took up her duties as United States Poet Laureate, the 19th poet to serve since Congress created the position in 1985. Also known as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the Laureate is responsible for all the public poetry programs of the Library, as well as an annual lecture and reading. With her appointment as Poet Laureate, Trethewey crowns a career steeped in the complexities of American history. The marriage of her white, Canadian-born father and her African American mother was still illegal in Mississippi, where she was born, on Confederate Memorial Day, in 1966, although the Supreme Court legalized interracial marriage the following year. Her parents divorced when she was young; she grew up with her mother in Georgia, spending summers with her grandmother in Mississippi and her father in New Orleans. When Natasha was 19, her mother was murdered by her second husband. In Trethewey’Ŵs words, ’źI turned to poetry to make sense of what had happened.’Ź Trethewey’Ŵs poetry is unique for the manner in which she fuses historical materials and vernacular language with traditional verse forms. In Bellocq’Ŵs Ophelia, she imagines the inner life of an anonymous prostitute immortalized by the New Orleans photographer E.J. Bellocq. In 2007, she received the Pulitzer Prize for her book Native Guard, a verse narrative inspired by a black regiment of the Union Army during the Civil War.