Thomas Frank — The Creativity Con: How Innovation Became America's Biggest Racket — at Conn Ave
About This Event
From the best-selling and always-prescient author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? and Listen, Liberal comes a bold indictment of America’s chronic obsession with creativity and innovation, showing how these beloved ideas came to dominate our political and economic conversation, all while serving to mask inequality and protect elite interestsInnovation and creativity have been the defining watchwords of American exceptionalism for decades, used by business thinkers, tech gurus, military strategists, educators and urban planners to describe our unique standing in the world. While other countries supposedly suffer from regimentation and a fatal lack of imagination, the United States is often portrayed as an unmatched dynamo of new ideas and products. In his new book, Thomas Frank disabuses us of this notion, offering a bold account of the way creativity and innovation have been used as a kind of ideological cover for policies that reinforce the class system.Frank charts the construction of America’s glamorous self-image from Sputnik to Silicon Valley, Apple to Lockheed Martin, Madison Avenue to Main Street, Richard Florida to Donald Trump. He deconstructs the innovation agendas touted by politicians; reads the books of pop psychology; tours SXSW, the mecca of creativity where musicians mingle with Pentagon officials; and looks in on the cafes, sidewalk murals, and bike lanes that populate the neighborhoods built for the creative class. Along the way, Frank uncovers the insidious effects of centering innovation and creativity in our rhetoric while, in practice, nurturing exactly the opposite. In the name of these noble goals, he shows, our leaders have reoriented the American economy around white-collar knowledge work, cut taxes on the wealthy, deregulated banks, off-shored manufacturing, reoriented cities, and destroyed what is truly creative about this country. Deeply original, marked by Frank’s signature brilliance and acerbic wit, Progressland is a troubling X-ray of postwar American business and political culture — and a crushing indictment of the clichés that have undergirded its many failures.Thomas Frank is the bestselling author of What’s the Matter With Kansas?; Listen, Liberal; The People, No; and other books. Frank is a founding editor of The Baffler, a former columnist for The Wall Street Journal, and has written regularly for Harper’s, The Guardian, and Le Monde Diplomatique. He lives outside Washington, DC.This event is free with first come, first serve seating. To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.
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Claudia Castro Luna — The Flowers Along the Way: A Memoir — at Conn Ave
This event will be in partnership with Salvadoran Cultural Institute.Passionately demonstrating the dormant trauma of political violence and the redemption waiting beyond itFrom El Salvador’s lush countryside to the streets of Oakland, California, a young mother wrestles with the intersecting forces of memory, history, and language in order to chart a new path for herself and her growing family. Fleeing political unrest and civil war violence in El Salvador, fourteen-year-old Claudia Castro Luna arrived in the United States with her family in 1981. Two decades later, holding her two-year-old and pregnant with her second child, she survives a public shooting by hiding behind shrubs in front of her house in Oakland. This event unleashes disorienting and traumatic memories, plunging her into a journey of discovery as she grapples with PTSD, recovers family stories, and begins to make sense of all that was torn asunder within her by the experiences of war and emigration. Beauty, longing, fear, and joy entwine in this powerful story of love, self-determination, and the search for home.CLAUDIA CASTRO LUNA is a 2019 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, a former Washington State Poet Laureate, and Seattle’s inaugural Civic Poet. She is the author of the poetry collections Green, the World; Cipota Under the Moon; Killing Marías; One River, A Thousand Voices; and This City, a chapbook. Her nonfiction has appeared in anthologies, journals, and newspapers. Born in El Salvador, Castro Luna lives and dreams in English and Spanish.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.
Roberto Tejada & Christina Wiginton — Art & Water: Volume 2 - with Kaira M. Cabañas — at Conn Ave
Essays, personal meditations, and images that explore water in all its renewing, destructive, corrosive, and connecting powerWater and its transmutations link the contributions in Art & Water, the second volume in the series Art & from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. The series situates the study of art at the intersection of various disciplines—here, they include modernist literature, poetry, film, and both natural and built environments. Essayists use water to address hydrolatry practices in India; ritual objects and practices of enslaved Afro-Surinamers; traces of millstones in the architecture of Seville; and visualizations of sea-level change in the nineteenth-century United States. Their research places art within broader conversations in the humanities considering a water-oriented rather than terrestrial historical framework.The book is enlivened by first-person narratives that examine deeply embedded meanings of water. Continuing the series’ tradition of exciting book design, an enclosed poster from Brazilian multimedia artist Aline Motta addresses ancestry, memory, and belonging across the Black Atlantic while compellingly conjuring water’s capacity to transform, bring together, and renew. Water as a connective theme offers a fitting lens to advance understandings of how art, as both material object and practice, remains entangled with the natural, supernatural, and scientific—and, like water, remains inseparable from our daily lives.Distributed for the National Gallery of Art, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual ArtsRoberto Tejada is an award-winning poet and the author of art histories that include Along the Diagonal: Art / Essays / América (2026), National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (2009) and Celia Alvarez Muñoz (2009), as well as the poetry collections Carbonate of Copper (2025), Why the Assembly Disbanded (2022) and Exposition Park (2010). A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, Tejada serves as the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston, where he teaches creative writing and art history.Christina Wiginton is an art book publishing specialist focused on color-critical print production for visually ambitious museum publications and nonfiction books. She has worked extensively in illustrated book development, first at the Smithsonian Institution and now at the National Gallery of Art.Tejada and Wiginton will be in conversation with Kaira M. Cabañas, the award-winning author of several volumes, including Immanent Vitalities: Meaning and Materiality in Modern and Contemporary Art (2021), which received the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award. Her previous work, Learning from Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art (2018), was recognized as a finalist for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. Since 2023, she has served as Associate Dean for Academic Programs and Publications at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.This event is free with first come, first serve seating. To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.
Brian Jay Jones — The Capitol: The Surprising Biography of an American Building - with David O. Stewart — at Conn Ave
An in-depth exploration of history of the US Capitol building and the incredible personalities who built it, full of dramatic stories, surprising facts, and offering a powerful testament to what the Capitol has meant to generations of Americans, and how it’s endured.The Capitol is a unique biography of a place, encompassing architecture, history, politics, popular culture, and race in a fascinating exploration of our Capitol's secret history; a history rife with political intrigue, assassination attempts, thwarted bombings, and gunmen on the run. Never mind ghostly cat prints, mysteriously bloodstained steps, and charming “fairy doors” that have delighted visitors for hundreds of years. Spanning across three centuries of American history, it focuses on iconic and easily recognizable names and personalities from the past—from George Washington to Davy Crockett to Ronald Reagan—as well as countless colorful characters readers may not have heard of before, with a focus on restoring the stories of enslaved people and recognizing their contributions. The story of the Capitol is the story of America itself, and, for the first time, that story will be told in this sweeping, aspirational biography of the building at the very heart of the American experiment.Brian Jay Jones is the critically acclaimed, bestselling biographer of some of the world’s most iconic creative geniuses. Born in the Midwest and raised in the Southwest, Brian has a degree in English from the University of New Mexico. He spent more than two decades as a public policy analyst and speechwriter for thought leaders and elected officials at all levels of government, including nearly ten years in the US Senate. He presently lives in New Mexico.Jones will be in conversation with David O. Stewart, who has published eleven award-winning and best-selling books of history and historical novels. In 2023, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Washington Independent Review of Books. His most recent fictional series, the Overstreet Saga, is inspired by family stories his mother told. He lives in Maryland with the light of his life, Nancy Floreen; they have three children and six grandchildren.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.