February 25, 2017 – “Story in the Public Square”

This week, hosts Jim Ludes and G. Wayne Miller are joined by a remarkably talented scholar and novelist whose work, whether for academic or popular audiences, traces the role of both narrative and truth in public life.

Eric Bennett is the author of Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War, and the novel A Big Enough Lie.  His fiction has appeared in A Public Space and Lumina, and his nonfiction in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Chronicle of Higher Education, VQR, and Modern Fiction Studies.  He received an MFA in fiction writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Ph.D. in English from Harvard University.  He is an associate professor at Providence College in Rhode Island.

“Story in the Public Square” airs on Rhode Island PBS in Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts on Sundays at 11 a.m. and is rebroadcast Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. An audio version of the program airs Saturdays at 8:30 a.m. & 6:30 p.m. ET and Sundays at 1:30 a.m. & 12:30 p.m. ET on SiriusXM’s popular P.O.T.U.S. (Politics of the United States), channel 124.

Story in the Public Square is a partnership between the Pell Center and The Providence Journal. The initiative aims to study, celebrate, and tell stories that matter.