Arts & Letters

On this special Valentine's Day segment of Arts & Letters, we speak with husband and wife duo, Lauren and Micah Sukany. Their band, The Damsels in Distress, provides much of the music for Arts & Letters shows. Their music is fun, post-modern and quirky-cool. You can follow them at their website, paperopera.com. You can also hear more of their music here.

On this episode of Arts & Letters, we talk with writer and emeritus professor of Speech Communications at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Dr. Allan Ward. His book, Civil Rights Brothers, The Journey of Albert Porter and Allan Ward, published by Award Press in Little Rock, chronicles his friendship and work with civil rights activist Albert Porter.

Ward and Porter "started out in two different places, far apart, unknown to each other. But the lines moved closer to each other. . . until they came together, and then side by side, next to each other."

On this episode of Arts & Letters, we talk with novelist Daniel Omotosho Black from Blackwell, Arkansas. Much of Black’s fiction contains a deep-felt sense of Arkansas, focusing on home, history and identity.

His bestselling novels, They Tell Me of a Home, The Sacred Place, Perfect Peace, Twelve Gates to the City, and the soon to be released The Coming have all been published by St. Martin’s Press.

On this episode of Arts & Letters, we take a guided tour through the Johnny Cash: Arkansas Icon Exhibit, which opens October 10th and runs through January 24th, at the Arkansas Studies Institute in downtown Little Rock.

On this episode of Arts & Letters, we’ll be looking for lost fathers and their impact by way of memoir—a word originated from memorie, which means to be kept in mind.

Our first memoir will take us from Virginia Beach to New Orleans, where a son pieces together the reasons his alcoholic father left his family and this son reconstructs his father's life in order to give the “true” story to his own sons.

On this episode of Arts & Letters, we search for the 13th century teacher, translator, rhetorician and poet, Brunetto Latini. He was the teacher of Dante and the first translator of Aristotle and Cicero into a vernacular language.

His translations set the stage for the rhetorical turns in The Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. His student, Dante, in Canto XV of the Divine Comedy, damned him to Hell.

On this episode of Arts & Letters, we talk about ethics, thought to be derived from ethos—the Greek word for character or custom.

We also play the Ethics Bowl, a competition with  philosophy students on the University of Arkansas at Little Rock's  Ethics’ Bowl team.

And, we discuss some ethical cases whose content may range from the social to the political.

Last year, the UALR Ethics Bowl team placed 16th in the National Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl Competition and earned 4th place at the Texas Regional Ethics Bowl in San Antonio, Texas.