The Short Fuse Podcast

Kwame Daniels is a creative director, DJ, broadcaster and founder of Bounce Culture. He has spent his career using music and creativity to connect people and create opportunities. He is the founder of Solab, connecting artists and producers across Africa and the diaspora through collaboration and innovation. Kwame is the creative force behind North Star, an immersive live music performance inspire...

Can the arts provoke, reflect, and sustain cultural dialogue in a period of disruption? How can the arts continue to provoke, reflect, and sustain cultural dialogue as technology pulls us through a liminal space, defined by disruption and transition?  Moderator:    Elizabeth Howard        The Short Fuse  National Center of Afro-American Artists Akiba Abaka , Interim Executive Director, National Ce...

Peter Bouteneff  Peter C. Bouteneff (DPhil, University of Oxford) is professor of theology at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in Crestwood, New York and a conservatory-trained musician. He is the author of numerous books and essays on subjects relating to theology and the arts, including Arvo Pärt: Out of Silence. He is founding director of the Institute of Sacred Arts. Luminous Podca...

Episode Notes Big House Books .  Big House Books is a non-profit, volunteer organization that sends free books by request to prisoners in Mississippi correctional facilities in order to promote literacy and be a vehicle of change for prison reform. Big House Books would appreciate your paperback books - westerns, fantasy novels  and science fiction are genres often requested.  Books can be shipped...

Aldo Juraidini Zorrilla is a designer working across disciplines, with a focus on product, strategy, and brand. As Design Director at Studio Rodrigo, he guides multi-disciplinary teams on projects mainly for the digital world. Aldo also founded and curates Cinema Rodrigo, a film club where friends and fellow creatives come together across New York City's independent theaters once a month to watch...

Oarabile Ditsele  Oarabile Ditsele is a multidisciplinary creative force whose work spans writing, acting, producing, and socially driven arts Innovation.  He is a graduate of University of Cape Town, majoring in drama. Ditsele gained international attention in 2016 as a writer-performer of the award-winning theatre production, The Fall, produced by the Baxter Theatre. The play toured globally to...

  The music used in the intro of this episode is a classic Eritrean song called "Milenu" by Tewolde Reda .  In I Hope You Find What You're Looking For Zewdi mentions this singer in a flashback to her first love. Bsrat Mezghebe  received an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, The Paris Review , and the anthology Well–Read Black Girl: Finding Our S...

Big House Books .  Big House Books is a non-profit, volunteer organization that sends free books by request to prisoners in Mississippi correctional facilities in order to promote literacy and be a vehicle of change for prison reform. Big House Books would appreciate your paperback books - westerns, fantasy novels  and science fiction are genres often requested.  Books can be shipped through media...

Gish Jen Gish Jen's work has been included in  The Best American Short Stories  five times, including in  The Best American Short Stories of the Century . A fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she has received NEA, Guggenheim, and Radcliffe fellowships, a Lannan Literary Award, and a five-year Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Awa...

Fortune Society Founded in 1967, The Fortune Society’s vision is to foster a world where those who are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated will thrive as positive, contributing members of society. This is achieved through a holistic, one-stop model of service provision. The Fortune Society's continuum of care is informed and implemented by professionals with cultural backgrounds and life experie...

Chris Thurman Chris Thurman is  Director of the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is co-editor, with Sandra Young, of Global Shakespeare and Social Injustice: Towards a Transformative Encounter (2023). He is also editor of South African Essays on ‘Universal’ Shakespeare (2014), Sport versus Art: A South African Contest (2010) and sixteen volumes of the journal Shakes...

Seton Hawkins Seton Hawkins is the Director of Public Programs and Education Resources at Jazz at Lincoln Center. He leads the organization's Swing University teaching initiative.  In addition, he has worked as a producer, manager, publicist, radio DJ, and advocate in jazz for more than a decade.  He has written extensively for Hot House Jazz and for AllAboutJazz.com, with a particular emphasis on...

Open Book Festival The Open Book Festival is a trusted space in which difficult conversations are possible.  The festival, at its core, recognizes the importance of books to explore the world. Writers and their work is at the center of the Festival, along with the audience. We believe that the meaningful conversation is impossible, without the representation of the audiences.  Book Lounge The Book...

Malcolm D. Purkey  Born to Cockney Jewish immigrant parents who were entertainers, Malcolm Purkey  is an actor, director, playwright, influential drama lecturer, and theatre administrator.  He holds a BA and Honours from University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, an MA in Theatre Studies from the State University New York,  is a Fulbright Scholar and  he is a Graduate of the British Film School. ...

SUBCRIBE TO READING THE CITY Order Tyler Wetherall's novel Amphibian About Reading the City  "Reading the City" is a weekly newsletter of bookish events in and around NYC, a weekly diary of upcoming New York literary life on a need-to-know basis. No long blurbs, no reviews, just book events of all stripes. "Reading the City" links to the author’s books, website, or social pages when possible. Tyle...

 Sonya Chung is the author of the novels  The Loved Ones  (Relegation Books, 2016) and Long for This World (Scribner, 2010). She is a staff writer for the  The Millions  and founding editor of  Bloom, and is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize nomination, the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, the Bronx Council on the Arts Writers’ Residency, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Key West Literary Seminars res...

Adam Kuper Professor Adam Kuper  is an anthropologist and public intellectual. He has held positions at a number of universities  and is a recipient of the Huxley Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Kuper is the author or editor of 19 books and  has published over 100 journal articles focusing on anthropological theory, the history of anthropology in the US and Britain, and southern Afri...

The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and the Reclamation of Their Groundbreaking History   By:  Karen Valby The forgotten story of a pioneering group of five Black ballerinas, the first principals in the Dance Theatre of Harlem, who traveled the world as highly celebrated stars in their field and whose legacy was erased from history until now. At the height of the...

Yoknapatawpha and Faulkner Conference in Oxford, Mississippi  This is the longest continually running literary conference in the United States dedicated to the work of one author. This is the 50th Anniversary of the Conference, first held in 1974.  Square Book Store, Oxford, Mississippi  Square Books is a general independent bookstore in three separate buildings (about 100 feet apart) on the histo...

Elizabeth Howard began hosting and producing the Short Fuse during the pandemic years. Those days when we were shuttered in our rooms. Displaced. Disoriented. Since then she has hosted 33 conversations, created a YouTube channel for online Short Fuse reading groups, and held live events at P&T Knitwear in New York, the Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, and at the Portsmouth Athenaeum in New Hampshir...

The Arts Fuse is  an on-line magazine designed to preserve the craft of professional arts criticism,  while also looking for ways to explore new and innovative ways to evolve the cultural conversation and bring together critics, readers, and artists. Substantial criticism -- by sparking lively, contentious dialogue about the strengths, weaknesses, and contributions of the arts -- plays an indispen...

Justice Malala, is one of South Africa’s foremost political commentators and commentators and the author of the bestseller We Have Now Begun Our Decent:  How to stop south Africa losing its way .   He has been a columnist for the Times in SA, and written for the Washington Post , the Wall Street Journal , the Guardian and the Financial Times . He now lives in New York. Jonny Steinberg is the autho...

Ann Kjellberg  founded  Book Post , a newsletter-based book review, in 2018. Book Post publishes short book reviews by distinguished figures in literature, history, science, social sciences, and the arts. Kjellberg also reports for Book Post on the book industry, journalism, and the state of writing and ideas. Her essays have appeared in  The New York Review of Books ,  The Observer ,  The Browser...

Jasmine Rice LaBeija  the International Godmother of the Royal House of LaBeija is  an iconic and respected entertainer. In 2017, she was one of the leading cast members in the documentary series Shade, Queens of New York City, on Fusion Network. She has been a  host of Dragged, which won a Shorty Award in Diversity and Inclusion for Verizon's network In the Know and she was the face of New York C...

Justice Malala is one of South Africa’s foremost political commentators and the author of the #1 bestseller  We Have Now Begun Our Descent: How to Stop South Africa Losing its Way . A longtime weekly columnist for  The Times  (South Africa), he has also written for  The Washington Post ,  The Wall Street Journal ,  The Guardian , and  Financial Times , among other outlets. The former publisher of ...