Terry Gross

Performance artist, writer and theater director Rhodessa Jones is co-artistic director of the San Franciso performance company Cultural Odyssey. She is also founder and director of the "Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women," a performance workshop for women in prison in which she helps them develop and stage works based on their own stories. Jones' solo performance works include Hot Flashes, Power Surges, and Private Summers, and Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women.

Writer and producer Chris Albertson is considered an authority on blues singer Bessie Smith. His 1971 biography of Smith has been reissued in a new revised and expanded edition. It's called Bessie, and it contains new details on Smith's early years, new interview material, and a chapter devoted to events and responses that followed the original publication.

His new book is Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education. Among the commercial activities at many universities and colleges these days are: drug companies giving money to medical schools, industry buying the rights to scientific discoveries and industry-endowed faculty chairs. Bok is critical of such ventures.

James Wood is book critic for The New Republic. He's making his own literary debut with the novel The Book Against God. It's about a priest's son who becomes an atheist. Wood is also the author of The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief.

He directed the film Autofocus, about the life and death of actor Bob Crane. It is now available on DVD, and will come out on VHS next week. Schrader wrote the screenplays for a number of classic films, including Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Films he directed include Affliction, The Comfort of Strangers and American Gigolo. This interview first aired October 14, 2002.

Film director Martin Scorsese discusses his film Gangs of New York set in pre-Civil War New York city and focusing on street warfare between immigrant groups. It's inspired by the book of the same name published in 1927 by journalist Herbert Asbury. The film will be out on DVD and VHS next week. This interview first aired January 27, 2003.

Susan Orlean is a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 1994 she wrote a profile of David Friedman, one of the Friedman sons. David was known as Silly Billy, a popular clown who was a favorite at children's birthday parties in New York City. David's father and brother were accused of molesting children, and the family's story is told through their own home movies in the documentary film Capturing the Friedmans. Orlean is also the author of the best-selling book, The Orchid Thief.

He has written his first novel for adults, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The narrator of the story is an autistic teenager who is obsessed with Sherlock Holmes and who must prove his innocence when a neighborhood dog is killed. One reviewer described it as "wonderful, simple, moving, and likely to be a smash." Haddon lives in England and teaches creative writing for the Arvon Foundation and for Oxford University.

In his recent columns he has been writing about the intelligence officers who disclosed to him that the Bush administration exaggerated the claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the war. Kristof recently returned from Iraq.

His new movie is Capturing the Friedmans. It's a non-fiction feature film about a seemingly normal Long Island, New York family. The film takes a look at the convoluted case and attempts to determine the true story. Capturing the Friedmans won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2003 Sundance festival. This is Jarecki's first feature film. He was also the founder and CEO of Moviefone, which was acquired by AOL in 1999 for nearly $400 million.