Watch Live: Tony Kushner and Rachel Maddow at the WIT Literary Festival

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The Authors Guild Foundation is excited to present a livestream from its third-annual WIT Literary Festival in partnership with Community Television for the Southern Berkshires (CTSB). This livestream is made possible in part with support from Roland and Mary DeSilva.

Join playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America) and Rachel Maddow (Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism) for a discussion on the American democratic experiment and their collaboration adapting Maddow’s podcast Ultra for Steven Spielberg. 

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Rachel Maddow was born in Castro Valley, California. She is the host of the Emmy Award-winning The Rachel Maddow Show. She has written, produced, and hosted four original podcasts for MSNBC—“Rachel Maddow Presents: Bag Man” in 2018, which won a DuPont Columbia Award; “Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra” in October 2022, which received the first-ever Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism for a podcast in 2023 and was optioned by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment to be made into a feature film; the six-episode series “Rachel Maddow Presents: Deja News”; and, most recently, the eight-part second installment of “Ultra.” She is the author of DRIFT: The Unmooring of American Military Power, as well as Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth. Her latest book is Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism. In addition to Emmy Awards for TV journalism, she has been honored by the Interfaith Alliance with the Walter Cronkite Faith and Freedom Award and the 2012 John Steinbeck Award. She lives in western Massachusetts.

Tony Kushner was born in New York City and raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He is the author of the plays A Bright Room Called Day; Angels in America, Parts One and Two; Slavs!; Homebody/Kabul; the musical Caroline, or Change and the opera A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck (both with composer Jeanine Tesori); and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide To Capitalism And Socialism With A Key To The Scriptures. He has adapted Pierre Corneille’s The Illusion, S.Y. Ansky’s The Dybbuk, Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan and Mother Courage and Her Children; and the English-language libretto for the opera Brundibár by Hans Krasa. He wrote the screenplay for Mike Nichols’s film of Angels in America and Steven Spielberg’s films Munich, Lincoln, West Side Story, and The Fabelmans, which was co-written by Spielberg. His books include The Art of Maurice Sendak, 1980 to the Present; and Wrestling With Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict, co-edited with Alisa Solomon. He is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, an Olivier Award, an Emmy Award, three Oscar nominations, and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. In 2012, he was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. He lives in New York City.