76West: A Podcast from the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan

Tony Award winner J. Harrison Ghee talks to The Lambert Center’s Jason Blitman about their experience as the first nonbinary performer to win Best Actor in a Musical, living life as your most authentic self, and performing in a hit musical on Broadway.

J. Harrison Ghee Broadway/International Tour: Some Like it Hot, Kinky Boots, Mrs. Doubtfire. Regional: The Color Purple, The Sting. Television: “High Maintenance” (Charles), “Raising Dion” (Kwame). Industrial: Tokyo Disney Sea’s Big Band Beat, Norwegian Cruise Line.

Caldecott winner Brian Selznick (The Invention of Hugo Cabret) talks to the Lambert Center’s Jason Blitman about how his latest book, Big Tree, started as a Steven Spielberg film, and about the legacy of gay and Jewish children’s book authors.

Brian Selznick is the author and illustrator of many books for children, including The Invention of Hugo Cabret, winner of the Caldecott medal and the basis for the Oscar-winning movie Hugo, directed by Martin Scorsese. Kaleidoscope, a novel in short stories, was called a "lockdown masterpiece" by the New York Times, and his newest book Big Tree, inspired by an idea from Steven Spielberg.

First-time author Camille Kellogg talks to The Lambert Center’s Jason Blitman about her novel, Just As You Are, a queer rom-com inspired by Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. 

Camille Kellogg is a queer writer based in New York City, where she works as an editor for children’s and young adult books. She studied English and creative writing at Middlebury College and attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference on a fiction scholarship. She’s passionate about queer stories, cute dogs, and bad puns.

Bestselling author of The Guncle Steven Rowley talks to The Lambert Center’s Jason Blitman about all sorts of things, including working as a gay author and, of course, his newest book, this month’s TODAY Show #ReadWithJenna pick, The Celebrants.

Steven Rowley is the bestselling author of Lily and the Octopus, a Washington Post Notable Book of 2016; The Editor, named by NPR as one of the Best Books of 2019; The Guncle, a Goodreads Choice Awards finalist for 2021 Novel of the Year and winner of The 22nd Thurber Prize for American Humor; and The Celebrants, a TODAY Show #ReadWithJenna pick. His fiction has been published in twenty languages, and all of his books are in development for feature film or television adaptation. Originally from Portland, Maine, he is a graduate of Emerson College and currently resides in Palm Springs with his husband, writer Byron Lane.

Bestselling author of Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel, talks to The Lambert Center’s Jason Blitman as her final event for the paperback release of her latest novel, Sea of Tranquility. They also talk about why we’re drawn to post-apocalyptic fiction, what it’s like imagining the future of our world, and what she’s working on next.

Emily St. John Mandel’s five previous novels include The Glass Hotel, which has been translated into 25 languages, and Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, was the basis of a limited series on HBO Max, and has been translated into 37 languages. She lives in New York City and Los Angeles.

From the clothes we wear to the sheets we sleep in, textiles are part of daily life, but have you ever really thought about how they’re made? In this episode, The Lambert Center’s Jason Blitman talks to Preeti Gopinath, the head of the textiles program at Parsons School of Design at The New School. Jason and Preeti talk about what textiles are, how they’re made, and the impact they have on the world around us.