12:00: Training future leaders to navigate Rochester's challenges
1:00: 'Connections Summer Sessions': Jeff VanderMeer on fiction, imagination and our uncertain future
Who are Rochester's future leaders? And how can we train future leaders to guide the community through recent challenges? The question comes at a time when Rochester remains under a gun violence state of emergency. Our guests are from Leadership Rochester. The nonprofit provides leadership training for Rochesterians interested in working cooperatively to strengthen the city. We discuss what that work looks like in this current moment. In studio:
- Camille Simmons, executive director of Leadership Rochester and president of the Rochester Board of Education
- Wanda Ridgeway, director of care management for Chisel Collective and executive director of CAPZ
- Sgt. Justin Collins, Rochester Police Department
- Justin Morris, founder and CEO of Untrapped Ministries
Then in our second hour, "Connections Summer Sessions" continues with some of Evan Dawson's favorite interviews. In this special rebroadcast, he talks with Jeff VanderMeer. The author is said to have one of the most inventive minds in American fiction. His books have taken us into dystopian futures, into dark places with strange forces and blurred lines between reality and fantasy. His novel "Annihilation" was the basis for a film starring Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac. His novel "Borne" and the ecological horror novel "Hummingbird Salamander" have also received critical acclaim. VanderMeer joins us to talk about the value of fiction as a mental exercise at a time when many of us are thinking about how foreboding the future might be.
- Jeff VanderMeer, author, editor, and literary critic
"Connections" is livestreamed each day on the WXXI News YouTube channel. Watch here.
