Margaret Atwood: The Artist and the Future of Democracy in Conversation with CBS Sunday Morning’s Martha Teichner / in Conversation with <em>CBS Sunday Morning</em>’s Martha Teichner - The 92nd Street Y, New York
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92NY Belfer Center for Innovation & Social Impact

Margaret Atwood: The Artist and the Future of Democracy

in Conversation with CBS Sunday Morning’s Martha Teichner
Margaret Atwood and Martha Teichner

Democracy might not seem like utopia, but it’s our society’s best hope for a just future. Legendary Booker Prize-winning novelist Margaret Atwood has spent decades reimagining how artists and writers can push it forward.

Join author Margaret Atwood for an urgent conversation with CBS Sunday Morning’s Martha Teichner on the state of democracy in North America — and the vital role artists and writers play in democratic society. For decades, Atwood’s bestselling novels (The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, and The Testaments, among many others) have fearlessly explored the darkest reaches of political oppression and the cultural forces that can liberate us from its grip. Hear her discuss her vision of how art can inspire political activism, reshape culture in the long arc of history, and envision a better future for everyone.

Atwood’s new essay collection, Burning Questions, covers many of the subjects that she will discuss in the event and have influenced her fiction: feminism, the climate crisis, and the rise of authoritarianism, as well as the writing life and process.

Purchase Burning Questions.

Register and submit your own questions for Margaret Atwood.

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Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than 45 countries, is the author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry …

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than 45 countries, is the author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. Burning Questions, a collection of essays from 2004 - 2021 was published in March 2022. Dearly, her first collection of poetry in over a decade, was published November 2020. Her latest novel, The Testaments, is a co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. It is the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning TV series. Her other works of fiction include Cat’s Eye, finalist for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; The MaddAddam Trilogy; and Hag-Seed. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. She lives in Toronto.

Martha Teichner

Martha Teichner has been a correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning since December 1993 …

Martha Teichner

Martha Teichner has been a correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning since December 1993, where she’s equally adept at covering major national and international breaking news stories as she is handling in-depth cultural and arts topics.

Since joining CBS News in 1977, Teichner has earned multiple national awards for her original reporting, including 12 Emmy Awards and five James Beard Foundation Awards. Teichner was also part of the team coverage of the Newtown, Conn., elementary school shooting which earned CBS News a 2014 duPont-Columbia Award. In 2020, Teichner was inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame by Michigan Women Forward. And in 2018, Teichner was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York.

Teichner’s work has spanned the gamut of the human experience from a report on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, to a look at how the nation’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic had become political and from a report on police violence in America to a profile of a man who is a master upholsterer at Colonial Williamsburg.

As a correspondent for CBS News, Teichner has reported on the some of the largest national and international stories of this era, including the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the run-up to the war in Iraq, the death of Princess Diana and the life and death of Nelson Mandela. She's interviewed world leaders and other newsmakers, including then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton twice for CBS Sunday Morning in 1995 and 1997.

Now based in New York, Teichner spent more than a dozen years as a foreign correspondent covering major international news. Teichner was twice assigned to the CBS News London bureau (1980-1984, 1989-1994), where she not only covered Britain’s royal wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer, but many wars as one of only a handful of female war correspondents. Teichner also covered the Maze Prison Hunger Strike in Northern Ireland, the Lebanon War, the 1st Intifada in 1988 in Israel and the West Bank, and the conflicts associated with the collapse of Yugoslavia (Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia). She reported on the fall of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and the Romanian revolution. Teichner also spent several weeks in the Bolivian jungle reporting on undercover operations with the Drug Enforcement Agency.

During the Persian Gulf War, she was one of a small group of journalists allowed by the military to accompany U.S. troops. She spent nearly six weeks with the 1st Armored Division in the Saudi desert, but also covered the conflict from Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan and Israel.

Between her two London assignments, Teichner was based in Johannesburg (1987-1989) during the final dangerous years of the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa. She returned to report on Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and in 1994 she covered his election as the first black President of a post-apartheid South Africa. Also between London assignments, Teichner spent three years in the Dallas bureau (1984-1987), where she covered numerous stories in Latin America, among them the Mexico City earthquake.

She began her CBS News career as a correspondent based in the Atlanta bureau (1977-1980), where her assignments included the Cuban/Haitian boatlift to the United States, the war in El Salvador and the exile of the Shah of Iran to Panama. Her reporting on the exodus of Haitian and Cuban refugees to the U.S was featured in the CBS Radio special, “Exodus: The Freedom Flotilla,” which earned a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. While in Atlanta, Teichner covered a three-month strike by the coal miners in 1978 and numerous natural disasters.

Teichner began her journalism career at WJEF Radio and WZZM-TV in Grand Rapids, Mich. She then became a general assignment reporter for WTVJ-TV Miami and for WMAQ-TV Chicago.

She has narrated seven Biography programs for A&E. Teichner is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Daughters of the American Revolution (Walter Hines Page chapter of London), the Reform Club in London, the Wellesley Club of New York, and both the New York and Charleston chapters of Les Dames d’Escoffier. Since 1995 she has served as moderator of “Conversations With ...” an interview series at the Spoleto Festival, U.S.A., the summer arts celebration in Charleston, S.C.

Teichner is the author of the upcoming nonfiction book When Harry Met Minnie, to be published by Celadon in early 2021. Teichner was born in Traverse City, Mich. She was graduated from Wellesley College in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in economics. She attended the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business Administration. Teichner resides in New York City.

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