Event Archive

Director Pedro Almodovar has created a traditional “women’s picture” -- but with the sort of twists we expect from the "bad boy" of Spanish cinema. Marisa Paredes plays a writer of romantic best-sellers who finds her marriage falling apart and her career threatened.

This year’s symposium examines the history and legacy of the American Civil Rights movement. At 9 a.m. Tufts University’s Leslie Brown examines the early years of civil rights activism. At 10 a.m. the University of South Carolina’s Patricia Sullivan explores the pivotal year 1963 and the March on Washington. A Kansas City Civil Rights Roundtable convenes at 11:30 a.m., and a panel discussion begins at 12:30 p.m.

Symposium workshops are ideal for teachers in grades kindergarten through 12th, but the public is welcome to attend.

Its reputation is that of America’s incorruptible police force. Yet the primary mission of the FBI is secret intelligence, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tim Weiner. In his new book Weiner reveals how presidents have used the agency as the most formidable intelligence force in American history, and how the bureau has spied on anyone it considers subversive … including presidents.

The FBI’s secret intelligence and surveillance techniques have created a tug-of-war between national security and civil liberties, creating a tension that strains the very fabric of a free society.

Dean Young, this year's Carolyn S. Benton Cockefair Chair Writer-in-Residence at UMKC, reads from his poetry and discusses his work during a public conversation with Angela Elam of KCUR's New Letters on the Air.

Young's poetry has been described "as entertaining as a three-ring circus and as imaginative as a canvas by Hieronymus Bosch." Using surrealist techniques like collage, he often blurs the boundaries between reality and imagination.