This week as her special guests from the arts Ruth Copland is pleased to be interviewing Wallace Baine, award-winning journalist and writer, and Shmuel Thaler, award-winning photographer and author. Wallace and Shmuel have collaborated to produce a book The Creatives Among Us which celebrates the incredibly rich array of artists concentrated in Santa Cruz county in California. If you enjoy the interview, Wallace and Shmuel will be appearing at Bookshop Santa Cruz on November 23rd at 7 PM to discuss The Creatives Among Us.
Wallace Baine has been an arts writer, film critic, columnist and editor for the Santa Cruz Sentinel newspaper since 1991. He is a two-time winner of the National American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors ‘Excellence in Writing’ competition for his well-known Sunday column “Baine Street,” and has won several awards for his arts coverage from the California Newspaper Publishers Association. In addition, he was the winner of the City of Santa Cruz’s ArtWORKS Award for leadership in the arts in 2010. He has been host and director of the annual Gail Rich Awards, which started in 1997 honouring artists and arts supporters in the community in the Santa Cruz area. Wallace’s work has been syndicated in newspapers nationwide and his fiction has appeared in the Catamaran Literary Reader and the Chicago Quarterly Review. He is the author of the book Rhymes with Vain: Belabored Humor and Attempted Profundity and The Last Temptation of Lincoln, a collection of new short stories.” Wallace’s play, Oscar’s Wallpaper which premiered on stage in Santa Cruz in 2015 is adapted from one of the stories in this book.
Shmuel Thaler is an award-winning photographer who graduated from the film school at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. His photographs have been published in every leading newspaper in the United States as well as in numerous magazines including Time, Forbes and Business Week and viewed on CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News. He has been honored three times with awards in the prestigious National Press Photographers Association ‘Best of Photojournalism’ category, most recently in 2015, as well as receiving regional and state awards. Shmuel is the co-author of five children’s books, his photographs illustrating numerous books including his collaboration with George Levenson on ‘Bread Comes to Life’ and the classic ‘Pumpkin Circle’, which has more than 120,000 copies in print and is held by every major library system in the country. Shmuel’s photographic work has been exhibited in one-person shows and group shows. Shmuel has been a staff photographer at the Santa Cruz Sentinel newspaper since 1987.
Tune in Saturday 9-10 PM to find out more about the life and art of Wallace and Shmuel. For more info and to hear previous shows visit www.itsaquestionofbalance.com
