Photo © Janette Beckman

• About this Author

author spotlight

Anna Deavere Smith is an actor, a teacher, a playwright, and the creator of an acclaimed series of one-woman plays based on her interviews with diverse voices from communities in crisis. She has won two Obie Awards, two Tony nominations for her play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, and a MacArthur Fellowship, and she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her play Fires in the Mirror. She has had roles in the films Philadelphia, An American President, and The Human Stain, and she has worked in television on The Practice, Presidio Med, and The West Wing. She is the founder and director... Read More

author bookshelf

Fires in the Mirror

Written by Anna Deavere Smith

Format: Trade Paperback, 208 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: September 1, 1993
Price: $14.00

In monologues based on interviews with 26 subjects ranging from The Reverend Al Sharpton and Professor Leonard Jeffries, to Rabbi Joseph Speilman and Norman Rosenbaum (Yankel Rosenbaum's brother) to several men-and-women-on-the-street, Smith exposes and explores the black-Jewish tensions that erupted into outrage in the streets of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1991... Read more >

House Arrest and Piano
Two Plays
Written by Anna Deavere Smith

Format: Trade Paperback, 304 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: April 13, 2004
Price: $13.00

From the award-winning actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith, two teeming, pungent cross-sections of the American experience.

In the provocative and at times bitterly funny play House Arrest, Smith examines the relationships between a succession of American presidents and their observers in and out of the press. Arcing from Clinton and Monica... Read more >

House Arrest and Piano
Two Plays
Written by Anna Deavere Smith

Format: eBook
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: January 13, 2010
Price: $13.00

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Letters to a Young Artist
Straight-up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts-For Actors, Performers, Writers, and Artists of Every Kind
Written by Anna Deavere Smith

Format: Trade Paperback, 240 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: January 24, 2006
Price: $13.95

From Anna Deavere Smith here is brass-tacks advice to aspiring artists of all stripes, in the tradition of Rilke's classic Letters to a Young Poet.

Hailed as a pioneering force in American theater for her signature documentary style of performance, Anna Deavere Smith here looks back on lessons from thirty years of... Read more >

Letters to a Young Artist
Straight-up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts-For Actors, Performers, Writers, and Artists of Every Kind
Written by Anna Deavere Smith

Format: eBook, 240 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: December 10, 2008
Price: $13.95

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Talk to Me
Travels in Media and Politics
Written by Anna Deavere Smith

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: October 16, 2001
Price: $14.00

Believing that character and language are inextricably bound, Smith sets out to discern the essence of America by listening to its people and trying to capture its politics. To that end she travels to some of America's most conspicuous places, like the presidential conventions of 1996, and some of its darkest... Read more >

Talk to Me
Listening Between the Lines
Written by Anna Deavere Smith

Format: eBook
Publisher: Random House
On Sale: January 18, 2001
Price: $14.00

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Twilight
Los Angeles, 1992
Written by Anna Deavere Smith

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: March 15, 1994
Price: $14.95

Stanford professor Anna Deavere Smith has performed her hard-hitting, sociologically probing "documentary theater" stage pieces Fires in the Mirror and Twilight on campuses and in theaters nationwide, receiving critical praise and accolades from every quarter. Available here in book form with complete text and photographs, the productions document changes in racial... Read more >