American Prophets

Sponsor

We are grateful to 4 Culture for their grant to help sustain this archiving project.

Paul Nelson first started conducting interviews in his early radio days, Chicago 1980. In 1990 he was promoted to News & Community Affairs Director of KKNW (106.9 in Seattle) and over the next 14 years created nearly 500 hours of innovative and compelling public affairs radio programs. He continues to do interviews to this day and this is the main page for all his interview activity. It is updated regularly and thanks to a grant from 4Culture, we are digitizing our archives and posting links to the audio here.

Rupert Sheldrake

Building on his early interest in holistic medicine, his interviews soon began to see the holistic approach in all facets of life, as well as the

Allen Ginsberg

inadequacies of the industry-generated culture. In 1994 he interviewed Allen Ginsberg and three years later co-founded the Northwest SPokenword LAB in Auburn, Washington, now known as SPLAB.

Anne Waldman

American Prophets

If there was an “A” list of whole-systems luminaries, Paul interviewed many of them and is putting together a manuscript of some of the most fascinating interviews into a project called American Prophets. These are people who inherently understand some angle on the limitations of the materialist world view and the industry-generated culture it enables. In 2011, the Occupy movement was born, expressing outrage and indignation at the worst abuses of the military-industrial complex, but Paul was there in 1990, interviewing authors, poets and activists, all of whom had an angle on how things could be and how things were evolving past the notion of human as machine and the competition/domination ethos.

Jean Houston

Besides Allen Ginsberg, the archives created by Paul include interviews with David Abel, Cecile Andrews, Richard Atleo, Peter Balakian, Beaver Chief, Medea Benjamin, George Bowering, Shahar Bram, Trev Carolan, Wanda Coleman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Phyllis Curott, Bhagavan Das, John de Graaf, Gloria DeGaetano, Dominick DellaSala, Marita Dingus, Diane diPrima, Larry Dossey, Eric Drooker, George Draffan, Riane Eisler, Kurt Elling, Maria Amparo Escandon, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Gary Ferguson, Nikky Finney, Jack and Adelle Foley, Father Matthew Fox, Tom Frank, Emily Kendal Frey, Allen Ginsberg, Sallie Ann Glassman, Sam Hamill, Thom Hartmann, Andrew Harvey, Dennis William Hauck, Steven Hill,

Brenda Hillman, John Hogue, Jean Houston, Neil Jacobson, Sam Keen, Leslie Korn, Joanne Kyger, Frances Moore Lappe & Anna Lappe, Nate Mackey, Barb Maynes, Michael McClure, Corrine McLaughlin & Gordon Davidson, Russell Means, Erica Helm Meade, Michael Meade, Brooke Medicine Eagle, Ethelbert Miller, Kathleen Dean Moore, Michael Murphy, Eileen Myles, Loretta Napoleoni, Brett Nunn, James O’Dea, John Olson, Dan Pontbriand, Jamal Rahman, Paul Ray & Sherry Anderson, John Robbins, Jerome Rothenberg, Douglass Rushkoff, Rudy Ryser, Ed Sanders, Andrew Schelling, Leonard Schlain, Laura Simms,

Brenda Hillman

Rupert Sheldrake, Mona Lisa Schultz, Susan Starbuck, Hal & Sidra Stone, Robert Thurman, Judyth Reichenberg-Ullman & Robert Ullman, Wang Ping, Daniel Williams, Stephen Zunes,

Arun Gandhi

Michael Shuman, Ed Larson, David Montgomery, V.J. Vaitheeswaran, Arun Gandhi, Judith Orloff, Harriet Rubin, Jeffrey Hollander, Dawn Prince-Hughes, Solihin and Alicia Thom, Rudy Ryser,  Willie Smith, George Stanley, Anne Waldman, Wang Ping and Jerry Wennstrom and Marilyn Strong. Xi Chuan and also

Rudy Ryser

hear some poetry interviews and other SPLAB audio, here.