Editor’s Note: Paula Vogel is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. She has written The Baltimore Waltz, How I Learned to Drive, Hot N Throbbing, Desdemona, The Mineola Twins, The Long Christmas Ride Home, And Baby Makes Seven and The Oldest Profession. Elena Mora conducted this interview.

Editor's Note: LaQuetta Nelson is the chair of the board of directors of the Newark Pride Alliance in Newark, New Jersey. She is a former officer of Local 1377 of the Amalgamated Transit Union, a military veteran and a foudner of the New Jersey Stonewall Democrats. Last November she received a national award given to outstanding grass roots activists from the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force.

Editor’s note: Howard Wallace is a long-time peace activist, trade union organizer, senior advocate and gay rights activist. He has been a Teamster and recently retired as a leader in Local 250 of SEIU, a large health care union in Northern California. He currently works with Senior Action building support among seniors, the lesbian and gay community and labor for health care reform and rights for health care workers. He also helped found Pride at Work, a constituency group affiliated with the AFL-CIO.

Editor’s Note: Bertell Ollman is a professor of political science at New York University. He worked in the middle 1960s as an adviser to the Michael Manly government in Jamaica. He invented the board game Class Struggle. He is the author of numerous books on Marxism, most recently, How to Take and Exam…and Remake the World, Ballbuster?: True Confessions of a Marxist Businessman, and Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marxist Methods.

We writers have a passionate love affair with words – words that quite often don’t just get on the page but [actually] jump out at you.

Editors note: PA science editor Prasad Venugopal interviewed members of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal last April. Bhopal, India is the site of one of the worst industrial disasters in history. Over 18 years later the people of Bhopal are still demanding justice. Venugopal spoke with Krishnaveni Gundu and Nityanand Jayaraman. Readers can find out more at the ICJB website: www.bhopal.net.

PA: Is theater tackling today’s big ideas and issues?

OE: Perhaps more than some people give it credit for, but never enough...

Kathryn Blume, co-founder of the Lysistrata Project, an internationally successful theatrical act of dissent, has written and is performing a new play, The Accidental Activist, the debut production for her fledgling theater company, Mighty Ruckus.

Jaribu Hill is the director of the Mississippi Workers' Center for Human Rights in Greenville, Mississippi. She spoke with Political Affairs in May 2003.

Editor’s Note: Mike Ferner spent the month of February 2003 in Baghdad and Basra, with Voices in the Wilderness. He is Communications Coordinator for the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy and a member of Veterans for Peace. His articles have appeared in CounterPunch, truthout.org and Common Dreams.

"Our reform and innovation process arose from the fact that we made some quite serious mistakes. The first mistake was a simplistic understanding of socialism. Vietnam was at best at the beginning of the transition period. At that time we wanted to build pure socialism instantly."

Author/activist Robin D. G. Kelley teaches at Columbia University in New York City. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe and Freedom Dreams. He is currently working on a book on musician Thelonius Monk.

Editor’s Note: Paris is a Bay-area artist who has made a big impact on Hip-hop as an independent artist through his use of the Internet as an organizing tool for political activism as well as making his work available to the public. His most recent album, Sonic Jihad, was released last summer. Most recently, he has come under fire for his criticism of Bush’s perpetual “war on terrorism” and on Iraq.

Bill Fletcher is the president of TransAfrica Forum, a founder of United for Peace and Justice and the Black Radical Congress. This interview was conducted by Debbie Bell.

Editor’s Note: David Levering Lewis won two Pulitzer Prizes for his two-volume biography of W. E. B. Du Bois titled, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 and W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963. Lewis also authored the noted study of the Harlem Renaissance, When Harlem Was in Vogue. He also wrote the widely read biography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., King: A Biography. Additionally, he has written a book on the scramble for Africa, The Race to Fashoda, and a study of the Dreyfus affair, Prisoners of Honor. He is a Martin Luther King, Jr. University Professor in the Department of History at Rutgers University. He sits on the board of directors of The Crisis magazine in New York. This interview was conducted by Joel Wendland.

Editor’s Note: Russell Banks is the widely acclaimed author of over a dozen novels and collections of short stories, including Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter, Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, and Success Stories. He helped organize a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society at the University of North Carolina in the 1960s. He recently retired from teaching creative writing at Princeton University. Two of his novels, Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter, have been made into acclaimed films. A third, Cloudsplitter, is in the works with HBO. Banks was interviewed by Joel Wendland.

Editor’s note: Robert Meeropol, executive director of the Rosenberg Fund for Children, talks about his recently published memoir An Execution in the Family, the 50th anniversary of the execution of his parents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and the relevance of defending civil rights and liberties. The Rosenberg Fund for Children provides for the educational and emotional needs of children of targeted progressive activists, and youth who are targeted activists themselves.

Editor’s note: Most well-known for his mystery fiction, Walter Mosley is also the author of numerous social commentary books, including most recently What Next. He has also published science fiction such as Futureland and Bluelight. This interview was conducted by Libero Della Piana.

Editor’s note: Iranian writer Farnoosh Moshiri is the author of two novels, At the Wall of the Almighty (Interlink Publishers) and The Bathhouse (Black Heron Press/Beacon Press). Her recently published collection of short stories is called The Crazy Dervish and the Pomegranate Tree and was put out by Black Heron Press in October. After the revolution that overthrew the Shah in 1979, Moshiri, who had just received her Masters degree in drama from the University of Iowa, returned to Iran. She taught at the College of Dramatic Arts and worked as a dramaturge for the Theatre Division of the Ministry of Culture and Art. She also was politically active and a member of The Council of Writers and Artists of Iran and Women’s Organization. When the fundamentalists seized power by 1981, she was labeled “an enemy of God” and was forced to flee with her two year-old son. “This marked the end of my career as an Iranian playwright,” she says. She teaches college English in Houston, Texas.

Sam Webb was elected national chair of the Communist Party USA at the 27th National Convention held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 2001. He is formerly of Detroit, Michigan. In this interview he dicusses views on socialism that are being developed for a major essay on the subject. He invites readers to please send in their comments on the ideas in this interview.