Lea Carpenter

Lea Carpenter was a Founding Editor of Francis Ford Coppola’s literary magazine, Zoetrope. She graduated from Princeton and has an MBA from Harvard. Her Harvard University Commencement Address, “Auden and The Little Things,” was about the need for poetry in our lives. She lives in New York with her husband and son where she produces programming for the New York Public Library. She formerly wrote the Think, See, Feel blog for BigThink.

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Author posts

A SEAL’s smartest weapon, like a scholar’s, is his mind: his capacity to assess complex situations. This assessment is then coupled with the courage to achieve a given goal, and the humility to move on quietly to the next task.

New forms of writing will bring, as they always have, new ideas and new elements of creative genius.

This is Twilight, for poets. It’s not designed to fly over your head; it’s designed as to shoot straight to your heart.

Between the WikiLeaks scandal and the ongoing crisis in the Middle East, Frederick Siedel's "Our Gods" is the perfect poem for our times.

Amidst the radical change in the Middle East, JFK's first inaugural address remains a prescient reminder that our nation is founded upon the ideals of revolution and social progress.

Is evidence of shorter sentences—or no sentences at all—evidence of shallower emotions? “A kind of death of the sentence by collective neglect,” is how Adam Haslett puts it.

Making America fall in love with Don Draper is dangerous, because we will want to be him, or be with him, and both of these will bring moral compromise.