This year's Deep Water Literary Festival launches with a keynote performance by Jad Abumrad, founder of Radiolab. As anyone familiar with his work will know, “keynote” may be too tidy a word for what’s in store.
Beginning with the single surviving audio recording of Virginia Woolf, this new live piece explores what happens when language can no longer keep pace with the age. Woolf, speaking into a microphone in the aftermath of war and amid the shocks of new technology, becomes the starting point for a wide-ranging, idiosyncratic journey through artists and writers grappling with moments when time itself seems to lurch off its axis.
From 24-hour Beethoven to a slowed-down Psycho, from modernism to AI image-making, Abumrad follows a series of “time-quakes” across the last century, asking what happens to the people most sensitive to the tremors—and how art changes when the old forms no longer fit.
Date
Jun 19, 7:30pm to 8:30pm
Featuring
Jad Abumrad
Jad Abumrad is a Peabody Award-winning broadcaster, composer, and storyteller, best known as the creator of Radiolab and More Perfect. His other acclaimed audio projects include Dolly Parton’s America, UnErased, The Vanishing of Harry Pace, and Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, which won a 2025 Peabody Award. Across his work, Abumrad has helped redefine the possibilities of narrative audio, blending journalism, music, and ideas in ways that are both intellectually ambitious and formally inventive. He is the recipient of three Peabody Awards and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2011. He is currently a Distinguished Research Professor at Vanderbilt University.
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Featuring
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