Writers Bloc, with thanks to the Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills, invites you to a special, exclusive evening with Elmore Leonard.

Elizabeth Taylor was gorgeous, sexy and magnificent. And on screen she clearly helped to create a fundamental discussion about women’s roles– in terms of sex, marriage, and personal identity.

Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC’s Hardball, is the ultimate savvy political insider. He served on the late House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill’s staff. He ran for Congress in Pennsylvania, and he didn’t win. He covered politics and international affairs for The San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner. In short, Chris Matthews inhales and exhales politics and the rest of us just breathe. He’s been attacked by the right, and by the left, and has engaged in battle with both parties. In a bit of a departure, Matthews has undertaken a biography– of President John F. Kennedy. He looks at Kennedy from the lens of a political animal, and concludes that JFK was heroic in many of the choices he made, and human, unsettling and troubled in some of his personal decisions. In his new book, Jack Kennedy, Elusive Hero, Matthews portrays Kennedy as a crusader for peace and civil liberties, and always on the edge.

The best person to really explain Spalding Gray is Spalding Gray. The man who transformed his life experience into art, into revelatory performance and theater, is one of the most difficult writers or artists to sum up on this Writers Bloc website. We can’t possibly.