This inspiring collection, which includes Smith's 2007 commencement address at Bates College, draws from the best commencement speeches of recent years, revealing important life lessons about navigating successfully through life and being true to oneself. The advice is illuminating, surprising, thought-provoking, and funny. Creating a Life You'll Love is essential reading for everyone who is seeking the secret to living life wisely and well. (March 27, 2009)

Smith looks back on lessons learned from thirty years of acting and teaching to help a new generation of artists and performers begin a life in the arts on the right foot. Here, she offers advice on everything from how to present oneself and how to stay healthy, to building a diverse network of friends and professional alliances, all while keeping the hard realities of life-as-a-business constantly in mind. A motivating example for how to take lessons away from every life experience, and pursue one's art without compromise. (January 26, 2006)

In the provocative and at times bitterly funny play House Arrest, Smith examines the relationships between a succession of American presidents and their observers in and out of the press. In Piano, Smith casts her gaze back a century as she follows the tangled lines of race, sex, and exploitation in a prosperous Cuban household on the eve of the Spanish-American War.

(excerpt from inside flap, Anchor, 2004)

In Talk to Me, Anna Deavere Smith looks back at a singular career as a seeker and interpreter of language in America, revealing the methodology behind her extraordinary search for the truth and nuances of verbal communication. For thirty years, the defining thesis of Smith's work has been that how we speak is just as important in communicating truth and identity as what we say. Everything from individual vocal tone to grammar, Smith demonstrates, can be as identifiable and revealing as a fingerprint.

Fires in the Mirror is a combination of complete playscript, background material, and photographs presenting a tour-de-force solo performance dealing with the Crown Heights racial riots, offering a documentary picture of contemporary ethnic unrest.

Twilight is Anna Deavere Smith's stunning work of "documentary theater," in which she uses verbatim the words of people who experienced the Los Angeles riots to expose and explore the devastating human impact of the event.