This reel contains unedited interviews with Erica Jong and John Simon. Please see "An Evening of Forbidden Books" for the aired and edited version.

This is a reading of imprisoned, banned, or exiled writers, in which Joseph Brodsky, Hiber Conteris, Toni Morrison, Sigourney Weaver, Edward Said and others read from works of Miklós Radnóti, Isaac Babel, Reza Baraheni, Breyten Breytenbach, Osip Mandelstam, NgÅ©gÄ© wa Thiong'o, Ghassan Kanafani, Tawfiq Ziad, Mahmoud Darwish, César Vallejo, Václav Havel, Euripides, Irina Ratushinskaya, Eduardo Galeano, Mila D. Aguilar, Adam Michnik, Nâzım Hikmet, Primo Levi, Pablo Antonio Cuadra, Nguyễn Chí Thiện, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Kim Chiofha.

McCrary Bond feels that lesbian writing should address lesbianism as subject and she writes about "independent female sexuality and women independent from men." Kantrowitz notes that "When I came out as a lesbian and stopped caring what men thought of me I was able to write...something about that claiming of my own power made me also able to write about everything else in the world." Dorothy Allison says "Like most of the working class writers I know I juggle my life to survive. I'm doing a helluva lot better than at it than I've ever done. I intend to continue." And that she "write(s) for people who get the joke." Finally, Breedlove comments that she cannot separate the personal from the political, and that she writes for African American lesbian women and for the people that are difficult to reach. She then sings and reads a poem 'The New Miss Praise The Lord'" from her book.

This panel, the second of the day, is entitled "Present and Future." The panel is co-sponsored by CLAGS and PEN America and the moderator notes that it is a rare lesbian focused event (not Gay and, Feminist and etc.). Each panelist speaks briefly about how they position themselves in terms of lesbian literature and also how their lesbian identity influences their work. They speak about who they address as audience and note the scarcity of but importance of lesbian publishers and agents. Everyone talks about what they read and what literature inspires them. Nicole Breedlove, the youngest participant, comments on the whiteness of both the panel and the room but she insists that is not representative of the community of African American poets.

Wasserstein, Gurney, and Hwang discuss the nuances of playwriting, including the financial strains playwrights face at that time with lack of government (NEA) funding of the performing arts.