2022 Events

Torii Hunter has established himself as one of the top Major League Baseball players. Torii is a five-time Major League All-Star and the recipient of nine consecutive Gold Glove Awards for his accomplishments on the baseball diamond. In July 2016, Torii was inducted into the Minnesota Twins Hall of Fame.

Torii has always had a heart for philanthropy and has been dedicated to investing into his childhood community. Because of his charitable acts and outstanding accomplishments, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff in December 2014.

Since retiring from baseball in October 2015, Torii spends most of his time with, Katrina, his lovely wife of 24 years. The empty nesters have been opening new businesses, investing in small startups, and traveling the globe watching their sons play minor league baseball and Canadian football. When Torii’s not traveling, he is making memories with his grandchildren.

Spencer Hupp is a poet and critic from Little Rock. After graduating from Central High School in 2013, Spencer earned his BA at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN where he worked as an assistant editor for the Sewanee Review – the country’s oldest literary quarterly – from 2017 to 2020. He now lives in Baltimore and teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, from which he’ll take an MFA in May 2022. He also serves as a contributing editor to the Hopkins Review and Cortland Review.

Hupp’s poems – at once deadpan and profuse, caustic and rich with sound – deal with the dereliction of rural and suburban spaces, the isolation of people in those spaces, and the decline of vernacular language into jargon and buzzwords, with special attention to the Arkansas of his childhood. Hupp writes under the certain assumption that, as Les Murray said, “we are a language species.” As such, his language spans the widest possble range from detached observation, confession, and a “drawling kind of psychobabble.” Poems, essays and reviews appear or are forthcoming with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sewanee Review, Raritan, the New Criterion, the Honest Ulsterman, Literary Matters, Cortland Review, and the (London) Times Literary Supplement, among others. Hupp was most recently elected to the Johns Hopkins Society of Fellows in the Humanities and named a semifinalist in the 92Y Discovery Contest.

With musical guest The Salty Dogs

Started as a lark retro-country act, the quartet immediately found chemistry, along with a lot of joy, as they dug into their craft. Their sound has expanded over a decade and a half, from uber-twang and purist classic country to equal parts 1954 Nashville, 1961 Bakersfield, and 1972 Everywhere.

Dr. Jake Hertzog is a critically acclaimed guitarist, composer and educator whose career to-date has spanned ten albums as bandleader across jazz, rock and classical new music styles. He has toured throughout the U.S., Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and India and performed and recorded with a diverse cadre of artists including Randy Brecker, Ivan Neville, Mike Clarke, Blondie Chaplin, Anton Fig, Corey Glover, Barry Altschul, Dave Leibman, Ingrid Jensen and many others.

Hertzog’s many projects have included the Jake Hertzog Trio with Harvie S and Victor Jones — a jazz/rock group that has released five albums to wide acclaim and radio success and headlined venues such as The Blue Note in New York and Salo Jazz Festival in Finland. Hertzog’s rock group “The Young Presidents” has been featured on Vh1 and MTV as well as radio stations around the world. He also produced a documentary film about the making of their album “Coalition,” in collaboration with Grammy-winning producer Rob Fraboni (Rolling Stones, The Band).

Most recently, Hertzog released “Stringscapes: A Portrait of the World in Nylon and Steel” (2018) on Fretmonkey Records. This 12 movement through-composed work for two guitars co-features classical guitarist Yishai Fisher and is a unique blend of classical and jazz. He was awarded a fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council in 2018 for music composition for this project. His classical work also includes a solo guitar album, “Well Lit Shadow” (2016), a classical suite for solo electric guitar celebrating themes and images in particle physics.

For three years, Hertzog was musical director and lead guitarist for Nickelodeon’s The Naked Brothers Band stars, Nat and Alex Wolff. They headlined two major national tours and performed on national television shows including Good Morning America, The View, Nickelodeon’s Kids Choice Awards and The Today Show.

As an educator, Hertzog has been an artist-in-residence and guest clinician in colleges and conservatories in the U.S., Europe, Latin America and India. He created the instructional series “Hey Jazz Guy” for Guitar Player magazine and contributed over 30 articles to the publication. He currently serves as Jazz Area Coordinator as Assistant Professor of Guitar at the University of Arkansas.

Hertzog is a grand prize winner of the Montreux Jazz Guitar Competition, holds a performance degree from Berklee College of Music and a master’s degree from The Manhattan School of Music in New York. In additional to his musical work, Hertzog also holds a Ph.D. in higher education from the University of Arkansas. His research focuses on how higher music education is adapting to the digital music industry. Other research includes data use in the music industry, music ecosystems, and entrepreneurial pedagogy.

“An unapologetic brand of jazz-rock guitar that does not look back…”

— Mark Redlefsen, All About Jazz

Stephanie Smittle’s history of engagements includes howling in front of roaring amplifiers as a member of southern sludge rock group Iron Tongue, singing ancient chant as a cantor in a 200-year-old Episcopal church and slinking around stage in an avant-garde Kurt Weill opera.Her self-titled debut solo album is a collection of ten songs for voice and electric autoharp, which the Arkansas Democrat Gazette called “stunning” and “incandescent … a skilled and observant lyricist unafraid to express vulnerability and wonder and rage.” The Cave Springs, Arkansas, native has performed as a soloist with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra and Opera in the Ozarks, and has recorded two albums of genre-hopping original material with The Smittle Band

Alan Leveritt has been publisher of the Arkansas Times since its founding 47 years ago with $200 in capital. During the early years the only requirement to work at the Arkansas Times was another means of support. Leveritt drove a Yellow Cab at night for several years until retiring after a very bad night with four armed men in his cab. He lives on his great grandparents farm in north Pulaski County with two large dogs, two cats and a peacock named Lance. There he farms heirloom tomatoes, raspberries, elephant garlic and a variety of other crops for local restaurants and for sale at the Hillcrest Farmers Market onb Saturdays. He describes that as his night job. He loves Mexico where, as a young man, he spent three months hitchhiking on $150 and has been returning there annually for the past 50 years.

Stephanie S. Streett is executive director of the Clinton Foundation where she oversees the strategy and management of the Clinton Presidential Center. Stephanie oversees the Presidential Leadership Scholars program on behalf of the Clinton Foundation. She also serves as corporate secretary for the Clinton Foundation Board of Directors.

Streett served in the Clinton White House for eight years. Previously she worked on Capitol Hill as a staff member for the United States Senate Committee on the Budget.

Stephanie and her husband, Don Erbach, reside in Little Rock with their three daughters.

With musical guest The Salty Dogs

Started as a lark retro-country act, the quartet immediately found chemistry, along with a lot of joy, as they dug into their craft. Their sound has expanded over a decade and a half, from uber-twang and purist classic country to equal parts 1954 Nashville, 1961 Bakersfield, and 1972 Everywhere.

Kat Robinson is Arkansas’s food historian and most enthusiastic road warrior. The Little Rock-based author is the host of the Emmy- nominated documentary Make Room For Pie; A Delicious Slice of The Natural State and the Arkansas PBS show Home Cooking with Kat and Friends, as well as the host and producer of the 2021 documentary Arkansas Dairy Bars: Neat Eats and Cool Treats. She is a member of the Arkansas Food Hall of Fame committee, a co-chair of the Arkansas Pie Festival, and the Arkansas fellow to the National Food and Beverage Museum.

With musical guest The Salty Dogs

Started as a lark retro-country act, the quartet immediately found chemistry, along with a lot of joy, as they dug into their craft. Their sound has expanded over a decade and a half, from uber-twang and purist classic country to equal parts 1954 Nashville, 1961 Bakersfield, and 1972 Everywhere.

She has written eleven books on food, most notably Arkansas Food: The A to Z of Eating in The Natural State, an alphabetic guide to the dishes,delights and food traditions that define her home state. Two of her more recent travel guides, 101 Things to Eat in Arkansas Before You Die and 102 More Things to Eat in Arkansas Before You Die define the state’s most iconic and trusted eateries. Robinson’s Another Slice of Arkansas Pie: A Guide to the Best Restaurants, Bakeries, Truck Stops and Food Trucks for Delectable Bites in The Natural State outlines more than 400 places to find the dessert, an extraordinary accomplishment that took thousands of miles, hundreds of hours and so many bites to properly document and catalogue.

She shares her personal life experiences in A Bite of Arkansas: A Cookbook of Natural State Delights, the 2020 memoir and cookbook which offers 140 recipes made by and photographed herself. She also recently edited and contributed to the collection 43 Tables: An Internet Community Cookss During Quarantine.

In addition to this work, the nostalgic Arkansas Dairy Bars: Neat Eats and Cool Treats, the companion book for the Arkansas PBS television special of the same name, Robinson’s other 2021 work, Arkansas Cookery: Retro Recipes from The Natural State. In the book, she examines mid-century cookbooks from all over Arkansas. Robinson’s collection of more than 400 20th century cookbooks and research into common threads of shared recipes, cooking methods and flavors of the era has been brought together for this lovingly photographed collection of the foods previous generations brought to the table. The recipes, redacted and cooked with period methods at The Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow in Eureka Springs, were all shot on location.

Kat Robinson’s work has appeared in regional and national publications including Food Network, Forbes Travel Guide, Serious Eats, and AAA Magazines, among others. Her expertise in food research and Arkansas restaurants has been cited by Saveur, Eater, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Outline, and the Southern Foodways Alliance’s Gravy podcast, for her skills and talents related to food research and documentation.

Her efforts have been celebrated in articles by Arkansas Good Roads, Arkansas Business, 501 Life Magazine, the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. She has served as the keynote speaker for the South Arkansas Literary Festival and the Arkansas Library Association Conference and has spoken at the Six Bridges Literary Festival, Eureka Springs Books in Bloom and the Fayetteville True Lit Festival.

While she writes on food and travel subjects throughout the United States, she is best known for her ever-expanding knowledge of Arkansas food history and restaurant culture, all of which she explores on her 1200+ article website, TieDyeTravels.com.

Robinson’s journeys across Arkansas have earned her the title “road warrior,” “traveling pie lady,” and probably some minor epithets. Few have spent as much time exploring The Natural State, or researching its cuisine. “The Girl in the Hat” has been sighted in every one of Arkansas’s 75 counties, oftentimes sliding behind a menu or peeking into a kitchen.

Kat lives with daughter Hunter and partner Grav Weldon in Little Rock.

Witty, whimsical, wonderful. These words and more describe the creative world of Little Rock, Arkansas artist Jane F. Hankins. Born in Jonesboro, Jane has been a strong presence in the Arkansas artists community for over two decades. A visual artist, specializing in sculpture in porcelain and stoneware as well as drawing and painting, she is a designer for nationally marketed sculpture reproductions. An Arkansas native, Jane studied at the Memphis Art Academy, Arkansas State University, and the Arkansas Arts Center. She is a technically talented artist, who doesn’t take herself too seriously.

With musical guest The Salty Dogs

Started as a lark retro-country act, the quartet immediately found chemistry, along with a lot of joy, as they dug into their craft. Their sound has expanded over a decade and a half, from uber-twang and purist classic country to equal parts 1954 Nashville, 1961 Bakersfield, and 1972 Everywhere.

She has had numerous exhibitions and annual shows and was one of 10 artists chosen to exhibit in the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. She has shown at the Arkansas Arts Center in the Delta Show, Toys by Artists and Prints, Drawings and Crafts. She has also served on the Fine Arts Club Board.

Her work shows us that art does not have to be serious to be important. Jane says, “I like art that is approachable, and I believe that there is room for all kinds of art. A feminine theme is often present in my work – when I use that term – feminine, I’m referring to the divine aspects of the word, not just bein’ pretty and actin’ nice! Sometimes, I build entire stories around the characters I make and I get to know them better! I’m having great fun with the Little Old Ladies and Gents, as well as the Mavens of Madge’s Mobile Home Park. Remember, I’m laughing near them, not at them.”