Advertise on podcast: Twenty Summers

Experience an intimate and engaging event with Ari Shapiro and Joshua Prager at the Hawthorne Barn, closing out our 2025 Season. Take a closer look at Ari’s voice, perspective, and storytelling, filled with insight, nuance, and memorable moments.

Get ready for an unforgettable moment as powerhouse band Glitterfox light up the Hawthorne Barn in a show-stopping takeover you won’t want to miss. Captured live during Twenty Summers’ Season Twelve, this newly released video brings all the energy, magic, and raw electricity straight to your screen—press play and experience it for yourself. The Portland, OR based band Glitterfox has released five singles in just six months under their new record label Kill Rock Stars, with two more arriving this Spring. The band’s been growing steadily since “Drive” came out in August 2023, with their indie rock recipe that deftly balances Southern songwriting shine and nostalgia-fueled anthems. The four-piece band’s songwriters and front persons, married couple Solange Igoa and Andrea Walker, have always channeled their personal struggles as well as experiences as queer, neurodiverse individuals into their songwriting. Bassist Eric Stalker and drummer Blaine Heinonen bring a love of Americana, grunge, and dance music into the mix. All of these influences can be heard on the band’s latest singles, produced by Chris Funk of The Decemberists, and in their spirited live shows as they prepare for their full-length album debut in 2025.

Australian-born Geraldine Brooks is an author and journalist who grew up in the Western suburbs of Sydney, attending Bethlehem College Ashfield and the University of Sydney. She worked as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald for three years as a feature writer with a special interest in environmental issues. Later she worked for The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. In 1990, with her husband Tony Horwitz, she won the Overseas Press Club Award for best coverage of the Gulf War. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for her novel March. Her novels People of the Book, Caleb’s Crossing, The Secret Chord and Horse all were New York Times Bestsellers. Her first novel, Year of Wonders is an international bestseller, translated into more than 25 languages. She is also the author of the nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire, Foreign Correspondence and The Idea of Home. Her latest book, Memorial Days was released in 2024.

Enjoy dynamite talent Michael Mayo's concert at the Hawthorn Barn from June 2025 as part of our Season 12 programming. Michael Mayo leans on his intuition as a vocalist, composer, songwriter, and arranger. Much like molding and shaping a sculpture out of clay, he stretches his voice through layers of heavenly harmonizing, hard-hitting beatboxing, and heartfelt crooning. The Los Angeles-based phenomenon creates from the heart without filter or pretense, allowing his voice to transmit raw emotion above an ever-evolving backdrop of jazz, neo-soul, and R&B on his second full-length LP, Fly [Mack Avenue Records/Artistry Music], and more to come.

Ashley Gilbertson joins filmmaker Michael Cestaro at Stanley to discuss his recent exhibition alongside photographer Franco Pagetti, as well as his life, travels, and career as a photographer and writer.

Sit down with lawyer Chase Strangio and artist Celeste Lecesne to revisit some of Chase's most impactful moments, and how these two amazing individuals will look to the future with hope, determination, and love.

Kioea (pronounced kēōˈāə) is a music group featuring Carand Burnet (she/her) as lead guitarist and songwriter. Their music blends sounds of surf rock, psychedelia, and global influences. J. Swartwood (Aquarium Drunkard) described Burnet’s music as “simultaneously modern and vintage.” Kioea has played at 3S Artspace, The Music Hall, The Thing in the Spring Festival, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, SPACE Gallery, WMUR Summer Concert Series, and elsewhere. Burnet received a Maine ARP Grant through SPACE Gallery and the National Endowment for the Arts, which supported the making of Kioea’s album Stand Tall.

There is no separating equality from ecology, which knows that no member of any natural system has more value than another. In a world of polycrises, what does it mean for activism to be a daily necessity? How can we more deeply integrate it into our lives, allowing our values to shape a more fulfilling and joyful existence? This discussion will bring together advocates who are reframing how we talk about social and environmental justice—and what it means to be an embodied activist.

‘Milk Tea Opera House’ is an initiative to create opportunities to influence more voices, to awaken them, and to guide them. It is vital to be able to experience more voices and together we ask this question: Where does voice come from, and how does it represent you? JU-EH creates a live Milk Tea Opera House Session, along with Twenty Summers, to co-create new kinds of interactive spaces from where the voice is born, redefining the term ‘opera house’ for the next 100 years. The main practice of an MTOH Session focuses on the human voice, and exercise how we use the voice internally in different dimensions. Not the finished flawless performances of an opera singer, but the internal handling of the voice in a much wider spectrum. With this knowledge that JU-EH has lived, studied, and embodied for decades, it is time to collaborate to reveal the depth of our sonic environments, and the image of voice in various daily activities to a wider creative community.