The Coffee House

Hosts and Contributors

Mark Cohen
Angela J. Davis
David Eisner
Fred Feinstein
Reuben Jackson

Howard Kohn
Cathy Kristiansen
Liz Lerman
E. Ethelbert Miller
Jamie Raskin
Mike Tidwell

Mark Cohen is the producer of The Coffee House and the host of the Forum segment. Mark is also a filmmaker ("We Are All Smith Islanders" 2004), and a lawyer. He is the Executive Director of the Government Accountability Project, a non-profit that defends corporate and governmental whistleblowers, and promotes occupational free speech and institutional transparency. Mark is a former public radio news director and professor of communications. He holds a masters degree in international and comparative law from the Georgetown University Law Center and a law degree from the Antioch School of Law. Mark served on the legal staffs of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the National Association of Attorneys General. He also served as managing editor of an environmental law journal and senior correspondent for an audio legal news service. Mark is a Board member of the Washington area Inter-Faith Families Project. He is married to Cathy Kristiansen, and they have two sons, Ross and Tate.

Angela J. Davis, host of Courting Justice, is a professor of law at American University's Washington College of Law. She previously served as director of the D.C. Public Defender Service and as executive director of the National Rainbow Coalition. Angela was awarded a Soros Senior Justice Fellowship in 2003 and is the author of Arbitrary Justice: The Power of the American Prosecutor (Oxford University Press 2007).
She is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Peter M. Cicchino Social Justice Foundation, the Frederick Douglas Jordan Scholarship Board, the Southern Center for Human Rights, and the Sentencing Project. She won the American University Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching in a Full-Time Appointment in 2002.

David Eisner, host of Musical Traditions, is the president of the renowned music store in Takoma Park (MD), the House of Musical Traditions. David is also Board president of the not-for-profit, Institute of Musical Traditions, which has offered a popular Monday night concert series for over 20 years. David runs sound for the IMT series and at the Kennedy Center, and was recently nominated for a GRAMMY as an audio engineer and producer. He has also served on the Board of the Folklore Society of Greater Washington since 1984, and on the Board of the Silver Spring (MD) YMCA. David is a perennial basketball coach in several Montgomery County (MD) recreation leagues. Although he moved to this area in 1966, David still maintains his New York baseball loyalties, with a son, Mattingly, named after ex-Yankee Don Mattingly. David is married to Amy Maloney.

Fred Feinstein, host of WorkLife, was general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, the nation's chief labor law prosecutor, for nearly six years during the Clinton Administration. During that time, Fred received four "Hammer Awards" for innovations in the operations of the Office of the General Counsel. Before that, he served for 17 years as chief labor counsel and staff director of the U.S. House of Representatives Labor-Management Relations Subcommittee. Fred is currently a visiting professor and senior fellow in the Office of Executive Programs at the University of Maryland at College Park, where he teaches, writes on labor issues and develops executive education programs. He is also a member of the popular Cajun band, Squeeze Bayou. Fred is married to musician and teacher Karen Collins, and they have two children, Emma and Sam.

Reuben Jackson, host of Writers' Bloc, has worked as archivist with the Smithsonian Institution's Duke Ellington Collection since April 1989. He is also a poet whose first book of verse (entitled fingering the keys) was chosen by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Brodsky for the 1992 Columbia Book Award. Reuben has also worked as a music critic for The Washington Post, National Public Radio, Jazziz, and Jazz Times magazines, and has given talks on the music of Jimi Hendrix, Claude Thornhill, Curtis Mayfield, Wayne Shorter, Duke Ellington, Marvin Gaye, and Earth, Wind and Fire at the Smithsonian's Museum of American History, the Library of Congress, Georgetown University, and the University of Virginia, among other venues. Reuben also contributed to the Peabody-Award-winning radio series, "Making the Music," hosted by Wynton Marsalis, and has discussed the music and legacy of Duke Ellington on such varied media venues Radio Austria, BET and CNN.

Howard Kohn, the host of a Second Look, is the author of three highly acclaimed books: His memoir, The Last Farmer, runner-up for a Pulitzer; Who Killed Karen Silkwood?, which led to the Meryl Streep movie; and We Had a Dream, a non-fiction story that examines the afterlife of the civil rights movement in Prince George's County (MD). Howard was a staff writer at Rolling Stone Magazine, and is still an occasional contributor. His work has also been published in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Esquire, Mother Jones and other periodicals. He served five years as bureau chief of the Center for Investigative Reporting. Howard is also Commissioner of the Takoma Park Neighborhood Youth Soccer league, and helped spearhead the construction of the new Montgomery Blair High School and the Takoma Park Community Center. He lives with his wife Diana; they have two children, Jennifer and Gregory.

Cathy Kristiansen, host of the consumer health and medicine segment, In Sickness & In Health, is the editor of "Endocrine News," a publication of The Endocrine Society. She's a former senior correspondent for Knight-Ridder Financial News. Cathy earned an MA equivalent in journalism at City University in London, and went on to work in financial journalism in London, Paris, and Chicago before coming to Washington, DC to cover the Federal Reserve, Congress, and the White House. Cathy is of European ancestry but grew up in Africa. Her husband, Mark Cohen, and she have two sons, Ross and Tate, and three chickens.

Liz Lerman, host of In Step, is a choreographer, performer, educator, writer, and frequent public speaker. She founded the Takoma Park-based Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976, and has cultivated the company’s unique multi-generational ensemble into a leading force in contemporary dance. In 2002 her work was recognized with a MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship, and she was recently designated for the National Foundation for Jewish Culture’s Achievement Award and induction into the University of Maryland’s Alumni Hall of Fame. Liz’s work has been commissioned by Lincoln Center, American Dance Festival, Harvard Law School, and the Kennedy Center, among many others. With the Dance Exchange, she has conducted performances at unique sites such as the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and the Museum of the Chicago Historical Society. Liz holds a Masters Degree in dance from George Washington University. She is married to storyteller Jon Spelman. Their daughter, Anna Clare, was born in 1988.

E. Ethelbert Miller is the author of numerous essays, poetry collections and anthologies. His most recent book is How We Sleep on the Nights We Don't Make Love (Curbstone Press 2004). Ethelbert has been director of Howard University's African American Resource Center since 1974. He is also a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars at Bennington College. Ethelbert is a current and founding member of the Humanities Council of Washington, DC, and Board chairman of the Institute for Policy Studies. He is also affiliated with the African American Review, Arts & Letters: Journal of Contemporary Culture, Callaloo, Black Issues Book Review, and Poet Lore magazine. Ethelbert was awarded the 1995 O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize, and he recently was awarded a Fulbright to lecture in Israel. Ethelbert is married to Rev. Denise King-Miller, and has two children, Jasmine-Simone and Nyere-Gibran.

Jamie Raskin is a Democratic State Senator in Maryland representing District 20 (Silver Spring and Takoma Park) and serving on the Senate's Judicial Proceedings Committee. He is also a professor of constitutional law at American University's Washington College of Law and Director of its Program on Law and Government and its Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project. The Washington Post has described Raskin as the Maryland Senate's “authority on constitutional issues”. The Silver Spring Voice called him the “whiz kid” of the General Assembly, and the Takoma Voice, in its “Best of the Best” readers choice issue, named him Montgomery County's 2007 “Most Responsive Elected Official.”

Author and filmmaker Mike Tidwell has been on the environmental beat for more than a decade. His five books include Amazon Stranger (detailing efforts to save the Ecuadorian rainforest) and Bayou Farewell (about the rapidly disappearing wetlands of coastal Louisiana). Mike is also a documentary filmmaker (“We Are All Smith Islanders”) and co-host of "EarthBeat," a weekly show on WPFW radio (89.3 FM) in Washington. Mike founded and directs the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, a grassroots nonprofit dedicated to fighting global warming. His home is fueled almost entirely by wind, solar and corn power, and is regularly opened to the public as a community laboratory. In 2003, Mike received Audubon Naturalist Society's “Conservation Award.” Mike lives in Takoma Park, MD with his eight-year-old son Sasha and their two cats, Ulysses and Phinny.

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