Political satirist Mark Russell will share his wit and wisdom with residents of the Kanawha Valley Monday, Feb. 19, when the Festival of Ideas lecture series returns to Charleston for a second season. Jointly sponsored by The Charleston Gazette and West Virginia University, the free public forum will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the Charleston Civic Center Little Theater.

“WVU is pleased to once again partner with the Gazette to bring interesting and thought-provoking speakers to the capital city,”said WVU President David C. Hardesty Jr.”We have a similar series on the main campus in Morgantown that reaches our students and residents of north central West Virginia, but branching out into the southern part of the state is an important part of our mission.”

The bow-tied and bespeckled Russell finds humor in the latest-breaking news, especially the incongruities in Washington. Accompanying himself on his signature star-draped grand piano, the humorist pokes fun at conservatives and liberals alike as he”spins”news stories completely out of control.

Born in Buffalo, N.Y., Russell served in the Marines and had a couple of weeks of college before starting out as a piano player in a bar on Capitol Hill. There he poked fun at his customers, many of whom were politicians. For 20 years he was the resident comedian at Washingtons Shoreham Hotel, but now spends most of his time on the road getting his”message to the people.”

He can be seen every other month on PBS in”The Mark Russell Comedy Specials”and each Saturday on CNN s”Inside Politics Weekend.”He also writes a syndicated column for the Los Angeles Times that appears in more than 100 newspapers.

He is the former co-host of NBC s”Real People,”a once popular television series that featured regular people doing eccentric things.

Russells answer to the frequently asked question,”Do you have any writers?”is:”Oh yesI have 535. One hundred in the Senateand 435 in the House of Representatives.”

Last November, WVU and the Gazette brought a satirical review by the Washington comedy troupe, Capital Steps, to Charleston. It played to a full house, Hardesty noted, so it seems that in this national and state inaugural year, Mark Russell just might”hit the mark.”

Seating for the performance is limited, officials noted, and is on a first-come, first-served basis.

Also on tap for this years four-part Gazette-WVU series is a panel of Pulitzer Prize winners featuring American journalist David Halberstam set for Thursday, March 22, at 7:30 p.m. at the Embassy Suites Ballroom.

Halberstam won the Pulitzer at the age of 30 for his reporting on Vietnam while a reporter for the New York Times . A best-selling author, his latest book,”The Children,”chronicles the lives of eight young civil rights activists he met in 1960 as a reporter in the south. He is currently at work on a book about basketball superstar Michael Jordan.

His trilogy of books on power in America”The Best and the Brightest,”“The Powers That Be”and”The Reckoning”have helped define the later part of the century, biographers claim. They deal with, respectively, the path that the Kennedy-Johnson administrations used to take America to war in Vietnam, the dramatic and sudden rise of power in the media and the ascent of the Japanese rival economic superpower.

In 1997, an eight-part landmark series based on Halberstams book,”The Fifties,”was broadcast nationally on The History Channel.

Other panelists on March 22 are:

* Liz Balmesada of The Miami Herald , who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for columns on Cuban-American and Haitian issues. The Cuban-born writer is currently working on a screenplay with singer Gloria Estefan.

* Tom French, a feature writer for the St. Petersburg Times , who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for”Angels and Demons,”a project that chronicled a mother and her two daughters who were murdered when they came to Tampa Bay on vacation from their dairy farm in northwestern Ohio.

* Terry Wimmer, a former Gazette reporter, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 while at the Orange County (Calif.) Register as part of an investigative team that exposed theft and fraud at a fertility clinic. Wimmer is a 1976 WVU journalism graduate who returned to his alma mater to teach as the Shott Chair of Journalism.

Another Festival headliner coming to the Mountain State is poet, educator, historian and best-selling author Maya Angelou. She will speak Thursday, April 19, at 7:30 p.m. in Geary Auditorium, University of Charleston. Angelou is the author of”I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”and”The Heart of a Woman,”among others. She delivered President Bill Clinton’s inaugural poem,”On the Pulse of the Morning,”in January 1993.

Also a part of the spring series is a talk by Doris Kearns Goodwin, presidential historian, author and TV commentator, on Monday, May 7, at 7:30 p.m. at the Charleston Civic Center Little Theater.

Goodwin is a regular panelist on”The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer”and a former Harvard professor of government. She is the author of three best-selling biographies, including”No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt,”which won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for History, and”The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys,”made into a television mini-series. Her latest book, the memoir”Wait Till Next Year,”was also a best seller.

She is a former assistant to President Lyndon Johnson and often serves as a resource for PBS historic documentaries.

In addition to Capital Steps, last years Festival series in Charleston featured Vietnam War correspondents Peter Arnett and George Esper and author and war historian Stephen Ambroseall attended by capacity crowds.