On the next Kentucky Author Forum Presents , author and journalist Lawrence Wright discusses his new book, The Looming Tower : al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 , with professor and journalist Peter Bergen. The program airs Sunday, June 17 at 10/9 p.m. CT on KET2.

Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a fellow at the Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law. He also co-wrote the screenplay for The Siege , starring Denzel Washington. He is currently working on a script about John O'Neill, the former head of the FBI's New York office of counterterrorism, who died on 9/11.

Wright conducted more than 500 interviews for The Looming Tower , ranging from Osama bin Laden's best friend in college and reporters for Al-Jazeera, to former White House counter-terrorism advisor Richard A. Clarke. By interweaving the lives of four men -- the two leaders of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri; the FBI's counterterrorism chief, O'Neill; and the former head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal -- he reveals the crosscurrents of modern Islam and the birth of al-Qaeda.

Wright is interviewed by CNN's terrorism analyst Peter Bergen, whose most recent book is The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al-Qaeda ' s Leader . In 1997, as a producer for CNN, he obtained bin Laden's first television interview. Bergen is also a professor at Johns Hopkins University .

Kentucky Author Forum Presents: A Conversation with Lawrence Wright is a KET production. The producer-director is Duncan Hart; Nancy Carpenter serves as executive producer. The author's appearance in Louisville was produced by the Kentucky Author Forum (Mary Moss Greenebaum, producer) and sponsored by the University of Louisville, in partnership with Brown-Forman and The Humana Foundation.