This episode is presented in conjunction with our special exhibit Level Up: Writers & Gamers, on display now through May 2025 at the American Writers Museum. Level Up explores the role of narrative and storytelling in gaming, from the 1970s to today. Timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of fantasy tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, Level Up enriches visitors' understanding of writing through fun and interactive formats, inspires young people to try a new form of writing, and encourages exploration of the worlds created through games. Join the adventure today!

This conversation originally took place May 19, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Festival.

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About the panelists:

KEITH AMMANN is an ENNIE Award–winning writer based in Chicago. He’s the author of several books of advice for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons players, including The Monsters Know What They’re Doing: Combat Tactics for Dungeon Masters, MOAR! Monsters Know What They’re Doing, and most recently How to Defend Your Lair, all published by Saga Press, and has written the blog The Monsters Know What They’re Doing since 2016. He’s been a role-playing gamer and game master for more than thirty years. He likes to play outwardly abrasive helpers, out-of-their-element helpers, and genuinely nice, helpful helpers. Mostly, though, he plays non-player characters. And monsters.

DEREK TYLER ATTICO is a science fiction author, essayist, and photographer. He won the Excellence in Playwriting Award from the Dramatist Guild of America. Derek is also a two-time winner of the Star Trek Strange New Worlds short story contest, published by Simon and Schuster. He is the author of the bestselling, critically acclaimed Star Trek Autobiography of Benjamin Sisko from Titan Books. With a degree in English and History, Derek is an advocate of the arts, human rights, and inclusion. He can be found at DerekAttico.com and on social media platforms under the handle @Dattico.

KEISHA HOWARD is best known as the creator of Sugar Gamers, the world’s longest-running gaming & tech community geared toward inclusivity. What began as a multicultural gamer group is now an award-winning organization that supports it’s inclusive membership in finding their place in the rapidly growing industry, facilitating Sugar Gamers’ evolution from video game enthusiasts to game developers, writers, testers, voice and mo-cap actors, artists and designers. A consummate futurist, Keisha recognizes the potential for video games to transcend their role as entertainment and become a mechanism for inspiration and social change. As a true “geek of all trades” and first-wave gaming and esports influencer, Keisha’s experience spans from introducing game design/media literacy to underprivileged youth, such as her partnership with Adidas and the NBA on tech advocacy activations, to consulting Microsoft’s XBOX division as well as Logitech, Google, and Meta on Inclusive Game Strategy. A two-time TEDx Speaker, she is infectiously passionate and aut]]> false no 00:50:07 No no https://americanwritersmuseum.org/podcast/episode-191-freedom-to-read/ Mon, 23 Sep 2024 18:23:12 +0000 https://americanwritersmuseum.org/?post_type=podcast&p=67142 This week, we discuss the threat censorship poses to democracy as part of Banned Books Week, an annual event that highlights the value of free and open access to information. Presented by the American Library Association, this panel includes Heather Booth, Anna Claussen, Sara Paretsky, and Donna Seaman. The following conversation originally took place May 19, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Festival.

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About the speakers:

HEATHER BOOTH is the Audiobooks Editor for Booklist and a reader’s advisory librarian at the Helen Plum Library in Lombard, IL. She is also serving her third term as a trustee at the Westmont Public Library. Booth, the mother of two teens, has focused on teen services, and has been involved in facing book challenges and preserving our freedom to read.

ANNA CLAUSSEN is the Policy and Outreach Coordinator – Libraries for the Illinois Secretary of State.

A Chicago-based author, SARA PARETSKY is one of only four living writers to have received both the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain. Her latest V. I. Warshawski novel is Pay Dirt. Paretsky is an ardent freedom of speech advocate.

DONNA SEAMAN is the Editor-in-Chief for Booklist. A recipient of the Louis Shores Award for excellence in book reviewing and the Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award, Seaman is a member of the Content Leadership Team for the American Writers Museum and an adjunct professor for Northwestern University’s MA in Writing and MFA in Prose and Poetry Programs. Seaman’s author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air and she is the author of Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists. River of Books: A Life in Reading, will be out fall 2024.

This conversation originally took place May 19, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Festival.

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About LatinoLand:

"A perfect representation of Latino diversity" (The Washington Post), LatinoLand draws from hundreds of interviews and prodigious research to give us both a vibrant portrait and the little-known history of our largest and fastest-growing minority, in "a work of prophecy, sympathy, and courage" (Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author).

LatinoLand is an exceptional, all-encompassing overview of Hispanic America based on personal interviews, deep research, and Marie Arana's life experience as a Latina. At present, Latinos comprise twenty percent of the US population, a number that is growing. By 2050, census reports project that one in every three Americans will claim Latino heritage.

But Latinos are not a monolith. They do not represent a single group. The largest groups are Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Salvadorans, and Cubans. Each has a different cultural and political background. Puerto Ricans, for example, are US citizens, whereas some Mexican Americans never immigrated because the US-Mexico border shifted after the US invasion of 1848, incorporating what is now the entire southwest of the United States. Cubans came in two great waves: those escaping communism in the early years of Castro, many of whom were professionals and wealthy, and those permitted to leave in the Mariel boat lift twenty years later, representing some of the poorest Cubans, including prisoners.

As LatinoLand shows, Latinos were some of the earliest immigrants to what is now the US—some of them arriving in the 1500s. They are racially diverse—a random infusion of white, Black, indigenous, and Asian. Once overwhelmingly Catholic, they are becoming increasingly Protestant and Evangelical. They range from domestic workers and day laborers to successful artists, corporate CEOs, and US senators. Formerly solidly Democratic, they now vote Republican in growing numbers. They are as culturally varied as any immigrants from Europe or Asia.

Marie Arana draws on her own experience as the daughter of an American mother and Peruvian father who came to the US at age nine, straddling two worlds, as many Latinos do. "Thorough, accessible, and necessary" (Ms. magazine), LatinoLand unabashedly celebrates Latino resilience and character and shows us why we must understand the fastest-growing minority in America.

MARIE ARANA is a Peruvian-American author of nonfiction and fiction as well as the inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress. She is the recipient of a 2020 literary award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Among her recent positions are: Director of the National Book Festival, the John W. Kluge Center’s Chair of the Cultures of the Countries of the South, and Writer at Large for the Washington Post. For many years, she was editor-in-chief of the Washington Post’s book review section, Book World. Marie has also written for the New York Times, ]]> false no 00:40:42 No no https://americanwritersmuseum.org/podcast/episode-189-the-lasting-influence-of-lorraine-hansbery/ Mon, 09 Sep 2024 14:51:06 +0000 https://americanwritersmuseum.org/?post_type=podcast&p=66947 This week, we celebrate the legacy of Lorraine Hansberry with J. Nicole Brooks, Natalie Y. Moore, and Ericka Ratcliff. This conversation originally took place August 22, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

This program is presented in partnership with the Lorraine Hansberry Initiative, which was created by The Lillys (conceived by Lynn Nottage and Julia Jordan) to honor Lorraine Hansberry’s legacy through the tour and permanent placement of a figurative sculpture of the playwright, while investing in those following in her footsteps through the creation of a fellowship which supports the living expenses of women and non-binary writers of color during their pursuit of graduate degrees.

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About the panelists:

J. NICOLE BROOKS is an actor, author and director. Selected acting credits include Lottery Day (Goodman Theatre, New Stages Festival), Beyond Caring, Death Tax, and RACE (Lookingglass Theatre Company), Immediate Family (Center Theatre Group) and House Home (Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, China). Directing credits include Mr. Rickey Calls A Meeting, Thaddeus & Slocum: A Vaudeville Adventure and Black Diamond: The Years the Locusts Have Eaten. Brooks is author of HeLa, Fedra Queen of Haiti, Black Diamond, and 3 Weeks With Her Honor Jane Byrne. Television credits including recurring roles on Showtime’s The Chi and Comedy Central’s South Side. She is a multi-award winning artist honored by 3Arts, TCG Fox Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Black Ensemble Theatre Playwright of the Year, LA Ovation and Black Theatre Alliance. She is an ensemble member of Lookingglass Theatre Company.

NATALIE Y. MOORE is an award-winning journalist based in Chicago, whose reporting tackles race, housing, economic development, food injustice and violence. Natalie’s acclaimed book The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation received the 2016 Chicago Review of Books award for nonfiction and was Buzzfeed’s best nonfiction book of 2016. She is the author of the play The Billboard, set in Chicago. She is also co-author of The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of an American Gang and Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation.

ERICKA RATCLIFF works to amplify the mission of Congo Square by celebrating the complexities of Black life and culture on stage. She is a member of The Chicago Women In Philanthropy, Women’s Leadership Mentoring Program (WLMP), the 2023 Points of Light Conference Host Committee, and artEquity’s BIPOC Leadership Circle. Ericka is a nominee for Broadway World Chicago’s 2022 Regional Awards for “Best Direction of a Play” for her work on What To Send Up When It Goes Down and was recently featured in NewCity Magazine for her accomplished work in theatre. She is an artistic associate with Lookingglass Theater and was a recipient of the Chicago 3Arts Make A Wave Award in 2017.

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About The Mine Wars:

In May of 1920, in a small town in the mountains of West Virginia, a dozen coal miners took a stand. They were sick of the low pay in the mines. The unsafe conditions. The brutal treatment they endured from mine owners and operators. The scrip they were paid-instead of cash-that could only be used at the company store.

They had tried to unionize, but the mine owners dug in. On that fateful day in May 1920, tensions boiled over and a gunfight erupted-beginning a yearlong standoff between workers and owners.

The miners pleaded, then protested, then went on strike; the owners retaliated with spying, bribery, and threats. Violence escalated on both sides, culminating in the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest labor uprising in United States history.

In this gripping narrative nonfiction book, meet the resolute and spirited people who fought for the rights of coal miners, and discover how the West Virginia Mine Wars paved the way for vital worker protections nationwide. More than a century later, this overlooked story of the labor movement remains urgently relevant.

STEVE WATKINS is an award-winning author of twelve books for young readers, including Down Sand Mountain, which won the 2009 Golden Kite Award for young adult fiction. He also writes books for grown-ups, and won a Pushcart Prize for one of the stories in his collection My Chaos Theory. He is co-editor of the online ideas and features magazine Pie & Chai, a former English professor at the University of Mary Washington, a longtime yoga instructor, and father of four daughters. He and his family live in Fredericksburg, VA.

ROSEMARY FEURER’S research and teaching interests focus on understanding the political economy of social conflict. She focuses on labor movements and conflict within the context of U.S. capitalist development spatially, socially and economically during the late nineteenth and twentieth century. Her new work follows the story that made for violent conflict in Illinois and also helped to make it the strongest unionized state in the nation, tentatively entitled The Illinois Mine Wars, 1860-1930. It covers the epic conflicts that helped to define Illinois as one of the strongest labor states in the nation. She is also working on a new biography of Mother Jones, the renowned labor activist and agitator of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. She has always connected her research to public history projects, including tours, electronic media, oral history and video production. Feurer is the author of Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism and Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900-1950.

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The books:

Carson McCullers: A Life by Mary V. Dearborn — The first major biography in more than twenty years of one of America’s greatest writers, based on newly available letters and journals.

Pastures of the Empty Page: Fellow Writers on the Life and Legacy of Larry McMurtry edited by George Getschow — A collection of essays that offers an intimate view of Larry McMurtry, America's preeminent western novelist, through the eyes of a pantheon of writers he helped shape through his work over the course of his unparalleled literary life.

Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration by Harold Holzer — From acclaimed Abraham Lincoln historian Harold Holzer, a groundbreaking account of Lincoln's grappling with the politics of immigration against the backdrop of the Civil War.

A Revolver to Carry at Night by Monika Zgustova — A captivating, nuanced portrait of the life of Véra Nabokov, who dedicated herself to advancing her husband’s writing career, playing a vital role in the creation of his greatest works.

Is There God After Prince?: Dispatches from an Age of Last Things by Peter Coviello — Essays considering what it means to love art, culture, and people in an age of accelerating disaster.

The writers:

MARY V. DEARBORN holds a doctorate in English and comparative literature from Columbia University, where she was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. She is the author of seven books—among them, Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim and Ernest Hemingway. Dearborn has been a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in Buckland, Massachusetts.

GEORGE GETSCHOW is a Pulitzer Prize finalist for National Reporting and winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Award for distinguished writing about the underprivileged. He has earned numerous other awards for his writing and was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2012 for "distinctive literary achievement." Today, as director of the Archer City Writers Workshop, he helps organize and conduct annual writing workshops in Archer City for professional writers and college and high school students from across the country.

HAROLD HOLZER is the recipient of the 2015 Gilder-Lehrman Lincoln Prize. One of the country's leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era, Holzer was appointed chairman of the US Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission by President Bill Clinton and awarded the National Humanities Medal by]]> false no 00:46:18 No no https://americanwritersmuseum.org/podcast/episode-186-new-fiction/ Mon, 19 Aug 2024 10:24:00 +0000 https://americanwritersmuseum.org/?post_type=podcast&p=66580 This week, dive into the New Fiction panel from the American Writers Festival, recorded live on May 19, 2024. Four novelists — Donna Hemans, Jessica Shattuck, Yukiko Tominaga, and Michael Zapata — discuss their craft, process, and recent novels:

The House of Plain Truth by Donna Hemans — A lyrical, lush, evocative story about a fractured Jamaican family and a daughter determined to reclaim her home.

Last House by Jessica Shattuck — A sweeping story of a nation on the rise, and one family’s deeply complicated relationship to the resource that built their fortune and fueled their greatest tragedy.

See: Loss. See Also: Love. by Yukiko Tominaga — A tender, slyly comical, and shamelessly honest debut novel following a Japanese widow raising her son between worlds with the help of her Jewish mother-in-law as she wrestles with grief, loss, and—strangest of all—joy.

The Lost Book of Adana Moreau by Michael Zapata — The mesmerizing story of a Latin American science fiction writer and the lives her lost manuscript unites decades later in post-Katrina New Orleans.

About the writers:

DONNA HEMANS is the author of the novels River Woman and Tea by the Sea. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Slice, Shenandoah, Electric Literature, Ms. Magazine and Crab Orchard Review. She received her undergraduate degree in English and Media Studies from Fordham University and an MFA from American University. She lives in Maryland and is the owner of DC Writers Room, a co-working studio for writers.

JESSICA SHATTUCK is the New York Times bestselling author of The Women in the Castle; The Hazards of Good Breeding, a New York Times Notable Book and finalist for the PEN/Winship Award; and Perfect Life. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Glamour, Mother Jones, and Wired, among other publications.

YUKIKO TOMINAGA was born and raised in Japan. She was a finalist for the 2020 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, selected by Roxane Gay. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Chicago Quarterly Review, The Bellingham Review, among other publications. She also works at Counterpoint Press where she helps to introduce never-before-translated books from Japan to English language readers. See: Loss. See Also: Love. is her first book.

MICHAEL ZAPATA is a founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine and the author of the novel The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, winner of the 2020 Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, finalist for the 2020 Heartland Booksellers Award in Fiction, and a Best Book of the Year for NPR, the A.V. Club, Los Angeles Public Library, and BookPage, among others. He is a recipient of a Meier Foundation Artist Achievement Award. He is on the faculty of StoryStudio Chicago and the MFA faculty of Northwestern University. As a public-school educator, he taught literature and writing in high schools servicing drop out students. He currently lives in Chicago with his family.

This conversation originally took place May 19, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Festival.

About the writers:

HEATHER HENDERSHOT is the Cardiss Collins Professor of Communication Studies and Journalism at Northwestern University. Her most recent books are When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America and Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line.

KEVIN BOYLE is the William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University. Years ago, he stumbled across an obscure photo of a Chicago neighborhood celebrating the Fourth of July 1961. From that image – and the story it tells – he’s built The Shattering, his new history of the 1960s. His previous book, Arc of Justice, won the National Book Award for non-fiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He’s also the author of The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1948-1968 and co-author of Muddy Boots and Ragged Aprons. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Tribune, the Detroit Free Press, and other newspapers and magazines. He and his wife, Victoria Getis, now live in Evanston, IL with their manic one-year old Australian shepherd and, from time to time, with their marvelous daughters, Abby and Nan.

You can see Ardent Dance Company perform POE at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts on August 23rd and 24th at 7:30 pm, and August 25th at 3:00 pm. Learn more and get tickets here.

Justine and Ben are interviewed by Nate King, Digital Content Associate at the American Writers Museum. This conversation originally took place July 23, 2024 and was recorded live via Zoom.

About our guests:

JUSTINE KELLY, originally from the DMV area, grew up with the Cecchetti method under the training of her mother, Cynthia Kiehnau. She has worked professionally with many DMV-based companies including Lindsay Taylor Dance, Maryland Youth Ballet, Virginia Civic Ballet and Bowie Contemporary Dance Company and has received training from Pam Moore, Rosemary Floydand, and Sonia Cromiller. Justine moved to Chicago in 2012 and founded Ardent Dance Company in 2016 to reimagine classical and historical literature as full-length contemporary works. Working with over 100 professional dancers nationwide and in Chicago to help create Ardent’s shows, Justine is very grateful for all the dancers who have worked so hard these past few months. It is the countless hours of time, sweat, and dedication that allows Ardent to be vulnerable, be dramatic, and laugh together to create these stories.

BEN LOCKE has been dancing with Ardent for over seven years, appearing in shows like Dracula, Les Mis, Pandora's Box, Poe and more. He has a double degree in Theatre and Human Services from Millikin University and is currently getting his graduate degree in TV/Film Writing at Boston University. Outside of dance, Ben is an actor, director, writer and casting director. His hope is to make the arts equitable and accessible for all. His plays can be found at The New Play Exchange.

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About the writers:

DARCIE LITTLE BADGER is a Lipan Apache writer with a PhD in oceanography. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, Elatsoe, was featured in TIME as one of the best 100 fantasy books of all time. Elatsoe also won the Locus Award for Best First Novel and was a Nebula, Ignyte, and Lodestar finalist. Her second fantasy novel, A Snake Falls to Earth, received the Newbery Honor, was a LA Times Book Prize Finalist, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Darcie is married to a veterinarian named Taran and splits time between California and Texas.

MICHI TROTA is a five-time Hugo Award-winning Filipino American writer, editor, and narrative expert. Her work explores how to use empowerment, representation, and storytelling to attain collective liberation and to dismantle oppressive institutions, not just survive them. She is the Executive Editor at the environmental justice and advocacy nonprofit Green America and her publications include the Wing Luke Museum 2018-19 exhibit Worlds Beyond Here: Expanding the Universe of APA Science Fiction and Chicago Magazine, and she’s been featured in The Guardian, Chicago Tribune, and CNN: Philippines. She is also a member of the Filipino Young Leaders Program 2022 Immersion cohort and a fire performer with Raks Geek/Raks Inferno Fire+Bellydance.

SUZANNE WALKER is a Chicago-based writer and editor. She is co-creator of the critically acclaimed, award-nominated graphic novel Mooncakes. Her short fiction has been published in Clarkesworld and Uncanny Magazine, and the Star Wars anthology From a Certain Point of View: Return of the Jedi. Her nonfiction works have appeared in a diverse array of publications, StarTrek.com, and academic anthologies. She has spoken on panels at numerous conventions on a variety of topics. She is a scholar of medieval Italian longsword and enjoys aerial silks, figure skating, and baseball. You can find her on Twitter or Instagram at @suzusaur.

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About the writers:

AMANDA FLOWER is the USA Today bestselling and Agatha Award–winning mystery author of over twenty-five novels, including the nationally bestselling Amish Candy Shop Mystery Series, the Amish Matchmaker Mysteries, the Emily Dickinson Mysteries, the Katharine Wright Mysteries, and several series written under the name Isabella Alan. An organic farmer and former librarian, Amanda lives in Northeast Ohio and can be found online at AmandaFlower.com.

SARAH JAMES is the international bestselling author of The Woman with Two Shadows and Last Night at the Hollywood Canteen. Her work has appeared in Baseball Prospectus, Pittsburgh City Paper, Reductress, and more. Sarah is a graduate of the MFA Writing for Screen and Television program at USC and currently lives in Los Angeles.

BRIANNA LABUSKES is the Washington Post bestselling author of The Lost Book of Bonn, The Librarian of Burned Books as well as eight thrillers. For the first decade of her career, Brianna worked as a journalist for national news organizations covering politics and policy.

BRIANNA MADIA has lived a life of relentless intention, traveling the deserts of the American West in an old Ford van. She made a name for herself on social media with her inspiring captions-cum-essays about bravery, identity, nature, and subverting expectations. She lives in Utah with her four dogs. Her first book, Nowhere for Very Long, was a New York Times bestseller. Never Leave the Dogs Behind is her second book.

DIPIKA MUKHERJEE’S collection of travel essays, Writer’s Postcards (Penguin), was published in October 2023. Her work is included in The Best Small Fictions 2019 and appears in World Literature Today, Asia Literary Review, Del Sol Review, and Chicago Quarterly Review, Newsweek, Los Angeles Review of Books, Hemispheres, Orion and more, and she has been translated into French, Portuguese, Bengali and Mandarin Chinese. She is the author of the novels Shambala Junction (Aurora Metro, winner of the Virginia Prize f]]> false no 00:38:16 No no https://americanwritersmuseum.org/podcast/episode-181-john-berendt-and-taylor-mac/ Mon, 15 Jul 2024 10:40:00 +0000 https://americanwritersmuseum.org/?post_type=podcast&p=66266 This week, writers John Berendt and Taylor Mac discuss the Goodman Theatre’s world-premiere stage musical adaptation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Berendt is the author of the original book the musical is based on, and Mac wrote the book for the adaptation. Learn more about Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: The Musical, here. This conversation originally took place July 8, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

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More about Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: The Musical

Southern charm is bountiful in Savannah, Georgia. But behind polite smiles, the eccentric residents are filled with secrets and motives. When wealthy antiques dealer Jim Williams is accused of murder, the sensational trial uncovers hidden truths and exposes the fine line between good and evil—which sparks Lady Chablis and other Savannahians to change the city forever.

The world-premiere stage musical adaptation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil—John Berendt’s 1994 blockbuster non-fiction book, a Pulitzer-Prize finalist that was on the New York Times Best-Seller list for 216 weeks—is realized at Goodman Theatre by creators MacArthur “Genius” Grantee Taylor Mac (book), Tony Award winner Jason Robert Brown (music and lyrics) with choreography by Tanya Birl-Torres. Tony Award winner Rob Ashford directs a cast led by Tony- and Grammy-Award winning actor J. Harrison Ghee as The Lady Chablis; Tony Award nominee Tom Hewitt as Jim Williams; and Olivier Award nominee Sierra Boggess as Emma Dawes.

JOHN BERENDT was born and raised in Syracuse, New York. He attended Harvard, where he majored in English and wrote for the Harvard Lampoon. Upon graduation he was hired by Esquire magazine—first as an editor, then as a monthly columnist. Later, he became the editor of New York Magazine. It was during a trip to the South in the mid-1980s that he discovered Savannah—a cloistered, inward-looking garden city that basked on the Georgia coast, reveling in its own peculiarities and giving not a thought to the outside world. He was enchanted and began writing about the city and its people in what would eventually become the non-fiction book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

TAYLOR MAC is a MacArthur Fellow, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist, a Tony Award Nominee (for Best Play), and the recipient of the Kennedy Prize (with Matt Ray), the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Guggenheim, a Drama League Award, a NY Drama Critics Circle Award, two Obie’s, two Bessies, and the first American to receive the International Ibsen Award. Mac is the author of Joy and Pandemic (Huntington Theater); The Hang (with Matt Ray); Gary, A Sequel to Titus Andronicus; A 24-Decade History of Popular Music; Hir; The Fre, The Walk Across America For Mother Earth, The Lily’s Revenge; The Young Ladies Of; and The Be(A)st of Taylor Mac. The documentary Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music recently premiered on HBO to critical acclaim.

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MARK BOWDEN is the author of fifteen books, including the #1 New York Times bestseller Black Hawk Down, Killing Pablo, Hue 1968, and The Last Stone. He reported at the Philadelphia Inquirer for twenty years and now writes for The Atlantic and other magazines.

NATALIE Y. MOORE is an award-winning journalist based in Chicago, whose reporting tackles race, housing, economic development, food injustice and violence. Natalie’s acclaimed book The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation received the 2016 Chicago Review of Books award for nonfiction and was Buzzfeed’s best nonfiction book of 2016. She is also co-author of The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of an American Gang and Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation.

In this episode, comedians Jamie Loftus and Chelsea Hood talk about Chicago hot dogs, comedy writing, and Jamie’s cross-country journey to write Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs. Moderated by food writer David Hammond.

This conversation originally took place May 19, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Festival.

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About the panelists:

DAVID HAMMOND is the Dining and Drinking Editor for Newcity/Chicago, and a regular contributor of food/beverage-related articles to Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, Men’s Book, Plate, Wednesday Journal, and Where Chicago. Between 2010-2014, he wrote weekly “Food Detective” and “What to Do With” columns for Chicago Sun-Times; since 2010 he has written weekly restaurant and product reviews for Wednesday Journal.

CHELSEA HOOD is a stand up comedian living in Chicago, IL by way of the comedy scenes in both Dallas, TX and Brooklyn, NY. You may have seen her on WGN, The CW Network’s Eye Opener, or CW33’s Nightcap. She was also featured on Stand Up Records’ “Texas Mess” album recorded at SXSW. She was most frequently featured performer at Limestone Comedy Festival, one of eight chose as the Best of the Midwest at Gilda’s LaughFest and a Comic to Watch at RIOT LA.

JAMIE LOFTUS is a comedian, Emmy-nominated TV writer, and podcaster. She wrote and starred in her own web series for Comedy Central. She regularly works on viral videos for Super Deluxe. She has credits in The New Yorker, Playboy Magazine, VICE, Reductress, Paste Magazine, and many more. She writes and hosts popular limited-run podcasts—"My Year In Mensa" (2019), "Lolita Podcast" (2020), "Aack Cast" (2021), and "Ghost Church" (2022)—and cohosts, with screenwriter Caitlin Durante, a podcast on the How Stuff Works Network called "the Bechdel Cast."

This conversation originally took place May 13, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

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More about Horror Movie:

In June 1993, a group of young guerilla filmmakers spent four weeks making Horror Movie, a notorious, disturbing, art-house horror flick.

The weird part? Only three of the film’s scenes were ever released to the public, but Horror Movie has nevertheless grown a rabid fanbase. Three decades later, Hollywood is pushing for a big budget reboot.

The man who played "The Thin Kid" is the only surviving cast member. He remembers all too well the secrets buried within the original screenplay, the bizarre events of the filming, and the dangerous crossed lines on set that resulted in tragedy. As memories flood back in, the boundaries between reality and film, past and present start to blur. But he’s going to help remake the film, even if it means navigating a world of cynical producers, egomaniacal directors, and surreal fan conventions—demons of the past be damned.

But at what cost?

PAUL TREMBLAY has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the nationally bestselling author of The Beast You Are, The Pallbearers Club, Survivor Song, Growing Things and Other Stories, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. His novel The Cabin at the End of the World was adapted into the Universal Pictures film Knock at the Cabin. He lives outside Boston with his family.

GUS MORENO is the author of This Thing Between Us, a "Best Book Of 2021" pick by NPR and the New York Public Library. His stories have appeared in the Southwest Review, Aurealis, Pseudopod, and the Burnt Tongues anthology, among others. He lives in the suburbs with his wife and two dogs, but never think that he’s not from Chicago.

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More about Exhibit:

At a lavish party in the hills outside of San Francisco, Jin Han meets Lidija Jung and nothing will ever be the same for either woman. A brilliant young photographer, Jin is at a crossroads in her work, in her marriage to her college love Philip, and in who she is and who she wants to be. Lidija is an alluring, injured world-class ballerina on hiatus from her ballet company under mysterious circumstances. Drawn to each other by their intense artistic drives, the two women talk all night.

Cracked open, Jin finds herself telling Lidija about an old familial curse, breaking a lifelong promise. She's been told that if she doesn't keep the curse a secret, she risks losing everything; death and ruin could lie ahead. As Jin and Lidija become more entangled, they realize they share more than the ferocity of their ambition, and begin to explore hidden desires. Something is ignited in Jin: her art, her body, and her sense of self irrevocably changed. But can she avoid the specter of the curse?

Vital, bold, powerful, and deeply moving, Exhibit asks: how brightly can you burn before you light your life on fire?

R. O. KWON is the author of the nationally bestselling novel The Incendiaries, which was named a best book of the year by more than forty publications and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award. With Garth Greenwell, Kwon coedited the bestselling Kink, a New York Times Notable Book. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, and MacDowell. Born in Seoul, Kwon has lived most of her life in the United States.

NAMI MUN grew up in Seoul, South Korea and Bronx, New York. For her first book, Miles from Nowhere, she received a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers and the Asian American Literary Award. Miles From Nowhere was selected as Editors’ Choice and Top Ten First Novels by Booklist; Best Fiction of 2009 So Far by Amazon; and as an Indie Next Pick. Chicago Magazine named her Best New Novelist of 2009.

This conversation originally took place April 11, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

Featured panelists: Emily Crews, Executive Director of the Marty Center at University of Chicago Divinity School; Keisha Howard, creator of Sugar Gamers; Ghnewa Hayek, Assoicate Professor of Modern Arabic Literature at University of Chicago; and Alireza Doostdar, Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and the Anthropology of Religion at University of Chicago.

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See Sara and Donna at the American Writers Festival too! This entirely free literary event takes place May 19, 2024 at the Harold Washington Library Center in downtown Chicago, co-presented by the American Writers Museum and Chicago Public Library. Sara and Donna are part of the Freedom to Read panel presented by the American Library Association.

More about Pay Dirt:

V.I. Warshawski is famous for her cool under fire, her intelligence, her humor, her unflinching courage, and her love of good coffee. But even the strongest people sometimes need a break to recharge, so her friends send her to Kansas for a weekend of college basketball where Angela, one of her protégées, is playing. And that’s where trouble finds V.I.

Sabrina, one of Angela’s roommates, disappears and V.I. agrees to try to find her. Finding a missing person in a city where she knows few people and doesn’t have her trusted contacts is hard, but not as hard as the brutally negative reaction to the detective from some of the locals. When V.I. finds Sabrina close to death in a remote house, she lands herself in the FBI’s crosshairs and faces a violent online backlash. The men running the county’s opioid distribution are also not happy.

Discovering a dead body in the same house a few days later, V.I. is pitched headlong into a local land-use battle with roots going back to the Civil War. She finds that today’s combatants are just as willing as opponents in the 1860s to kill to settle their differences.

V.I.’s survival depends on keeping one step ahead of players in a game she never intended to play, before the clock runs down.

This conversation originally took place March 19, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

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More about The Blues Brothers:

"They're not going to catch us," Dan Aykroyd as Elwood Blues tells his brother Jake, played by John Belushi. "We're on a mission from God."

So opens the musical action comedy The Blues Brothers, which hit theatres on June 20, 1980. Their scripted mission was to save a local Chicago orphanage; but Aykroyd, who conceived and wrote the film, had a greater mission: to honor the then-seemingly forgotten tradition of rhythm and blues, some of whose greatest artists—Aretha Franklin, James Brown, John Lee Hooker, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles—made the film as unforgettable as its wild car chases.

Late and vastly over budget, beset by mercurial and oft drugged-out stars, The Blues Brothers opened to tepid reviews at best. However, in the 44 years since it has been acknowledged a classic: inducted into the National Film Registry for its cultural significance; even declared a “Catholic classic” by the Church itself; and re-aired thousands of times on television to huge worldwide audiences. It is, undeniably, one of the most significant films of the 20th century.

The story behind any classic is rich; the saga behind The Blues Brothers, as Daniel de Visé reveals, is epic, encompassing the colorful childhoods of Belushi and Aykroyd; the comedic revolution sparked by Harvard’s Lampoon and Chicago’s Second City; the birth and anecdote-rich, drug-filled early years of Saturday Night Live, where the Blues Brothers were born as an act amidst turmoil and rivalry; and of course the indelible behind-the-scenes narrative of how the film was made, scene by memorable scene. Based on original research and dozens of interviews probing the memories of principals from director John Landis and producer Bob Weiss to SNL creator Lorne Michaels and Aykroyd himself, The Blues Brothers vividly portrays the creative geniuses behind modern comedy.

This conversation originally took place March 6, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

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More about So Fetch:

It's been 20 years since Mean Girls hit theaters, winning over critics and audiences alike with its razor-sharp wit, star-making turns for its then unknown cast, and obsessively quotable screenplay by Tina Fey. Fast forward two decades and Mean Girls remains as relevant as ever. Arguably, no other movie from the 2000s has had as big of an impact on pop culture.

In So Fetch, New York Times bestselling author of Seinfeldia, Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, offers the first ever authoritative book about this beloved classic that shaped an entire generation. Based off revealing interviews with the director, cast, and crew, So Fetch tells the full story of the making of Mean Girls, from Tina Fey's brilliant adaptation of a self-help guide for parents of teen girls, to the challenges of casting Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, and the iconic supporting players. So Fetch also explores the film's lasting cultural influence, from its role in the rise of Y2K tabloid culture, impact on girls of all ages and lgbtq+ culture, to how we use it to define female relationships to this day.

Timed for the 20th anniversary and the release of the new movie musical adaptation, So Fetch is the perfect companion for fans and anyone who understands that when it comes to Mean Girls' enduring legacy, the limit does not exist!

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More about Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions:

"I'll be dropping a few names," Ed Zwick confesses in the introduction to his book. "Over the years I have worked with self-proclaimed masters-of-the-universe, unheralded geniuses, hacks, sociopaths, savants, and saints."

He has encountered these Hollywood types during four decades of directing, producing, and writing projects that have collectively received eighteen Academy Award nominations (seven wins) and sixty-seven Emmy nominations (twenty-two wins). Though there are many factors behind such success, including luck and the contributions of his creative partner Marshall Herskovitz, he's known to have a special talent for bringing out the best in the people he's worked with, especially the actors. In those intense collaborations, he's sought to discover the small pieces of connective tissue, vulnerability, and fellowship that can help an actor realize their character in full.

Talents whom he spotted early include Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Denzel Washington, Claire Danes, and Jared Leto. Established stars he worked closely with include Leonardo DiCaprio, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway, Daniel Craig, Jake Gyllenhaal, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, and Jennifer Connelly. He also sued Harvey Weinstein over the production of Shakespeare in Love—and won. He shares personal stories about all these people, and more.

Written mostly with love, sometimes with rue, this memoir is also a meditation on working, sprinkled throughout with tips for anyone who has ever imagined writing, directing, or producing for the screen. Fans with an appreciation for the beautiful mysteries—as well as the unsightly, often comic truths—of crafting film and television won't want to miss it.

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More about What the Children Told Us:

Dr. Kenneth Clark visited rundown and under-resourced segregated schools across America, presenting Black children with two dolls: a white one with hair painted yellow and a brown one with hair painted black. "Give me the doll you like to play with," he said. "Give me the doll that is a nice doll." The psychological experiment Kenneth developed with his wife, Mamie, designed to measure how segregation affected Black children’s perception of themselves and other Black people, was enlightening―and horrifying. Over and over again, the young children―some not yet five years old―selected the white doll as preferable, and the brown doll as "bad." Some children even denied their race. "Yes," said brown-skinned Joan W., age six, when questioned about her affection for the light-skinned doll. "I would like to be white."

What the Children Told Us is the story of the towering intellectual and emotional partnership between two Black scholars who highlighted the psychological effects of racial segregation. The Clarks' story is one of courage, love, and an unfailing belief that Black children deserved better than what society was prepared to give them, and their unrelenting activism played a critical role in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. The Clarks' decades of impassioned advocacy, their inspiring marriage, and their enduring work shines a light on the power of passion in an unjust world.

This conversation originally took place October 13, 2021 and was recorded live online.

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More about Capote's Women:

"There are certain women," Truman Capote wrote, "who, though perhaps not born rich, are born to be rich." Barbara "Babe" Paley, Gloria Guinness, Marella Agnelli, Slim Hayward, Pamela Churchill, C. Z. Guest, Lee Radziwill (Jackie Kennedy's sister)—they were the toast of midcentury New York, each beautiful and distinguished in her own way. Capote befriended them, received their deepest confidences, and ingratiated himself into their lives. Then, in one fell swoop, he betrayed them in the most surprising and startling way possible.

Bestselling biographer Laurence Leamer delves into the years following the acclaimed publication of Breakfast at Tiffany's in 1958 and In Cold Blood in 1966, when Capote struggled with a crippling case of writer's block. While en­joying all the fruits of his success, he was struck with an idea for what he was sure would be his most celebrated novel...one based on the re­markable, racy lives of his very, very rich friends.

For years, Capote attempted to write An­swered Prayers, what he believed would have been his magnum opus. But when he eventually published a few chapters in Esquire, the thinly fictionalized lives (and scandals) of his closest fe­male confidantes were laid bare for all to see, and he was banished from their high-society world forever. Laurence Leamer re-creates the lives of these fascinating swans, their friendships with Capote and one another, and the doomed quest to write what could have been one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

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More about The New Naturals:

An abandoned restaurant on a hill off the highway in Western Massachusetts doesn’t look like much. But to Rio, a young Black woman bereft after the loss of her newborn child, this hill becomes more than a safe haven—it becomes a place to start over. She convinces her husband to help her construct a society underground, somewhere safe, somewhere everyone can feel loved, wanted, and accepted, where the children learn actual history, where everyone has an equal shot.

She locates a Benefactor and soon their utopia begins to take shape. Two unhoused men hear about it and immediately begin their journey by bus from Chicago to get there. A young and disillusioned journalist stumbles upon it and wants in. And a former soccer player, having lost his footing in society, is persuaded to check it out too. But no matter how much these people all yearn for meaning and a sanctuary from the existential dread of life above the surface, what happens if this new society can’t actually work? What then?

From one of the most exciting new literary voices out there, The New Naturals is fresh and deeply perceptive, capturing the absurdity of life in the 21st century, for readers of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House. In this remarkable feat of imagination, Bump shows us that, ultimately, it is our love for and connection to each other that will save us.

GABRIEL BUMP grew up in South Shore, Chicago. He received his MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His debut novel, Everywhere You Don’t Belong, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2020 and has won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Fiction, the Heartland Booksellers Award for Fiction, and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s First Novelist Award. Bump teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

ADAM LEVIN is the author of the novels The Instructions, Bubblegum, and Mount Chicago, as well as the story collection, Hot Pink. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and Playboy. He has been a New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award winner, a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a National Jewish Book Award finalist. He lives in Chicago.

Quick note: during this episode, Clara references photos from a slideshow she shared during the live in person program. You can view these photos by visiting the American Writers Museum’s YouTube channel.

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More about Catfish Rolling:

There's a catfish under Japan, and when it rolls the land rises and falls. At least that's what Sora was told after she lost her mother to an earthquake so powerful that it cracked time itself. Sora and her father are some of the few who still live near one of these "zones"—the places where time has been irrevocably sped up or slowed down.

Sora's father leads a research team studying the zones, and even as his colleagues begin to fall ill, he refuses to stop entering the zones himself. Sora finds herself stuck and increasingly alone as her father starts behaving strangely—he's disoriented and his memory seems to be deteriorating. Sora, meanwhile, has been secretly conducting her own research on the zones, tracking down a time expert in Tokyo and surprising herself with a crush on a strikingly confident girl named Maya, another hafu girl with whom she forms an instant bond.

But when Sora's father disappears, she has no choice but to return home, with Maya in tow, and venture deep into the abandoned time zones to find him and perhaps the catfish itself...

Taplin’s latest book The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto is a brilliant takedown and exposé of the great con job of the twenty-first century—the metaverse, crypto, space travel, transhumanism—being sold by four billionaires (Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreesen, Elon Musk), leading to the degeneration and bankruptcy of our society.

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More about the panelists:

JONATHAN TAPLIN is a public intellectual, writer, film producer, and scholar. He is the director emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and was a professor at the USC Annenberg School in the field of international communication management and digital media entertainment until 2017. Since his graduation from Princeton University in 1969, his extraordinary journey has put him at the crest of every major cultural wave in the past half century: he was tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band, producer of major films such as Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, an executive at Merrill Lynch, creator of the Internet’s first video-on-demand service, and a cultural critic and author writing about technology in the new millennium.

MICHI TROTA is a five-time Hugo Award-winning Filipino American writer, editor, and narrative expert. Her work explores empowerment, representation, storytelling, and autonomy, and how to exercise those tools for collective liberation and to dismantle oppressive institutions, not just survive them. Her publications include the Wing Luke Museum 2018-19 exhibit Worlds Beyond Here: Expanding the Universe of APA Science Fiction and Chicago Magazine, and she’s been featured in The Guardian, Chicago Tribune, and CNN: Philippines. She is also a member of the Filipino Young Leaders Program 2022 Immersion cohort and a fire performer with Raks Geek/Raks Inferno Fire+Bellydance.

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More about Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant:

Nineteen eighties Detroit was a volatile place to live, but above the fray stood a safe haven: Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, where anyone—from the city’s first Black mayor to the local drag queens, from a big-time Hollywood star to elderly Jewish couples—could sit down for a warm, home-cooked meal. Here was where, beneath a bright-red awning and surrounded by his multigenerational family, filmmaker and activist Curtis Chin came of age; where he learned to embrace his identity as a gay ABC, or American-born Chinese; where he navigated the divided city’s spiraling misfortunes; and where—between helpings of almond boneless chicken, sweet-and-sour pork, and some of his own, less-savory culinary concoctions—he realized just how much he had to offer to the world, to his beloved family, and to himself.

Served up by the cofounder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and structured around the very menu that graced the tables of Chung’s, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant is both a memoir and an invitation: to step inside one boy’s childhood oasis, scoot into a vinyl booth, and grow up with him—and perhaps even share something off the secret menu.

A co-founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York City, CURTIS CHIN served as the non-profits’ first Executive Director. He went on to write for network and cable television before transitioning to social justice documentaries. Chin has screened his films at over 600 venues in sixteen countries. He has written for CNN, Bon Appetit, the Detroit Free Press, and the Emancipator/Boston Globe. A graduate of the University of Michigan, Chin has received awards from ABC/Disney Television, New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, and more. His memoir, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant will be published by Little, Brown in Fall 2023. His essay in Bon Appetit was just selected for Best Food Writing in America 2023.

GRACE CHAN MCKIBBEN is Executive Director at the Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community (CBCAC), which seeks to empower the Chinese American communities in Greater Chicago through planning, advocacy, and organizing. For over 25 years, Grace has held senior level positions in education, government, corporate, and nonprofits and is a fierce advocate of equality, inclusion, and belonging for immigrants, persons of color, the low-income community, and the LGBTQ+ community. Grace is also co-founder of a pro-bono legal clinic in Chinatown, three consultancy firms, and a women’s choir, and serves on many volunteer boards and commissions, including the ACLU, City of Chicago’s Community Development Commission, and the State of Illinois Asian American Employment Plan Advisory Council.

This episode is presented alongside our special exhibit Dark Testament: A Century of Black Writers on Justice, currently on display at the American Writers Museum.

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More about August Wilson: A Life

August Wilson wrote a series of ten plays celebrating African American life in the 20th century, one play for each decade. No other American playwright has completed such an ambitious oeuvre. Two of the plays became successful films, Fences, starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis; and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, starring Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman. Fences and The Piano Lesson won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; Fences won the Tony Award for Best Play, and years after Wilson’s death in 2005, Jitney earned a Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play.

Through his brilliant use of vernacular speech, Wilson developed unforgettable characters who epitomized the trials and triumphs of the African American experience. He said that he didn’t research his plays but wrote from "the blood’s memory," a sense of racial history that he believed African Americans shared. Author and theater critic Patti Hartigan traced his ancestry back to slavery, and his plays echo with uncanny similarities to the history of his ancestors. She interviewed Wilson many times before his death and traces his life from his childhood in Pittsburgh (where nine of the plays take place) to Broadway. She also interviewed scores of friends, theater colleagues and family members, and conducted extensive research to tell the story of a writer who left an indelible imprint on American theater and opened the door for future playwrights of color.

PATTI HARTIGAN is an award-winning theater critic and arts reporter who spent many years on the staff of The Boston Globe. She divides her time between the Boston area and Charlottesville, VA.

J. NICOLE BROOKS is an actor, author and director. Selected acting credits include Lottery Day (Goodman Theatre, New Stages Festival), Beyond Caring, Death Tax, and RACE (Lookingglass Theatre Company), Immediate Family (Center Theatre Group) and House Home (Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, China). Directing credits include Mr. Rickey Calls A Meeting, Thaddeus & Slocum: A Vaudeville Adventure and Black Diamond: The Years the Locusts Have Eaten. Brooks is author of HeLa, Fedra Queen of Haiti, Black Diamond, and 3 Weeks With Her Honor Jane Byrne. Television credits including recurring roles on Showtime’s The Chi and Comedy Central’s South Side. She is a mutli-award winning artist honored by 3Arts, TCG Fox Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Black Ensemble Theatre Playwright of the Year, LA Ovation and Black Theatre Alliance. She is an ensemble member of Lookingglass Theatre Company.

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About A Man of Two Faces:

Viet Thanh Nguyen expands the genre of personal memoir in A Man of Two Faces by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son.

At the age of four, Nguyen and his family are forced to flee his hometown of Ban Mê Thuột and come to the USA as refugees. After being removed from his brother and parents and homed with a family on his own, Nguyen is later allowed to resettle into his own family in suburban San José. But there is violence hidden behind the sunny façade of what he calls AMERICA™. One Christmas Eve, when Nguyen is nine, while watching cartoons at home, he learns that his parents have been shot while working at their grocery store, the SàiGòn Mới, a place where he sometimes helps price tins of fruit with a sticker gun. Years later, as a teenager, the blood-stirring drama of the films of the Vietnam War such as Apocalypse Now throw Nguyen into an existential crisis: how can he be both American and Vietnamese, both the killer and the person being killed? When he learns about an adopted sister who has stayed back in Vietnam, and ultimately visits her, he grows to understand just how much his parents have left behind. And as his parents age, he worries increasingly about their comfort and care, and realizes that some of their older wounds are reopening.

Profound in its emotions and brilliant in its thinking about cultural power, A Man of Two Faces explores the necessity of both forgetting and of memory, the promises America so readily makes and breaks, and the exceptional life story of one of the most original and important writers working today.

VIET THANH NGUYEN was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of The Committed, which continues the story of The Sympathizer, awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, alongside seven other prizes. He is also the author of the short story collection The Refugees; the nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award; and is the editor of an anthology of refugee writing, The Displaced. He is the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. He lives in Los Angeles.

VU TRAN is the author of Dragonfish—a New York Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Books of the Year—as well as a forthcoming novel, Your Origins. His writing has also appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, the Best American Mystery Stories, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly, and the New York Times. Born in Vietnam and raised in Oklahoma, Vu received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and his PhD from the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas, and is also the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the NEA, MacDowell, Yaddo, Bread Loaf, and Sewanee. He teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of]]> false no 00:57:21 No no https://americanwritersmuseum.org/podcast/episode-163-sterling-l-bland-jr/ Mon, 23 Oct 2023 08:54:00 +0000 https://americanwritersmuseum.org/?post_type=podcast&p=54208 This week, historian and author Sterling L. Bland Jr. discusses his book In the Shadow of Invisibility: Ralph Ellison and the Promise of American Democracy. This conversation originally took place October 15, 2023 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

This episode is presented in conjunction with the AWM's ongoing special exhibit Dark Testament: A Century of Black Writers on Justice, on display now.

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About In the Shadow of Invisibility:

With In the Shadow of Invisibility, Sterling Lecater Bland Jr. offers a long-overdue reconsideration of Ralph Ellison, examining the trajectory of his intellectual thought in relation to its resonances in twenty-first-century American culture. Bland charts Ellison's evolving attitudes on several central topics including democracy, race, identity, social community, place, and political expression. This compelling new exploration of Ellison's legacy stresses the perpetual need to reexamine the intersections of race, literature, and American culture, with particular attention to how the democratic principle has grown increasingly urgent in the nation's ongoing, and often contentious, conversations about race.

Arguing that Ellison saw racial and social identity as being inseparable from the nation's past and its complicated history of racial anxiety, In the Shadow of Invisibility traces the growth and transformation of Ellison's ideas across his life and work, from his early apprentice writing that culminated in his groundbreaking first novel, Invisible Man, through the posthumous publication of his unfinished second novel, Three Days before the Shooting.

Focused on his mythic vision of the promise of America, this book firmly situates Ellison in the sociopolitical environments from which his ideas arose, with close consideration of his published writings, including his influential essays on literature and jazz, as well as his working notes and correspondence. Bland foregrounds Ellison's thinking on the responsibilities of Black writers to examine democratic ideals, the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, and the impacts of civil rights movements.

Interweaving biography, history, and literary criticism, and drawing from extensive archival research, In the Shadow of Invisibility reveals the extent to which Ellison's work exposes the contradictions inherent in American culture, arguing anew for the importance and immediacy of his writings in the broader context of American intellectual thought.

STERLING LECATER BLAND JR. is professor of English, African American studies, and American studies at Rutgers University-Newark. He is the author of Voices of the Fugitives: Runaway Slave Stories and Their Fictions of Self-Creation and the editor of Understanding 19th-Century Slave Narratives and the three-volume African American Slave Narratives: An Anthology.

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More about the speakers:

Pearl Cleage (she/her/hers) is an Atlanta-based writer whose plays include POINTING AT THE MOON, WHAT I LEARNED IN PARIS, FLYIN’ WEST, BLUES FOR AN ALABAMA SKY, and BOURBON AT THE BORDER, commissioned and directed by Kenny Leon at the Alliance Theatre. She is also the author of A SONG FOR CORETTA, written in 2007 during Cleage’s time as Cosby Professor in Women’s Studies at Spelman College. Her play, THE NACIREMA SOCIETY REQUESTS THE HONOR OF YOUR PRESENCE AT A CELEBRATION OF THEIR FIRST ONE HUNDRED YEARS, was commissioned by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival and premiered in 2010, in a joint production by the ASF and Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, directed by Susan Booth. Her plays have also been performed at Arena Stage, Hartford Stage, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Huntington Theatre, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, the Long Wharf Theatre, Just US Theatre, True Colors Theatre, Bushfire Theatre, the Intiman Theatre, St. Louis Black Repertory Company, and Seven Stages. She is also an accomplished performance artist, often working in collaboration with her husband, writer Zaron W. Burnett, Jr. They have performed at the National Black Arts Festival, the National Black Theatre Festival, and colleges and universities across the country. Cleage and Burnett also collaborated with performance artists Idris Ackamoor and Rhodessa Jones on the script for THE LOVE PROJECT, which premiered at the National Black Theatre Festival in 2008, and is currently touring the country. Cleage is also an accomplished novelist. Her novels include “What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day,” a New York Times bestseller and an Oprah Book Club selection, “I Wish I Had a Red Dress,” “Some Things I Never Thought I’d Do,” “Babylon Sisters,” “Baby Brother’s Blues,” “Seen It All and Done the Rest,” and “Till You Hear from Me.” She is also the author of “Mad at Miles: A Blackwoman’s Guide to Truth,” a groundbreaking work of race and gender, and “We Speak Your Names,” a praise poem commissioned by Oprah Winfrey for her 2005 celebration of legendary African American women and written in collaboration with Zaron Burnett. Cleage has also written for magazines, including “Essence,” “Vibe,” “Rap Pages,” and “Ms.” In addition to her work as the founding editor of “Catalyst” magazine, a literary journal, she was a regular columnist for the Atlanta Tribune for ten years, winning many awards for her thought-provoking columns. She has also written for TheDefendersOnLine.com. Cleage has been awarded grants in support of her work from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulton County Arts Council, the Georgia Council on the Arts, the Atlanta Bureau of Cultural Affairs, and the Coca-Cola Foundation. Her work has earned her many awards and honors, including an NAACP Image Award for fiction in 2008. Pearl Cleage is represented by Ron Gwiazda at Abrams Artists Agency in New York City. Her website is www.PearlCleage.net. She also maintains a Facebook fan page. www.pearlcleage.net.

Marti Lyons (she/her/hers) most recently directed the world-premiere of Galileo’s Daughter by Jessica Dickey at Remy Bumppo, Georgiana and Kitty: Christmas at Pemberly at Northlight Theatre, Wife of a Salesman by Eleanor Burgess at Milwaukee Rep, Sense and Sensibility adapted by Jessica Swale at American Pl]]> false no 00:57:04 No no https://americanwritersmuseum.org/podcast/episode-161-patty-lin-with-zibby-owens/ Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:09:00 +0000 https://americanwritersmuseum.org/?post_type=podcast&p=54053 This week, former television screenwriter Patty Lin discusses her new memoir End Credits: How I Broke Up with Hollywood. She is joined by author, podcaster, and publisher Zibby Owens. This conversation originally took place October 5, 2023 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

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About End Credits:

The only script you can really write in life is your own.

What if achieving your professional dreams comes at too high a personal cost? That’s what screenwriter Patty Lin started to ask herself after years in the cutthroat TV industry. One minute she was a tourist, begging her way into the audience of Late Night with David Letterman. Just a few years later, she was an insider who—through relentless hard work and sacrifice—had earned a seat in the writers' rooms of the hottest TV shows of all time. While writing for Friends, Freaks and Geeks, Desperate Housewives and Breaking Bad, Patty steeled herself against the indignities of a chaotic, abusive, male-dominated work culture, not just as one of the few women in the room, but as the only Asian person.

This funny, fresh, eye-opening, and inside-Hollywood story will resonate with anyone trying to please their parents, maintain a love life, and find their way in the world—and will inspire countless dreamers to listen to their inner voices and know when it’s time to get out.

PATTY LIN is an author and former TV writer/producer whose credits include Freaks and Geeks, Friends, Desperate Housewives, and Breaking Bad. She has also written pilots for Fox, CBS, and Nickelodeon. Her Breaking Bad episode, "Gray Matter," was nominated for a Writers Guild Award for Outstanding Script of 2008 in the Episodic Drama category. She retired from television to save her sanity and began writing a book as an answer to the question, "Why would you quit such a cool job?" Her memoir, End Credits: How I Broke Up with Hollywood, is out now. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband.

ZIBBY OWENS is an author, publisher, award-winning podcaster, CEO, bookstore owner, and mom of four. Creator and host of the award-winning, daily podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books, Zibby is also the founder and CEO of Zibby Media, dubbed "the Zibby-verse" by the L.A. Times. It includes a publishing house, magazine, podcast network, retreats, classes, Zibby’s Book Club, and Zibby’s Bookshop, an independent bookstore in Santa Monica, CA. A regular contributor to Good Morning America and other outlets, she loves recommending books as "NYC’s Most Powerful Book-fluencer" (Vulture). A writer herself, Zibby has published a memoir, Bookends: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature, a children’s book Princess Charming, two anthologies, and a zillion essays. Her debut novel Blank comes out in March 2024. A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Business School, Zibby currently lives in New York with her husband, Kyle Owens of Morning Moon Productions, and four children ages 8 to 15.

This episode is presented in conjunction with Banned Books Week. Follow the link to learn more about this initiative from the American Library Association and see how you can take action to preserve open access to literature in your community.

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About the speakers:

JOANNE LEEDOM-ACKERMAN is a novelist, short story writer, and journalist. Her works of fiction include Burning Distance and The Far Side of the Desert. She is editor of The Journey of Liu Xiaobo: From Dark Horse to Nobel Laureate. A former reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, Joanne is a Vice President Emeritus and former International Secretary of PEN International. She serves on the boards of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, the International Center for Journalists, Words Without Borders and Refugees International. She is an emeritus board member of Poets and Writers and Human Rights Watch and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and PEN American Center, where she served as a trustee. She is currently a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Writers Museum.

SARA PARETSKY revolutionized the mystery world in 1982 when she introduced V.I. Warshawski in Indemnity Only. By creating a detective with the grit and smarts to take on the mean streets, Paretsky challenged a genre in which women historically were vamps or victims. V.I. struck a chord with readers and critics; Indemnity Only was followed by twenty more V.I. novels. Paretsky detailed her journey from Kansas farm-girl to New York Times bestseller in her 2007 memoir, Writing in an Age of Silence, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. In addition, Paretsky has written two stand-alone novels, Ghost Country, and Bleeding Kansas, set in the part of rural Kansas where Paretsky grew up. She has published several short story collections, most recently Love & Other Crimes, and has edited numerous other anthologies.

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About The Auburn Conference:

It is 1883, and America is at a crossroads. At a tiny college in Upstate New York, an idealistic young professor has managed to convince Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Confederate memoirist Forrest Taylor, and romance novelist Lucy Comstock to participate in the first (and last) Auburn Writers’ Conference for a public discussion about the future of the nation. By turns brilliantly comic and startlingly prescient, The Auburn Conference vibrates with questions as alive and urgent today as they were in 1883—the chronic American conundrums of race, class, and gender, and the fate of the democratic ideal.

TOM PIAZZA is celebrated both as a novelist and as a writer on American music. His twelve books include the novels The Auburn Conference and City Of Refuge, the short-story collection Blues and Trouble, the post-Katrina manifesto Why New Orleans Matters, and the essay collection Devil Sent The Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America. He was a principal writer for the innovative New Orleans-based HBO drama series TREME and the winner of a Grammy Award for his album notes to Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey. He lives in New Orleans.

DONNA SEAMAN is Editor, Adult Books for Booklist. A recipient of the Louis Shores Award for excellence in book reviewing, the James Friend Memorial Award for Literary Criticism, and the Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award, Seaman is a member of the Content Leadership Team for the American Writers Museum, a frequent presenter at various literary events and programs, and an adjunct professor for Northwestern University’s MA in Writing and MFA in MFA in Prose and Poetry Programs. Seaman’s author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air and she is the author of Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists.

About From Dust to Stardust:

Chicago, 1916. Doreen O’Dare is fourteen years old when she hops a Hollywood-bound train with her beloved Irish grandmother. Within a decade, her trademark bob and insouciant charm make her the preeminent movie flapper of the Jazz Age. But her success story masks one of relentless ambition, tragedy, and the secrets of a dangerous marriage.

Her professional life in flux, Doreen trades one dream for another. She pours her wealth and creative energy into a singular achievement: the construction of a one-ton miniature Fairy Castle, the likes of which the world has never seen. So begins Doreen’s public tour to lift the nation’s spirits during the Great Depression―and a personal journey worth remembering.

A sweeping journey from the dawn of the motion picture era through turbulent twentieth-century America, From Dust to Stardust is a breathtaking novel about one determined woman navigating change, challenging the price of fame, and sharing the gift of real magic.

KATHLEEN ROONEY is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a collective of poets and their vintage typewriters who compose poetry on demand. Her most recent books include the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey. Her poetry collection Where Are the Snows won the 2021 X. J. Kennedy Prize and was published by Texas Review Press in fall of 2022. She is a winner of the Ruth Lilly Prize from Poetry magazine and the Adam Morgan Literary Citizen Award from the Chicago Review of Books, and her criticism appears in the New York Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Brooklyn Rail, Chicago magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago with her spouse, the writer Martin Seay, and teaches English and creative writing at DePaul University.

Twice Pushcart nominated, IGNATIUS VALENTINE ALOYSIUS earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern University, where he won the Distinguished Thesis Award for fiction and is a lecturer in writing and experimentation there. A 2020-21 Creative Writing Fellow for the Ludington Writers Board and the Ludington Area Center for the Arts in Michigan, Ignatius is the author of the literary novel Fishhead. Republic of Want (Tortoise Books, 2020), and his prose and poetry have appeared in or are forthcoming in Cold Mountain Review, Olney Magazine, Thanatos Review, Roi Fainéant Press, Trampset, Tofu Ink Arts Press, and the Coalition for Digital Narratives, among other venues. He is a host and curator of the long-running reading series Sunday Salon Chicago, and he serves on the curatorial and diversity boards at Ragdale Foundation, an arts residency in Lake Forest, Illinois. Ignatius lives in Evanston and is a mayor-appointed board member of the Evanston Arts Council.

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About Growing Up Chicago:

Growing Up Chicago is a collection of coming-of-age stories that reflects the diversity of the city and its metropolitan area. Primarily memoir, the book collects work by writers who spent their formative years in the region to ask: What characterizes a Chicago author? Is it a certain feel to the writer's language? A narrative sensibility? The mention of certain neighborhoods or locales? Contributors to the volume include renowned writers Ana Castillo, Stuart Dybek, Emil Ferris, Charles Johnson, Rebecca Makkai, Erika L. Sánchez, and George Saunders, as well as emerging talents. While the authors represented here write from distinct local experiences, some universals emerge, including the abiding influence of family and friends and the self-realizations earned against the background of a place sparkling with promise and riven by inequality, a place in constant flux.

The stories evoke childhood trips to the Art Institute of Chicago, nighttime games of ringolevio, and the giant neon Magikist lips that once perched over the expressway, sharing perspectives that range from a young man who dreams of becoming an artist to a single mother revisiting her Mexican roots, from a woman's experience with sexual assault to a child's foray into white supremacy. This book memorably explores culture, social identity, and personal growth through the eyes of Chicagoans, affirming that we each hold the ability to shape the places in which we live and write and read as much as those places shape us.

About the speakers:

Lauren DeJulio Bell teaches in the Honors College at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She previously taught in the UIC English Department and the Chicago Public Schools district. She serves on the associate board of StoryStudio Chicago and leads a local project (We Are All Chicago), where she engages with the people of Chicago to foster civic engagement, community writing, and artistic endeavors.

Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novels I Have Some Questions for You, The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, as well as the short story collection Music for Wartime. The Great Believers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize, among other honors. Makkai is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University, and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.

Daiva Markelis is professor of English at Eastern Illinois University. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in New Ohio Review, Crab Orchard Review, The American Literary Review, Oyez, The Chic]]> false no 00:45:09 No no https://americanwritersmuseum.org/podcast/episode-156-small-odysseys/ Mon, 21 Aug 2023 09:49:00 +0000 https://americanwritersmuseum.org/?post_type=podcast&p=52030 This week, contributing authors Jac Jemc, Juan Martinez, Joe Meno, and Luis Alberto Urrea discuss their work in the collection Small Odysseys: Selected Shorts Presents 35 New Short Stories. This conversation originally took place May 15, 2022 and was recorded live at the American Writers Festival.