AWM Author Talks

This is our 200th episode! To celebrate the occasion, we’ve gone back in the vault for highlights from the ten most listened-to episodes of the past one hundred. So, that is episodes 101 through 199. 

Enjoy these top ten clips, and listen to the full episodes wherever you get your podcasts. We have included the episode numbers so you can more easily find them.

Listen to the full episodes below:

1. David W. Blight — The Legacy of Frederick Douglass (Ep. 111)

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Two bestselling authors — Nicole Chung (A Living Remedy) and Lydia Millet (We Loved It All) — discuss the process and craft of writing a memoir with book critic Donna Seaman. This conversation originally took place May 19, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Festival.

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A Living Remedy: A Memoir by Nicole Chung — A searing memoir of family, class and grief—a daughter’s search to understand the lives her adoptive parents led, the life she forged as an adult, and the lives she’s lost.

We Loved It All: A Memory of Life by Lydia Millet — This lucent anti-memoir from celebrated novelist Lydia Millet explores the pain and joy of being a parent, child, and human at a moment when the richness of the planet’s life is deeply threatened.

NICOLE CHUNG’S A Living Remedy was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2023 and a Best Book of the Year by over a dozen outlets. Her 2018 debut, All You Can Ever Know, was a national bestseller and finalist the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Time, the Atlantic, GQ, the Guardian, and Slate. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she now lives in the Washington, DC area.

LYDIA MILLET has written more than a dozen novels and short story collections, including Dinosaurs (2022) and A Children’s Bible, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction and one of The New York Times Book Review’s Best 10 Books of 2020. Millet has won fiction awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and PEN-Center USA and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; since 1999 she has also worked as a writer and editor at the Center for Biological Diversity. We Loved It All is her first work of nonfiction.

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.

This week, historian and biographer Paul Hendrickson discusses writing about his own family's history and his recent book Fighting the Night: Iwo Jima, World War II, and a Flyer’s Life, the profoundly moving story of his father's wartime service as a night fighter pilot, and the prices he and his fellow soldiers paid for their acts of selfless, patriotic sacrifice. Paul is joined by book critic Elizabeth Taylor. This conversation originally took place May 19, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Festival.

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More about Fighting the Night:

In the fall of 1944, Joe Paul Hendrickson, the author's father, kissed his twenty-one-year-old wife and two baby children goodbye. The twenty-five-year-old first lieutenant, pilot of a famed P-61 Black Widow, was leaving for the war. He and his night fighter squadron were sent to Iwo Jima, where, for the last five and a half months of World War II, he flew approximately seventy-five missions, largely in pitch-black conditions. His wife would wait out the war at the home of her small-town Ohio parents, one of the countless numbers of American family members shouldering the burden of being left behind.

Joe Paul, the son of a Depression-poor Kentucky sharecropper, was fresh out of high school in 1937 when he enlisted in mechanic school in the peacetime Army Air Corps. Eventually, he was able to qualify for flight school. After marriage, and with the war on, the young officer and his bride crisscrossed the country, airfield to airfield, base to base: Santa Ana, Yuma, Kissimmee, Bakersfield, Orlando, La Junta, Fresno. He volunteered for night fighters and the newly arrived and almost mythic Black Widow. A world away, the carnage continued. As Paul Hendrickson tracks his parents' journey, together and separate, both stateside and overseas, he creates a vivid portrait of a hard-to-know father whose time in the war, he comes to understand, was something truly heroic, but never without its hidden and unhidden psychic costs.

Bringing to life an iconic moment of American history, and the tragedy of all wars, Fighting the Night is an intense and powerful story of violence and love, forgiveness and loss. And it is a tribute to those who got plunged into service, in the best years of their lives, and the sacrifices they and their loved ones made, then and thereafter.

PAUL HENDRICKSON is a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a winner in 2003 for his book Sons of Mississippi. The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War was a 1996 finalist for the National Book Award. Hemingway’s Boat was a New York Times best seller. He has been the recipient of writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lyndhurst Foundation, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation. Since 1998, he has been on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania, and for two decades before that, he was a staff writer at The Washington Post. He lives with his wife, Cecilia, outside Philadelphia and in Washington, DC.

ELIZABETH TAYLOR, Literary Editor at Large of the Chicago Tribune, has served as President of the NBCC. The co-author of American Pharaoh, she edited both the Books and Sunday Magazine sections of the Chicago Tribune, and was a national correspondent for Time magazine, based in New York and then Chicago.

This week, author Rebecca Siegel offers media literacy advice and discusses her book Loch Ness Uncovered: Media, Misinformation, and the Greatest Monster Hoax of All Time, an extensively researched, myth-busting account of the world's most famous monster hoax—the Loch Ness Monster—and a cautionary tale on the dangers of misinformation. This conversation originally took place May 19, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Festival.

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More about Loch Ness Uncovered:

In 1934, a man was walking by a lake in the Scottish Highlands when he saw a long-necked creature swimming in the water. He grabbed his camera and snapped a photo. When the photo landed on the front page of the Daily Mail, it shattered the belief that paranormal creatures were pure fiction. But amid the monster-hunting craze, complex conspiracies soon emerged. The Loch Ness Monster became more than a mysterious sea creature—it became a phenomenon that caused people to question their assumptions and dig for the truth.

Meticulously researched through primary sources and in-depth interviews with key figures, Loch Ness Uncovered is the fascinating true story of the conspiracy that sparked intrigue worldwide. Complete with archival images, an engaging narrative, and a guide to media literacy, here is a nonfiction book that will transport young readers to the thrilling world of monster mania.

REBECCA SIEGEL has worked in children’s publishing for 18 years. Three of her books have received Starred Reviews in Booklist, including To Fly Among the Stars (Scholastic 2020), which was also named a Mighty Girl’s Book of the Year, and one of the National Science Teaching Association’s Outstanding Science Trade Books for Students. Another recent title, Mayflower (Quarto 2020) was named a 2021 EUREKA! Children’s Honor Book. Rebecca has two books publishing in 2024: Loch Ness Uncovered (Astra Young Readers) and The United States Book (Welbeck). Rebecca lives in the Chicago suburbs with her husband and two daughters.

This week, acclaimed writers Renée Watson and Jabari Asim talk about Watson’s novel, skin & bones, as well as writing Black history and moving from writing for children to adults. This conversation originally took place May 19, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Festival.

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About skin & bones:

From the acclaimed #1 New York Times bestselling author comes a soulful and lyrical novel exploring sisterhood, motherhood, faith, love, and ultimately what gets passed down from one generation to the next.

At 40, Lena Baker is at a steady and stable moment in life—between wine nights with her two best friends and her wedding just weeks away, she's happy in love and in friendship until a confession on her wedding day shifts her world.

Unmoored and grieving a major loss, Lena finds herself trying to teach her daughter self-love while struggling to do so herself. Lena questions everything she's learned about dating, friendship, and motherhood, and through it all, she works tirelessly to bring the oft-forgotten Black history of Oregon to the masses, sidestepping her well-meaning co-workers that don't understand that their good intentions are often offensive and hurtful.

Through Watson's poetic voice, skin & bones is a stirring exploration of who society makes space for and is ultimately a story of heartbreak and healing.

RENÉE WATSON is a #1 New York Times bestselling author. Over the past decade she has authored fifteen young adult books, which have collectively sold more than a million copies. She received a Coretta Scott King Award and a Newbery Honor for Piecing Me Together and high praise for 1619 Project: Born on the Water. Watson is on the Council of Writers for the National Writing Project and is a member of the Academy of American Poets’ Education Advisory Council. She is also a writer-in-residence at The Solstice Low-Residency MFA Creative Writing Program. Renée splits her time between New York City and Portland, Oregon.

JABARI ASIM is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. He directs the MFA program in creative writing at Emerson College, where he is also the Elma Lewis Distinguished Fellow in Social Justice. His nonfiction books include The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why; What Obama Means: For Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Future; Not Guilty: Twelve Black Men Speak Out on Law, Justice, and Life; and We Can’t Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival. His books for children include Whose Toes Are Those? and Preaching to the Chickens: The Story of Young John Lewis. His works of fiction include A Taste of Honey, Only the Strong, and Yonder.

This week, scholar Marilyn Sanders Mobley visits the AWM to discuss her book Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing, which Henry Louis Gates, Jr. calls a "powerful and learned meditation, and one that deserves a prominent place in the field of Morrison studies." Mobley is joined in conversation by poet Parneshia Jones. This conversation originally took place October 15, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

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More about Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing:

Toni Morrison’s readers and critics typically focus more on the “what” than the “how” of her writing. In Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing, Marilyn Sanders Mobley analyzes Morrison’s expressed narrative intention of providing “spaces for the reader” to help us understand the narrative strategies in her work.

Mobley’s approach is as interdisciplinary, intersectional, nuanced, and complex as Morrison’s. She combines textual analysis with a study of Morrison’s cultural politics and narrative poetics and describes how Morrison engages with both history and the present political moment.

Informed by research in geocriticism, spatial literary studies, African American literary studies, and Black feminist studies at the intersection of poetics and cultural politics, Mobley identifies four narrative strategies that illuminate how Morrison creates such spaces in her fiction; what these spaces say about her understanding of place, race, and belonging; and how they constitute a way to read and re-read her work.

MARILYN SANDERS MOBLEY is Emerita Professor of English and African American Studies at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. She is the author of Folk Roots and Mythic Wings in Sarah Orne Jewett and Toni Morrison: The Cultural Function of Narrative and a spiritual memoir, The Strawberry Room, and Other Places Where a Woman Finds Herself.

PARNESHIA JONES studied creative writing at Chicago State University and earned an MFA from Spalding University. Her first book Vessel (2015) was the winner of the Midwest Book Award and featured in O, The Oprah Magazine as one of 12 poetry books to savor for National Poetry Month. Her poems have been published in anthologies such as The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007), Poetry Speaks Who I Am (2010), and She Walks in Beauty: A Woman’s Journey Through Poems (2011), edited by Caroline Kennedy. Jones serves on the boards of Cave Canem and the Guild Complex and the advisory board for UniVerse: A United Nations of Poetry. She is the director of Northwestern University Press.

This week, in honor of Indigenous People’s Day, scholars Rose Miron and Jean O'Brien discuss the power and importance of indigenous storytelling, activism, history, and memory; as well as Miron’s book Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory.

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

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About Indigenous Archival Activism:

Who has the right to represent Native history?

The past several decades have seen a massive shift in debates over who owns and has the right to tell Native American history and stories. For centuries, non-Native actors have collected, stolen, sequestered, and gained value from Native stories and documents, human remains, and sacred objects. However, thanks to the work of Native activists, Native history is now increasingly being repatriated back to the control of tribes and communities. Indigenous Archival Activism takes readers into the heart of these debates by tracing one tribe's fifty-year fight to recover and rewrite their history.

Rose Miron tells the story of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation and their Historical Committee, a group of mostly Mohican women who have been collecting and reorganizing historical materials since 1968. She shows how their work is exemplary of how tribal archives can be used strategically to shift how Native history is accessed, represented, written and, most importantly, controlled. Based on a more than decade-long reciprocal relationship with the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation, Miron's research and writing is shaped primarily by materials found in the tribal archive and ongoing conversations and input from the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee.

As a non-Mohican, Miron is careful to consider her own positionality and reflects on what it means for non-Native researchers and institutions to build reciprocal relationships with Indigenous nations in the context of academia and public history, offering a model both for tribes undertaking their own reclamation projects and for scholars looking to work with tribes in ethical ways.

DR. ROSE MIRON is the Director of the D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago and Affiliate Faculty in the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research at Northwestern University. Her research explores Indigenous public history and public memory within the Northeast and the Great Lakes regions. She holds a BA in History and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota.

JEAN O’BRIEN (citizen, White Earth Ojibwe Nation) is Regents Professor and McKnight Distinguished University Professor of History at University of Minnesota. O’Brien is a scholar of American Indian and Indigenous history. Her scholarship has been especially influential regarding New England’s American Indian peoples in relation to European colonial settlement. O’Brien’s works include: Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790, in which she demonstrates the persistence of Indians in the face of market economies that first commodified, and then slowly alienated their lands; Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England, which investigates the local history writing of New England towns, which laid down the templates for American narratives of Indian disappearance; Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit (with Lisa Blee) that analyzes the memory work surrounding monuments to the Indigenous leader who encountered the Pilgrims in Plymouth, Massachusetts; and four edited volumes, most recently Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege (with Daniel Heath Justice). She is a co-founder and past president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. She holds a Ph.D. from University of Chicago.

This week, investigative journalists Shawn Cohen and Philip Eil share insights into their reporting processes, interviewing techniques, and writing true crime with honesty and sensitivity. Moderated by journalist Evan F. Moore. They also discuss their latest books:

College Girl, Missing: The True Story of How a Young Woman Disappeared in Plain Sight by Shawn Cohen. "She visited friends. She walked to a bar. She was right there…until she was gone. Investigative journalist Shawn Cohen breaks more than a decade of silence as he pursues the truth: what really happened to Lauren Spierer?"

Prescription for Pain: How a Once-Promising Doctor Became the “Pill Mill Killer” by Philip Eil. "An obsessive true crime investigation of a bizarre and unlikely perpetrator, who’s serving the opioid epidemic’s longest term for illegal prescriptions—four life sentences."

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

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About the panelists:

SHAWN COHEN is an investigative journalist specializing in crime and law enforcement reporting. He is currently working for the Daily Mail as a senior reporter on its exclusives team, breaking news on national stories. He has twenty-eight years of front-line experience covering everything from small-town murders and police corruption to Hurricane Katrina and mass shootings.

PHILIP EIL is an award-winning freelance journalist based in his hometown, Providence, Rhode Island. He is the former news editor of the alt-weekly newspaper, The Providence Phoenix. Since the paper’s close in 2014, he has contributed to The Atlantic, Men’s Health, the Boston Globe, Huffington Post, and the Columbia Journalism Review, among other outlets. He has also taught writing and journalism classes at Brown University, Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and the Rhode Island School of Design. He holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the Columbia University School of the Arts. This is his first book.

EVAN F. MOORE is a Chicago-based writer whose work over time consists of topics at the intersection of sports, race, entertainment, news, and culture. Evan, an adjunct community journalism professor at DePaul University, is the co-author of the critically-acclaimed book, Game Misconduct: Hockey’s Toxic Culture and How to Fix It. Evan, who has won several journalism awards and nominations, is also a member of the Harold Washington Literary Award committee.

This week, prominent writers and game designers discuss crafting game narrative and representation within gaming communities. Featured panelists are Keith Ammann, Derek Tyler Attico, Keisha Howard, and Samantha Ortiz. Moderated by Carly A. Kocurek. Learn more about them below.

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 authentically plugged-in to the worlds of video games, AI, VR and geek culture. Keisha Howard identifies compelling ways for games & tech to intersect with any industry and inspires others around the infinite possibilities.

CARLY A. KOCUREK is a cultural historian specializing in the study of new media technologies and video gaming. She is the author of two books, Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade, which covers the early rise of video game arcades in the U.S., and Brenda Laurel: Pioneering Games for Girls, a consideration of Laurel’s career as researcher and game designer. With Jennifer deWinter, she co-founded and co-edits the Influential Game Designers book series for Bloomsbury. She is also a game designer specializing in experimental and serious games. Paste Magazine called her game Choice: Texas “one of the best games of 2014.” She served as lead writer and producer for The Spider’s Web, an alternate reality game embedded in a peer-reviewed journal article. In 2020, her print-and-play card game, Happy Ecosystems, was awarded the positive impact award for the Indiecade Climate Jam. At Illinois Tech, she teaches courses on digital culture, interactive storytelling, game design, and media history at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. She also works with both undergraduate and graduate students on collaborative research and design projects.

SAMANTHA ORTIZ is a writer and Narrative Designer at Bad Robot Games. Over her five year career in the independent games space, she has worked on award-winning titles including Neon White, Tamales: Con Familia, and the 2021 Latinx in Gaming Unidos Jam winner, Comunicacion. She has also appeared on NPR and exhibited at ICIDS Hops Ahead. In her spare time, she volunteers as a program coordinator and mentor for the IGDA Foundation.

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.