AWM Author Talks

This week, writers Joanne Leedom-Ackerman and Sara Paretsky discuss their craft, the writing process, and the dangers of censorship and book bans. This conversation originally took place June 15, 2023 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

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.

This week, author Tom Piazza discusses his novel The Auburn Conference with Booklist editor Donna Seaman. This conversation originally took place September 10, 2023 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

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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.

This week, author Kathleen Rooney discusses her new book From Dust to Stardust, a novel about Hollywood, the cost of stardom, and selfless second acts, inspired by an extraordinary true story. Rooney is joined by writer and lecturer Ignatius Aloysius. This conversation originally took place September 6, 2023 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

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.

This week, authors and editors Lauren DeJulio Bell, Rebecca Makkai, and Daiva Markelis discuss their contributions to the collection Growing Up Chicago. This conversation originally took place May 15, 2022 and was recorded live at the American Writers Festival.

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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.

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.

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About Small Odysseys:

A must-have for any lover of literature, Small Odysseys sweeps the reader into the landscape of the contemporary short story, featuring never-before-published works by many of our most preeminent authors as well as up-and-coming superstars.

On their journey through the book, readers will encounter long-ago movie stars, a town full of dandelions, and math lessons from Siri. They will attend karaoke night, hear a twenty-something slacker’s breathless report of his failed recruiting by the FBI, and travel with a father and son as they channel grief into running a neigh­borhood bakery truck. They will watch the Greek goddess Persephone encounter the end of the world, and witness another apocalypse through a series of advertise­ments for a touchless bidet. And finally, they will meet an aging loner who finds courage and resilience hidden in the most unexpected of places—the next generation.

Published in partnership with beloved literary radio program and live show Selected Shorts in honor of its thirty-fifth anniversary, this collection of thirty-five stories captures its spirit in print for the first time.

About the authors:

Jac Jemc is the author of the novels Total Work of Art; My Only Wife, winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award; The Grip of It; and the short-story collections A Different Bed Every Time and False Bingo, winner of the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction and finalist for the Story Prize. Jemc currently teaches creative writing at UC–San Diego.

Juan Martinez is the author of the short-story collection Best Worst American, winner of the Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award. His work has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s, TriQuarterly, Conjunctions, Norton’s Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America, and The Perpetual Engine of Hope: Stories Inspired by Iconic Vegas Photographs.

Joe Meno is the author of seven novels: Marvel and a Wonder, Office Girl, The Great Perhaps, The Boy Detective Fails, Hairstyles of the Damned, How the Hula Girl Sings, and Tender as Hellfire. His short story collections are Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir and Demons in the Spring. His short fiction has been published in McSweeney’s, One Story, Swink, LIT, TriQuarterly, Other Voices, and Gulf Coast, and have been broadcast on NPR.

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his landmark work of nonfiction The Devil’s Highway, Lu

This week, author Jabari Asim discusses his novel Yonder with journalist Evan F. Moore. This conversation originally took place May 15, 2022 and was recorded live at the American Writers Festival.

About Yonder:

The Water Dancer meets The Prophets in this spare, gripping, and beautifully rendered novel exploring love and friendship among a group of enslaved Black strivers in the mid-19th century.

They call themselves the Stolen. Their owners call them captives. They are taught their captors' tongues and their beliefs but they have a language and rituals all their own. In a world that would be allegorical if it weren't saturated in harsh truths, Cato and William meet at Placid Hall, a plantation in an unspecified part of the American South. Subject to the whims of their tyrannical and eccentric captor, Cannonball Greene, they never know what harm may befall them: inhumane physical toil in the plantation's quarry by day, a beating by night, or the sale of a loved one at any moment. It's that cruel practice—the wanton destruction of love, the belief that Black people aren't even capable of loving—that hurts the most.

It hurts the reserved and stubborn William, who finds himself falling for Margaret, a small but mighty woman with self-possession beyond her years. And it hurts Cato, whose first love, Iris, was sold off with no forewarning. He now finds solace in his hearty band of friends, including William, who is like a brother; Margaret; Little Zander; and Milton, a gifted artist. There is also Pandora, with thick braids and long limbs, whose beauty calls to him.

Their relationships begin to fray when a visiting minister with a mysterious past starts to fill their heads with ideas about independence. He tells them that with freedom comes the right to choose the small things—when to dine, when to begin and end work—as well as the big things, such as whom and how to love. Do they follow the preacher and pursue the unknown? Confined in a landscape marked by deceit and uncertainty, who can they trust?

In an elegant work of monumental imagination that will reorient how we think of the legacy of America's shameful past, Jabari Asim presents a beautiful, powerful, and elegiac novel that examines intimacy and longing in the quarters while asking a vital question: What would happen if an enslaved person risked everything for love?

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

This week, journalist Todd Brewster discusses his book Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice, which he co-authored with Marc Lamont Hill. Brewster is interviewed by author Catherine Adel West. This conversation originally took place May 15, 2022 and was recorded live at the American Writers Festival.

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About Seen and Unseen:

A riveting exploration of how the power of visual media over the last few years has shifted the narrative on race and reignited the push towards justice by the author of the "worthy and necessary" (The New York Times) Nobody Marc Lamont Hill and the bestselling author and acclaimed journalist Todd Brewster.

With his signature "clear and courageous" (Cornel West) voice Marc Lamont Hill and New York Times bestselling author Todd Brewster weave four recent pivotal moments in America's racial divide into their disturbing historical context—starting with the killing of George Floyd—Seen and Unseen reveals the connections between our current news headlines and social media feeds and the country's long struggle against racism.

For most of American history, our media has reinforced and promoted racism. But with the immediacy of modern technology—the ubiquity of smartphones, social media, and the internet—that long history is now in flux. From the teenager who caught George Floyd's killing on camera to the citizens who held prosecutors accountable for properly investigating the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, ordinary people are now able to reveal injustice in a more immediate way. As broad movements to overhaul policing, housing, and schooling gain new vitality, Seen and Unseen demonstrates that change starts with the raw evidence of those recording history on the front lines.

In the vein of The New Jim Crow and Caste, Seen and Unseen incisively explores what connects our moment to the history of race in America but also what makes today different from the civil rights movements of the past and what it will ultimately take to push social justice forward.

TODD BREWSTER is a veteran journalist and historian who has worked as an editor for Time and Life and as a senior producer for ABC News. He is the coauthor, with Peter Jennings, of the #1 New York Times bestselling book, The Century, which spent nearly a year on the bestseller list, and the author of the acclaimed Lincoln’s Gamble. Brewster was the founding director of Center for Oral History at West Point and the executive producer of Into Harm’s Way, an award-winning documentary about the West Point Class of 1967. He has taught journalism at Temple University and Mount Holyoke College. A native of Indianapolis, Brewster was inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame in 2000. He lives in Connecticut.

CATHERINE ADEL WEST was born and raised in Chicago, where she currently resides. She graduated with both her Bachelors and Masters of Science in Journalism from the University of Illinois–Urbana. Her work is published in Black Fox Literary Magazine, Five2One, Better than Starbucks, Doors Ajar</

This week, award-winning author Elizabeth Nunez discusses her novel Now Lila Knows, with Booklist editor Donna Seaman. This conversation originally took place May 15, 2022 and was recorded live at the American Writers Festival.

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More about Now Lila Knows:

Lila Bonnard has left her island home in the Caribbean to join the faculty as a visiting professor at Mayfield College in a small Vermont town. On her way from the airport to Mayfield, Lila witnesses the fatal shooting of a Black man by the police. It turns out that the victim was a professor at Mayfield, and was giving CPR to a white woman who was on the verge of an opioid overdose.

The two Black faculty and a Black administrator in the otherwise all-white college expect Lila to be a witness in the case against the police. Unfortunately, Lila fears that in the current hostile political climate against immigrants of color she may jeopardize her position at the college by speaking out, and her fiancé advises her to remain neutral.

Now Lila Knows is a gripping story that explores our obligation to act when confronted with the unfair treatment of fellow human beings. A page-turner with universal resonance, this novel will leave readers rethinking the meaning of love and empathy.

ELIZABETH NUNEZ is the award-winning author of a memoir and ten novels, four of them selected as New York Times Editors’ Choice. Anna In-Between won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award and was long-listed for an IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award. Nunez also received the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in nonfiction for Not for Everyday Use; an American Book Award; and a NALIS Lifetime Literary Award from the Trinidad and Tobago National Library. Her other novels are: Even in Paradise, Boundaries, Prospero’s Daughter, Bruised Hibiscus, Beyond the Limbo Silence, Grace, Discretion, and When Rocks Dance. She is a cofounder of the National Black Writers Conference and executive producer of the CUNY-TV series Black Writers in America. Nunez is a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, where she teaches fiction writing. She divides her time between Amityville and Brooklyn, New York.

DONNA SEAMAN is Editor, Adult Books for Booklist. A recipient of the Louis Shores Award for excellence in book reviewing, the James Friend Memorial

In this episode, authors Jocelyn Nicole Johnson and Rebecca Makkai discuss their work and Johnson’s acclaimed collection short story collection My Monticello.

This conversation originally took place at the American Writers Festival on May 15, 2022 and was recorded live.

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About My Monticello:

A young woman descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings driven from her neighborhood by a white militia. A university professor studying racism by conducting a secret social experiment on his own son. A single mother desperate to buy her first home even as the world hurtles toward catastrophe. Each fighting to survive in America.

Tough-minded, vulnerable, and brave, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s precisely imagined debut explores burdened inheritances and extraordinary pursuits of belonging. Set in the near future, the eponymous novella, "My Monticello," tells of a diverse group of Charlottesville neighbors fleeing violent white supremacists. Led by Da’Naisha, a young Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, they seek refuge in Jefferson’s historic plantation home in a desperate attempt to outlive the long-foretold racial and environmental unravelling within the nation.

In "Control Negro," hailed by Roxane Gay as "one hell of story," a university professor devotes himself to the study of racism and the development of ACMs (average American Caucasian males) by clinically observing his own son from birth in order to "painstakingly mark the route of this Black child too, one whom I could prove was so strikingly decent and true that America could not find fault in him unless we as a nation had projected it there." Johnson’s characters all seek out home as a place and an internal state, whether in the form of a Nigerian widower who immigrates to a meager existence in the city of Alexandria, finding himself adrift; a young mixed-race woman who adopts a new tongue and name to escape the landscapes of rural Virginia and her family; or a single mother who seeks salvation through "Buying a House Ahead of the Apocalypse."

United by these characters’ relentless struggles against reality and fate, My Monticello is a formidable book that bears witness to this country’s legacies and announces the arrival of a wildly original new voice in American fiction.

JOCELYN NICOLE JOHNSON is the author of My Monticello, a fiction debut that was called "a masterly feat" by the New York Times and finalist for the Kirkus Prize. Johnson has been a fellow at TinHouse, Hedgebrook, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her writing appears in Guernica, The Guardian and elsewhere. Her short story "Control Negro" was anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2018, guest edited by Roxane Gay, who called it, "one hell of a story" and read live by LeVar Burton as part of PRI’s Selected Shorts series. A veteran public school art teacher, Johnson lives and writes in Charlottesville, Virginia.

REBECCA MAKKAI is the Chicago-based author of the novels 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 t

This week, authors Logan Steiner and Elizabeth Blackwell discuss writing historical fiction and Steiner’s debut novel After Anne: A Novel of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Life. This conversation originally took place July 9, 2023 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

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More about After Anne:

A stunning and unexpected portrait of Lucy Maud Montgomery, creator of one of literature’s most prized heroines, whose personal demons were at odds with her most enduring legacy—the irrepressible Anne of Green Gables.

“Dear old world,” she murmured, “you are very lovely, and I am glad to be alive in you.” —L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, 1908

As a young woman, Maud had dreams bigger than the whole of Prince Edward Island. Her exuberant spirit had always drawn frowns from her grandmother and their neighbors, but she knew she was meant to create, to capture and share the way she saw the world. And the young girl in Maud’s mind became more and more persistent: Here is my story, she said. Here is how my name should be spelled—Anne with an “e.”

But the day Maud writes the first lines of Anne of Green Gables, she gets a visit from the handsome new minister in town, and soon faces a decision: forge her own path as a spinster authoress, or live as a rural minister’s wife, an existence she once likened to “a respectable form of slavery.” The choice she makes alters the course of her life.

With a husband whose religious mania threatens their health and happiness at every turn, the secret darkness that Maud herself holds inside threatens to break through the persona she shows to the world, driving an ever-widening wedge between her public face and private self, and putting her on a path towards a heartbreaking end.

LOGAN STEINER is a lawyer by day and a writer by baby bedtime. Her writing explores motherhood and the creative life. Logan’s debut novel After Anne will be released on May 30, 2023 by HarperCollins. For fans of Anne of Green Gables and complex, creative women, the novel tells the life story of the author Lucy Maud Montgomery. Logan also writes a Substack newsletter called The Creative Sort. After graduating from Pomona College and Harvard Law School, Logan clerked for three federal judges, spent six years in Big Law, and served for three years as an Assistant United States Attorney. She now specializes in brief writing at a boutique law firm. Logan lives in Denver with her husband, daughter, and the cranky old man of the house, a Russian Blue cat named Taggart.

ELIZABETH BLACKWELL is the author of While Beauty Slept, On a Cold Dark Sea, and Red Mistress. She graduated from Northwestern University with a double major in history and communications and later received a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She worked as a restaurant hostess, waitress, TV station receptionist, medical school secretary, magazine editor, and freelance writer before becoming a historical-fiction author–her favorite job so far. Elizabeth lives in the Chicago suburbs with her husband, three children, an impressive collection of long underwear, and an ever-growing stack of must-read books.