AWM Author Talks

This week, Black writers and artists celebrate Juneteenth by discussing their crafts and their activism in the context of our special exhibit Dark Testament: A Century of Black Writers on Justice, on view now at the American Writers Museum.

Journalist Jaha Nailah Avery reads from and discusses her new book Those Who Saw the Sun, a collection of oral history narratives from the time of Jim Crow in the South. Then, a gallery talk by artists featured in Dark Testament. Chicago artists Dorothy Burge, Damon Reed, and Dorian Sylvain talk about their process, what it means to them to create representations of America’s legendary Black authors for the exhibit, and how the words and work of those writers affected the artists' renderings.

This conversation originally took place June 19, 2023 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

This week, Juno Dawson discusses her work and her debut picture book You Need to Chill!. Dawson is a leading LGBTQ+ activist and also the bestselling author of This Book Is Gay, which is currently the tenth most banned book in the United States.

The following conversation originally took place June 22, 2023 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

About You Need to Chill!:

A delightfully endearing debut picture book by bestselling author and activist Juno Dawson in which a sister proves to be an LGBTQ ally when answering everyone's questions about where her brother Bill has gone.

When Bill can't be found at school one day, the imaginations of the other children run wild. Is he on vacation? Is he lost in the park? Has he been eaten by a shark? It's up to Bill's sister to explain that everyone needs to chill.

Juno Dawson's debut LGBTQ children's book is a witty and fun-filled rhyming story about family, identity, and acceptance. Bold, joyful, and warm-hearted, this inclusive children's book's message shines through on every page.

JUNO DAWSON is the international bestselling author of fiction and nonfiction for young adults. Her works include the highly acclaimed This Book is Gay as well as What’s the T? She is a columnist for Attitude magazine and a key LGBTQ+ activist with the charity Stonewall. A former teacher specializing in behavior studies, Juno now writes full time and lives in Brighton, England.

This week, bestselling author Lisa See discusses her new historical fiction novel Lady Tan’s Circle of Women, with Joanne Leedom-Ackerman

The following conversation originally took place June 12, 2023 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

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About Lady Tan's Circle of Women:

The latest historical novel from New York Times bestselling author Lisa See, inspired by the true story of a woman physician from 15th-century China—perfect for fans of See's classic Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and The Island of Sea Women.

According to Confucius, "an educated woman is a worthless woman," but Tan Yunxian—born into an elite family, yet haunted by death, separations, and loneliness—is being raised by her grandparents to be of use. Her grandmother is one of only a handful of female doctors in China, and she teaches Yunxian the pillars of Chinese medicine, the Four Examinations—looking, listening, touching, and asking—something a man can never do with a female patient.

From a young age, Yunxian learns about women's illnesses, many of which relate to childbearing, alongside a young midwife-in-training, Meiling. The two girls find fast friendship and a mutual purpose—despite the prohibition that a doctor should never touch blood while a midwife comes in frequent contact with it—and they vow to be forever friends, sharing in each other's joys and struggles. No mud, no lotus, they tell themselves: from adversity beauty can bloom.

But when Yunxian is sent into an arranged marriage, her mother-in-law forbids her from seeing Meiling and from helping the women and girls in the household. Yunxian is to act like a proper wife—embroider bound-foot slippers, pluck instruments, recite poetry, give birth to sons, and stay forever within the walls of the family compound, the Garden of Fragrant Delights.

How might a woman like Yunxian break free of these traditions, go on to treat women and girls from every level of society, and lead a life of such importance that many of her remedies are still used five centuries later? How might the power of friendship support or complicate these efforts? Lady Tan's Circle of Women is a captivating story of women helping other women. It is also a triumphant reimagining of the life of a woman who was remarkable in the Ming dynasty and would be considered remarkable today.

This week, sex and relationship columnist Zachary Zane discusses his new essay collection Boyslut: A Memoir and Manifesto, named a Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Book of the Year by Buzzfeed. This conversation originally took place June 6, 2023 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

Content Warning: this conversation contains explicit language related to sexual themes. Listener discretion is advised.

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About Boyslut:

A sex and relationship columnist bares it all in a series of essays—part memoir, part manifesto—that explore the author's coming-of-age and coming out as a bisexual man and move toward embracing and celebrating sex unencumbered by shame.

As a boy, Zachary Zane sensed that all was not right when images of his therapist naked popped into his head. Without an explanation as to why, a deep sense of shame pervaded these thoughts. Though his therapist assured him a little imagination was nothing to be ashamed of, over the years, society told him otherwise.

Boyslut is a series of personal and tantalizing essays that articulate how our society still shames people for the sex that they have and the sexualities that they inhabit. Through the lens of his bisexuality and much self-described sluttiness, Zane breaks down exactly how this sexual shame negatively impacts the sex and relationships in our lives, and through personal experience, shares how we can unlearn the harmful, entrenched messages that society imparts to us.

From stories of drug-fueled threesomes and risqué Grindr hookups to insights on dealing with rejection and living with his boyfriend and his wife, Boyslut is reassuring and often painfully funny—but is most potently a testimony that we can all learn to live healthier lives unburdened by stigma.

This week, a panel of authors and educators from StoryStudio Chicago discuss the process of writing from multiple identities, often marginalized ones, and inspiring young people to do the same. The writers include Dionna Griffin-Irons, Jac Jemc, Juan Martinez and Frances de Pontes Peebles.

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

About the panelists:

DIONNA GRIFFIN-IRONS is a writer, producer and Director of Talent Diversity and Development for The Second City U.S. and Canada. A Second City Detroit alumnus with 18+ years of experience as a performer, producer and facilitator, Dionna has taught 200+ workshops at colleges, corporate boardrooms, women’s shelters and worked with the United States Embassy in Norway and Latvia introducing improv as a tool for social change. Griffin-Irons’s outreach work has appeared in Diversity Journal publication, on NPR, ABC, NBC and numerous academic posts including her 2015 TEDx Talk at the University of Chicago. Producer credits include 20+ "Urban Twist" revues, Second City Southside, R.E.A.C.H. (Risky, Eclectic Artists Comedy Hour), Second City Black History Month Show, and Second City & NBC Break Out Comedy Festival. Her 2014 published work can be found in Rowan/Littlefield’s anthology Women, Writing and Prison. She is currently writing a memoir on the intersection of comedy, diversity and women in prison.

JAC JEMC is the author of the novels Empty Theatre; 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.

FRANCES DE PONTES PEEBLES is the author of the novels The Seamstress and The Air You Breathe. She is a Creative Writing Fellow in Literature for 2020 from The National Endowment for the Arts. Her books have been

This week, we have a special episode with live music and lively conversation in celebration of the new one-of-a-kind anthology The People’s Tongue: Americans and the English Language. With performances and discussion from Ambassador Carolyn Curiel, senior speechwriter and special assistant to President Bill Clinton and former editorial board member of The New York Times; Paquito D’Rivera, renowned Cuban-American jazz saxophonist, clarinetist and composer; Fareed Haque, Pakistani-Chilean-American jazz and classical guitarist and University of Chicago professor; and Ilan Stavans, editor of the The People’s Tongue.

This conversation originally took place May 21, 2023 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

More about The People's Tongue:

A riveting, one-of-a-kind anthology of the diversity, strangeness, and power of American English that features a tremendous array of letters, poems, memoir, jeremiads, stories, songs, documents, and more from Sojourner Truth and Abraham Lincoln to Henry Roth and Zora Neale Hurston, from George Carlin and James Baldwin to Richard Rodríguez and Amy Tan, from Tony Kushner and Toni Morrison to Louise Erdrich and Donald Trump.

This volume is a kind of people's history of English in the United States, told by those who have transformed it: activists, teachers, immigrants, journalists, nurses, poets, astronauts, dictionary makers, actors, musicians, playwrights, preachers, Supreme Court Justices, rappers, translators, singers, children's book authors, scientists, politicians, foreigners, students, homemakers, lexicographers, scholars, newspaper columnists, TV personalities, senators, novelists, technology innovators, and a bunch of fanatics.

The quest is to understand how an imperial language like English, with Germanic origins, whose spread resulted from the Norman conquest, came to be an intrinsic component of the first and most influential democratic experiment in the world. Edited by internationally renowned cultural commentator and consultant for the OED Ilan Stavans, it is organized chronologically and offers a banquet of letters, poems, autobiographical reflections, op-eds, dictionary entries, stories, songs, legislative documents, and other evidence of verbal mutation. It addresses Ebonics, and Yinglish, Spanglish, and other linguistic concoctions, including sci-fi inventions.

In pages in which the story is not only the what but the how, The People's Tongue starts with samples of the English used by the settlers in Plymouth Colony and it ends with President Donald Trump's tweets.

This week, bestselling author Nicole Chung discusses her new memoir, A Living Remedy, with Nina Li Coomes.

The following conversation originally took place May 16, 2023 and was recorded live via Zoom.

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More about A Living Remedy:

From the bestselling author of All You Can Ever Know comes 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.

"In this country, unless you attain extraordinary wealth, you will likely be unable to help your loved ones in all the ways you'd hoped. You will learn to live with the specific, hollow guilt of those who leave hardship behind, yet are unable to bring anyone else with them."

Nicole Chung couldn't hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough. As a scholarship student at a private university on the East Coast, no longer the only Korean she knew, she found community and a path to the life she'd long wanted. But the middle class world she begins to raise a family in — where there are big homes, college funds, nice vacations — looks very different from the middle class world she thought she grew up in, where paychecks have to stretch to the end of the week, health insurance is often lacking, and there are no safety nets.

When her father dies at only sixty-seven, killed by diabetes and kidney disease, Nicole feels deep grief as well as rage, knowing that years of precarity and lack of access to healthcare contributed to his early death. And then the unthinkable happens — less than a year later, her beloved mother is diagnosed with cancer, and the physical distance between them becomes insurmountable as COVID-19 descends upon the world.

Exploring the enduring strength of family bonds in the face of hardship and tragedy, A Living Remedy examines what it takes to reconcile the distance between one life, one home, and another — and sheds needed light on some of the most persistent and grievous inequalities in American society.

This week, writers discuss their contributions to the anthology The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry. The panel includes editors and contributors Tara Betts, Mallessa James, Len Lawson, Cynthia Manick, and Craig Stevens. Moderated by Eve L. Ewing.

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

More about The Future of Black:

The expansion of Marvel and DC Comics' characters such as Black Panther, Luke Cage, and Black Lightning in film and on television has created a proliferation of poetry in this genre—receiving wide literary and popular attention.

This groundbreaking collection highlights work from poets who have written verse within this growing tradition, including Terrance Hayes, Lucille Clifton, Gil Scott-Heron, A. Van Jordan, Glenis Redmond, Tracy K. Smith, Teri Ellen Cross Davis, Joshua Bennett, Douglas Kearney, Tara Betts, Frank X Walker, Tyree Daye, and others. In addition, the anthology will also feature the work of artists such as John Jennings and Najee Dorsey, showcasing their interpretations of superheroes, Black comic characters, Afrofuturistic images from the African diaspora.

Acclaimed science fiction author John Scalzi discusses his recent book The Kaiju Preservation Society and the science fiction genre with fellow award-winning science fiction writer Michi Trota.

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

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More about The Kaiju Preservation Society:

When COVID-19 sweeps through New York City, Jamie Gray is stuck as a dead-end driver for food delivery apps. That is, until Jamie makes a delivery to an old acquaintance, Tom, who works at what he calls "an animal rights organization." Tom's team needs a last-minute grunt to handle things on their next field visit. Jamie, eager to do anything, immediately signs on.

What Tom doesn't tell Jamie is that the animals his team cares for are not here on Earth. Not our Earth, at least. In an alternate dimension, massive dinosaur-like creatures named Kaiju roam a warm, human-free world. They're the universe's largest and most dangerous panda and they're in trouble.

It's not just the Kaiju Preservation Society who have found their way to the alternate world. Others have, too. And their carelessness could cause millions back on our Earth to die.

This week, poet Michael Warr reads and discusses his work, and brings his fellow poets and friends on stage to perform their work. Featured poets include avery r. young, Elise Paschen, Reginald Gibbons, and more.

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