AWM Author Talks

This week, acclaimed writers Ashley C. Ford and Eve L. Ewing discuss Ford’s memoir Somebody’s Daughter. One of the most prominent voices of her generation debuts with an extraordinarily powerful memoir: the story of a childhood defined by the looming absence of her incarcerated father.

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

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More about Somebody's Daughter:

Through poverty, adolescence, and a fraught relationship with her mother, Ashley C. Ford wishes she could turn to her father for hope and encouragement. There are just a few problems: he's in prison, and she doesn't know what he did to end up there. She doesn't know how to deal with the incessant worries that keep her up at night, or how to handle the changes in her body that draw unwanted attention from men. In her search for unconditional love, Ashley begins dating a boy her mother hates. When the relationship turns sour, he assaults her. Still reeling from the rape, which she keeps secret from her family, Ashley desperately searches for meaning in the chaos. Then, her grandmother reveals the truth about her father's incarceration...and Ashley's entire world is turned upside down.

Somebody's Daughter steps into the world of growing up a poor Black girl in Indiana with a family fragmented by incarceration, exploring how isolating and complex such a childhood can be. As Ashley battles her body and her environment, she embarks on a powerful journey to find the threads between who she is and what she was born into, and the complicated familial love that often binds them.

This week, legal analyst and author Elie Mystal discusses his book Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution, with professor Ivy Wilson. This episode is presented in conjunction with the AWM's special exhibit and content initiative Dark Testament: A Century of Black Writers on Justice.

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

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More about Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution

Allow Me to Retort is an easily digestible argument about what rights we have, what rights Republicans are trying to take away, and how to stop them. Mystal explains how to protect the rights of women and people of color instead of cowering to the absolutism of gun owners and bigots. He explains the legal way to stop everything from police brutality to political gerrymandering, just by changing a few judges and justices. He strips out all of the fancy jargon conservatives like to hide behind and lays bare the truth of their project to keep America forever tethered to its slaveholding past.

Mystal brings his trademark humor, expertise, and rhetorical flair to explain concepts like substantive due process and the right for the LGBTQ community to buy a cake, and to arm readers with the knowledge to defend themselves against conservatives who want everybody to live under the yoke of eighteenth-century white men. The same tactics Mystal uses to defend the idea of a fair and equal society on MSNBC and CNN are in this book, for anybody who wants to deploy them on social media.

You don't need to be a legal scholar to understand your own rights. You don't need to accept the "whites only" theory of equality pushed by conservative judges. You can read this book to understand that the Constitution is trash, but doesn't have to be.

This week, professor and author Richard Bradford discusses his book Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer, the first biography to examine Mailer's life as a twisted lens, offering a unique insight into the history of America from the end of World War II to the election of Barack Obama. Bradford is interviewed by AWM Program Director Allison Sansone.

The following conversation originally took place January 20, 2023 and was recorded live via Zoom.

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More about Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer

Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, firstly in 1969 for The Armies of the Night and again in 1980 for The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer's life comes as close as is possible to being the Great American Novel: beyond reason, inexplicable, wonderfully grotesque and addictive.

The Naked and the Dead was acclaimed not so much for its intrinsic qualities but rather because it launched a brutally realistic sub-genre of military fiction—Catch 22 and MASH would not exist without it. Richard Bradford combs through Mailer's personal letters—to lovers and editors—which appear to be a rehearsal for his career as a shifty literary narcissist, and which shape the characters of one of the most widely celebrated World War II novels.

Bradford strikes again with a merciless biography in which diary entries, journal extracts and newspaper columns set the tone of this study of a controversial figure. From friendships with contemporaries such as James Baldwin, failed correspondences with Hemingway and the Kennedys, to terrible - but justified - criticism of his work by William Faulkner and Eleanor Roosevelt, this book gives a unique, snappy and convincing perspective of Mailer's ferocious personality and writings.

This week, professor and historian Brooks E. Hefner discusses his book Black Pulp: Genre Fiction in the Shadow of Jim Crow, a deep dive into mid-century African American newspapers, exploring how Black pulp fiction reassembled genre formulas in the service of racial justice. Hefner is interviewed by journalist Evan F. Moore.

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

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About Black Pulp: Genre Fiction in the Shadow of Jim Crow

In recent years, Jordan Peele's Get Out, Marvel's Black Panther, and HBO's Watchmen have been lauded for the innovative ways they repurpose genre conventions to criticize white supremacy, celebrate Black resistance, and imagine a more racially just world—important progressive messages widely spread precisely because they are packaged in popular genres. But it turns out, such generic retooling for antiracist purposes is nothing new.

As Brooks E. Hefner's Black Pulp shows, this tradition of antiracist genre revision begins even earlier than recent studies of Black superhero comics of the 1960s have revealed. Hefner traces it back to a phenomenon that began in the 1920s, to serialized (and sometimes syndicated) genre stories written by Black authors in Black newspapers with large circulations among middle- and working-class Black readers. From the pages of the Pittsburgh Courier and the Baltimore Afro-American, Hefner recovers a rich archive of African American genre fiction from the 1920s through the mid-1950s—spanning everything from romance, hero-adventure, and crime stories to westerns and science fiction. Reading these stories, Hefner explores how their authors deployed, critiqued, and reassembled genre formulas—and the pleasures they offer to readers—in the service of racial justice: to criticize Jim Crow segregation, racial capitalism, and the sexual exploitation of Black women; to imagine successful interracial romance and collective sociopolitical progress; and to cheer Black agency, even retributive violence in the face of white supremacy.

These popular stories differ significantly from contemporaneous, now-canonized African American protest novels that tend to represent Jim Crow America as a deterministic machine and its Black inhabitants as doomed victims. Widely consumed but since forgotten, these genre stories—and Hefner's incisive analysis of them—offer a more vibrant understanding of African American literary history.

This week, author and professor Leonard Moore discusses his book Teaching Black History to White People. Moore is joined in conversation by Laura McEnaney, Vice President for Research and Education at the Newberry Library.

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

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More about Teaching Black History to White People:

Leonard Moore has been teaching Black history for twenty-five years, mostly to white people. Drawing on decades of experience in the classroom and on college campuses throughout the South, as well as on his own personal history, Moore illustrates how an understanding of Black history is necessary for everyone.

With Teaching Black History to White People, which is "part memoir, part Black history, part pedagogy, and part how-to guide," Moore delivers an accessible and engaging primer on the Black experience in America. He poses provocative questions, such as "Why is the teaching of Black history so controversial?" and "What came first: slavery or racism?" These questions don't have easy answers, and Moore insists that embracing discomfort is necessary for engaging in open and honest conversations about race. Moore includes a syllabus and other tools for actionable steps that white people can take to move beyond performative justice and toward racial reparations, healing, and reconciliation.

We thought we’d kick off 2023 with an episode full of laughs! In this episode, comedy writers Cristela Alonzo, Karen Chee, Peter Gwinn, Alexandra Petri and Peter Sagal discuss their crafts and the role of comedy writing in American culture.

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

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This week we take a look back at some of our favorite moments from the top episodes we released in 2022. From Poet Laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners to screenwriters, novelists and more, we hope you enjoy entering the minds of these writers.

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This week, celebrate the 100th anniversary of T. S. Eliot’s iconic poem The Waste Land with scholar and professor Jed Rasula, author of What the Thunder Said: How The Waste Land Made Poetry Modern. Rasula discusses his book and the enduring impact of The Waste Land with poet and scholar Reginald Gibbons.

The following conversation originally took place December 6th, 2022 and was recorded live via Zoom.

This week, we discuss The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022 anthology with guest editor Rebecca Roanhorse, series editor John Joseph Adams, and bestselling author Veronica Roth. With a diverse selection of stories chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and guest editor Rebecca Roanhorse, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022 explores the ever-expanding and changing world of contemporary science fiction and fantasy.

This conversation originally took place November 13, 2022 at the American Writers Museum and was recorded live.

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About the speakers:

REBECCA ROANHORSE is a New York Times bestselling and Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Award-winning speculative fiction writer and the recipient of the 2018 Astounding (Campbell) Award for Best New Writer. Rebecca has published multiple award-winning short stories and five novels, including two in The Sixth World Series, Star Wars: Resistance Reborn, Race to the Sun for the Rick Riordan imprint, and her latest novel, the epic fantasy Black Sun. She has also written for Marvel Comics and for television, and had projects optioned by Amazon Studios, Netflix, and Paramount TV. Find her Fiction & Non-Fiction HERE.

JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and is the editor of more than thirty anthologies, such as Wastelands and The Living Dead. He is also editor (and publisher) of the Hugo Award-winning magazine Lightspeed, and for five years he was the editor of the John Joseph Adams Books novel imprint for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Lately, he’s been working as an editor on TTRPG projects for Kobold Press and Monte Cook Games and as a contributing game designer on books such as Tome of Heroes. Learn more at johnjosephadams.com.

VERONICA ROTH is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Poster Girl and Chosen Ones, the short story collection The End and Other Beginnings, the Divergent series, and the Carve the Mark duology. She was also the guest editor of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021. She lives in Chicago, Illinois. Learn more at veronicarothbooks.com

This week, writers from Central and Eastern Europe stop by the AWM on the Ukrainian and Dissident Writers Tour, presented by The Continental Literary Magazine.

Sándor Jászberényi, editor-in-chief of The Continental Literary Magazine, moderates a panel of writers aimed at promoting cultural exchange between Central Europe and the writers of the United States. In tumultuous and dangerous times like the ones we currently face, literature becomes even more important, as these writers demonstrate. Máté Makai, author of the 4th NOIR issue, and Dániel Levente Pál, executive director of The Continental Literary Magazine, join Jászberényi in conversation on this important topic.

The following conversation originally took place November 8th, 2022 at the American Writers Museum and was recorded live.

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The Continental Literary Magazine is a thematic quarterly English-language literary and public affairs journal. It is a shared platform providing a space for Central and Eastern European literature to gather ground abroad, and to form a partnership with English literature. This is Central European literature, culture, and traditions as they are — edgy and classy.