This week, historian and author Kelly Lytle Hernández sits down with writer Michael Zapata to discuss her book Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands. The recently released book fills in one of the largest gaps in our history textbooks: the 1910 Mexican Revolution, which remade both Mexico and the United States.

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

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This week, historian and author David W. Blight talks with scholar Keidrick Roy about the work and legacy of Frederick Douglass. Blight edited the recently published collection of Douglass’s public writings from the Library of America. This edition is the largest single-volume selection of Douglass’s writings ever published, including 34 speeches and 67 pieces of journalism.

This episode is presented in conjunction with the American Writers Museum’s new exhibit Dark Testament: A Century of Black Writers on Justice, on which Keidrick Roy served as lead curator. The immersive exhibit is now open to the public and is included with admission. The American Writers Museum is open Thursday through Monday from 10 am to 5 pm.

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

This week, author David Maraniss discusses his new book Path Lit By Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, the definitive biography of a great American athlete who struggled most of his life to overcome racist stereotypes.

Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post and a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and was a finalist three other times. Among his bestselling books are biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, and Vince Lombardi, and a trilogy about the 1960s—Rome 1960; Once in a Great City (winner of the RFK Book Prize); and They Marched into Sunlight (winner of the J. Anthony Lucas Prize and Pulitzer Finalist in History).

Maraniss is interviewed by Kelly Wisecup, professor of English and director of the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University, where she is also an affiliate of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research.

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This week, bestselling mystery novelist Sara Paretsky chats with Booklist editor Donna Seaman about Overboard, the latest book in Paretsky’s “V.I. Warshawski” detective series.

This conversation originally took place May 15th, 2022 at the American Writers Museum and was recorded live as part of the museum’s inaugural American Writers Festival.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer.

This week, beloved children’s book authors Andrea Beaty and Betsy Bird chat about Beaty’s career, her writing process, the publishing industry, and how much fun it is to write for kids.

This conversation originally took place May 15th, 2022 at the American Writers Museum and was recorded live as part of the Museum’s inaugural American Writers Festival.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer.

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This week, singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson and writer Bekah Brunstetter discuss the process of adapting The Notebook, the romance novel by Nicholas Sparks, into a musical for the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. The world premiere musical opens September 6th, 2022. Learn more here.

This conversation originally took place August 17th, 2022 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer.

This week, author and Broadway director Schele Williams discusses her children’s picture book Your Legacy: A Bold Reclaiming of Our Enslaved History with journalist Arionne Nettles.

This conversation was recorded live at the American Writers Museum on May 15, 2022 as part of the inaugural American Writers Festival.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer.

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This week, author Kim Michele Richardson discusses her new book The Book Woman’s Daughter with American Writers Museum Program Director Allison Sansone.

This conversation was recorded live for the American Writers Festival on May 15, 2022 in Chicago.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer.

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This week, journalist and author Kosoko Jackson discusses his young adult novel Survive the Dome with writer and educator Jacoby Cochran. The Hate U Give meets Internment in this pulse-pounding thriller about an impenetrable dome around Baltimore that is keeping the residents in and information from going out during a city-wide protest.

This conversation was recorded live at the American Writers Festival on May 15, 2022 in Chicago.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer.

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This week, acclaimed writers Maxine Hong Kingston and Viet Thanh Nguyen discuss Kingston’s writing and legacy in light of the new collection of Kingston’s work from the Library of America, edited by Nguyen.

This conversation was recorded live for the American Writers Festival on May 15, 2022 in Chicago.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer.

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