AWM Author Talks

This week, Stuart N. Brotman and John Palfrey discuss Brotman’s new book The First Amendment Lives On, a collection of conversations with free speech scholars and advocates. This conversation originally took place November 7th, 2022 at the American Writers Museum and was recorded live.

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More about The First Amendment Lives On:

Hugh M. Hefner’s legacy of enduring free speech and free press values is embodied in the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Awards, established in 1979, which honor leading First Amendment scholars and advocates. Hefner also had a lifelong interest in film censorship issues and supported teaching about them at the University of Southern California for 20 years. His deep commitment to these values was confirmed when the author was granted unrestricted access to over 3,000 personal scrapbooks, which Hefner had kept in order to track free speech and press issues during his lifetime.

The format of the book is an homage to the in-depth conversational interviews Hefner pioneered as the editor and publisher of Playboy magazine. Stuart Brotman conducted in-person conversations with eight persons who in their lifetimes have come to represent a "greatest generation" of free speech and free press scholars and advocates. Notably, these conversations include Geoffrey R. Stone, Floyd Abrams, Nadine Strossen, Burt Neuborne, David D. Cole, Lucy A. Dalglish, Bob Corn-Revere, and Rick Jewell.

STUART N. BROTMAN is an American government policymaker; tenured university professor; management consultant; lawyer; author and editorial adviser; and non-profit organization executive. He has served in four Presidential Administrations on a bipartisan basis and has taught students from 42 countries in six separate disciplines--Communications, Journalism, Business, Law, International Relations, and Public Policy.

JOHN PALFREY is President of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, one of the nation’s largest philanthropies with assets of approximately $7 billion, and offices in Chicago, New Delhi, and Abuja, Nigeria. Palfrey is a well-respected educator, author, legal scholar, and innovator with expertise in how new media is changing learning, education, and other institutions. Throughout his career, he has demonstrated a commitment to rigorous thinking, disruption, and creative solutions often made possible by technology, accessibility of information, and diversity and inclusion. Palfrey has extensive experience in social change spanning the education, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors. He is the author or coauthor of several books, including Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces: Diversity and Free Expression in Education. A revised and expanded version of his book Born Digital: How Children Grow Up in a Digital Age, which he co-authored with Urs Gasser, was issued in 2016. Palfrey serves on the board of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Palfrey holds a JD from Harvard Law School, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and an AB from Harvard College.

This week, Imani Perry, recent recipient of the 2022 National Book Award for nonfiction, discusses her book South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. Perry is joined by Dawn Turner.

This episode is presented in conjunction with our special exhibit Dark Testament: A Century of Black Writers on Justice, in which Perry and her work is featured. Explore Dark Testament today at the American Writers Museum.

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

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Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and a faculty associate with the Programs in Law and Public Affairs, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Jazz Studies. She is the author of 6 books, including Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, which received the Pen Bograd-Weld Award for Biography, The Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award for outstanding work in literary scholarship, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction and the Shilts-Grahn Award for nonfiction from the Publishing Triangle. Looking for Lorraine was also named a 2018 notable book by the New York Times, and a honor book by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was a finalist for the African American Intellectual History Society Pauli Murray Book Prize. Her book May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, winner of the 2019 American Studies Association John Hope Franklin Book Award for the best book in American Studies, the Hurston Wright Award for Nonfiction, and finalist for an NAACP Image Award in Nonfiction. Her most recent book is: Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (Beacon Press, 2019) which was a finalist for the 2020 Chautauqua Prize and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Excellence in Nonfiction.

Dawn Turner is an award-winning author and journalist. Her most recent book, Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood, was named a Notable book of 2021 by The New York Times and The Washington Post, among others. A former columnist for the Chicago Tribune, Turner spent a decade and a half writing about race, politics and people whose stories are often dismissed and ignored. Turner, who served as a 2017 and 2018 juror for the Pulitzer Prize in commentary, has written commentary for The Washington Post, PBS NewsHour, CBS Sunday Morning News show, NPR’s Morning Edition show, the Chicago Tonight show, and elsewhere. She has covered national presidential conventions, as well as Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential election and inauguration. Turner has been a regular commentator for several national and international news programs, and has reported from around the world in countries such as Australia, China, France, and Ghana. She spent the 2014–2015 school year as a Nieman Journalism fellow at Har

This week, we present the Fierce Reads Nonfiction Panel, a discussion of the various forms of nonfiction writing with five authors who work in the genre. In order of appearance, the writers are Achut Deng and Keely Hutton, Alex Graudins, Ashley Woodfolk, and Jessica Vitkus.

Quick note: Alex Graudins is a cartoonist and presented a slideshow of her work during her segment. If you would like to watch this, it is available on the American Writers Museum’s YouTube channel.

This conversation originally took place October 25th, 2022 and was recorded live via Zoom.

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About the panelists:

ACHUT DENG was born in South Sudan and came to America as a refugee when she was sixteen years old, a story she recounts in her memoir, Don’t Look Back: A Memoir of War, Survival, and My Journey from Sudan to America. She is now an American citizen and works in human resources at a meat-packing plant in South Dakota, where she also resides. She is the mother of three sons.

KEELY HUTTON is a children’s book author and former English teacher. She worked closely with Ricky Richard Anywar to tell his story in her debut novel, Soldier Boy. Booklist named Soldier Boy one of the top ten first novels in 2017 and one of the top ten historical novels for youth in 2018. Her second novel, Secret Soldiers, was a 2020 Bank Street Best Children’s Book of the Year and 2020 Children’s Book Council Notable Social Studies Book for Young People. Keely lives in Rochester, NY with her husband, two sons, and adorable dog, Maximus. Hutton assisted Deng in the writing of Don't Look Back.

ALEX GRAUDINS is the cartoonist behind Science Comics: The Brain and History Comics: The Great Chicago Fire. Currently hiding out in li’l Rhode Island, she holds a BFA in Cartooning from the School of Visual Arts and has done work for sites like The Nib and CollegeHumor. She has a penchant for memoirs and narratives that tackle the topics of anxiety and friendship. Her most recent title is the graphic memoir Improve: How I Discovered Improv and Conquered Social Anxiety.

ASHLEY WOODFOLK has loved reading and writing for as long as she can remember. She graduated from Rutgers University and worked in children’s book publishing for over a decade. Now a full-time mom and writer, Ashley lives in a sunny Brooklyn apartment with her cute husband, her cuter dog, and the cutest baby in the world. Her books include The Beauty That Remains, When You Were Everything,

This week, bestselling author Ross Gay discusses his new essay collection Inciting Joy. In these gorgeously written and timely pieces, Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life’s inevitable hardships. This conversation originally took place November 1, 2022 at the American Writers Museum and was recorded live.

This episode is presented in conjunction with our special exhibit Dark Testament: A Century of Black Writers on Justice. Explore the exhibit now at the American Writers Museum.

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About the book: In Inciting Joy, which Ada Limón calls "brilliant," Ross Gay once again proves a luminous observer of our shared humanity. From gardeners offering their abundance to the conviviality of pickup basketball games, from public displays of skateboarding to private heartaches, such as caring for his dying father, Gay investigates how joy and sorrow are inextricably linked.

"My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow—which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow—might draw us together," Gay ponders. "It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love. And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive."

Looking clear-eyed at the injustice, political polarization, and destruction of the natural world, Gay shows us how we might resist, how the possibility of joy is available to us if we seek the things in our lives that prepare the ground for that joy. Then, moving beyond what incites joy, he explores what joy incites, suggesting perhaps a wild, unpredictable, transgressive and unboundaried solidarity among us.

ROSS GAY is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His first collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller. His newest collection of essays, Inciting Joy, was released by Algonquin in October of 2022.

To celebrate Halloween, this week’s episode is magical! Acclaimed authors Dhonielle Clayton and Jacqueline Woodson discuss Clayton’s recent middle grade debut The Marvellers, a fantasy adventure set in a global magic school in the sky.

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

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Dhonielle Clayton spent most of her childhood under her grandmother’s table with a stack of books. She hails from the Washington, D.C. suburbs on the Maryland side. She is the author of the Tiny Pretty Things series (recently adapted by Netflix) and The Belles series. She earned an MA in Children’s Literature from Hollins University and an MFA in Writing for Children at the New School. Now, she is a librarian at Harlem Village Academies, is one of the #WeNeedDiverseBooks librarians, and co-founder of CAKE Literary. The Marvellers is her debut middle grade novel.

Jacqueline Woodson is the recipient of a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and the 2018 Children’s Literature Legacy Award, and she was the 2018–2019 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Her New York Times bestselling memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, won the National Book Award, as well as the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor, and the NAACP Image Award. She also wrote the adult books Red at the Bone, a New York Times bestseller, and Another Brooklyn, a 2016 National Book Award finalist. Her dozens of books for young readers include Coretta Scott King Award and NAACP Image Award winner Before the Ever After, New York Times bestsellers The Year We Learned to Fly, The Day You Begin, and Harbor Me, Newbery Honor winners Feathers, Show Way, and After Tupac and D Foster, and the picture book Each Kindness, which won the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award.

This week, acclaimed authors Reyna Grande and Juan Martinez discuss Grande’s life and writing, in particular her two most recent books: A Ballad of Love and Glory, a historical novel set during the Mexican-American War; and an anthology of immigrant voices she co-edited called Somewhere We Are Human: Authentic Voices on Migration, Survival, and New Beginnings. The Spanish version of her recent novel is also available as Corrido de Amor y Gloria.

This conversation originally took place October 16th, 2022 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

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REYNA GRANDE is the author of the bestselling memoir, The Distance Between Us, (Atria, 2012) where she writes about her life before and after she arrived in the United States from Mexico as an undocumented child immigrant. The much-anticipated sequel, A Dream Called Home (Atria), was released in 2018. Her other works include the novels, Across a Hundred Mountains, (Atria, 2006) and Dancing with Butterflies (Washington Square Press, 2009) which were published to critical acclaim. The Distance Between Us is also available as a young readers edition from Simon & Schuster’s Children’s Division–Aladdin. Her books have been adopted as the common read selection by schools, colleges, and cities across the country. Her most recent titles are A Ballad of Love and Glory (Atria, 2022), a novel set during the Mexican-American War, and an anthology by and about undocumented Americans called Somewhere We Are Human: Authentic Voices on Migration, Survival and New Beginnings (HarperVia, 2022).

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.

This week, photographer Carell Augustus discusses his new photography book Black Hollywood: Reimagining Iconic Movie Moments with journalist Arionne Nettles.

This episode is presented in conjunction with our new special exhibit Dark Testament: A Century of Black Writers on Justice, now open.

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

This week, U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo and Literary Director of the Library of Congress Marie Arana explore the themes of their roots, their creativity, and how their origin stories feed them and their work. This conversation originally took place May 15, 2022 at the inaugural American Writers Festival and was recorded live.

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In 2019, Joy Harjo was appointed the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold the position and only the second person to serve three terms in the role. Harjo’s nine books of poetry include An American Sunrise, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, and She Had Some Horses. She is also the author of two memoirs, Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior, which invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble realizations of her “poet-warrior” road. She has edited several anthologies of Native American writing including When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through — A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, and Living Nations, Living Words, the companion anthology to her signature poet laureate project. Her many writing awards include the 2019 Jackson Prize from the Poetry Society of America, the Ruth Lilly Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Board of Directors Chair of the Native Arts.

Marie Arana is a Peruvian-American author of nonfiction and fiction as well as the inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress. She is the recipient of a 2020 literary award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Among her recent positions are: Director of the National Book Festival, the John W. Kluge Center’s Chair of the Cultures of the Countries of the South, and Writer at Large for the Washington Post. For many years, she was editor-in-chief of the Washington Post’s book review section, Book World. Marie has also written for the New York Times, the National Geographic, Time Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, Spain’s El País, Colombia’s El Tiempo, and Peru’s El Comercio, among many other publications. Her sweeping history of Latin America, Silver, Sword, and Stone, was named Best Nonfiction Book of 2019 by the American Library Association, and was shortlisted for the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence. Her

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.