AWM Author Talks

This week, Booklist editor Donna Seaman talks with Pulitzer Prize-winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey about her powerful new memoir Memorial Drive, which recounts the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather and the impact that moment has had on Trethewey's life and work.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Listen to more episodes here.

“This is the situation I was in: a difficult childhood, a tragic loss when I was nineteen. That was the situation, but it took a very long time to figure out what story I had to tell. It wasn’t simply that [my mother] was murdered, it was something else entirely and it’s made up of both what I remember and also the silences, the restraint that allows certain parts to shine through and others to recede into the background.”

“I am a poet because of the deep existential wound of losing my mother. But the kind of poet I am has everything to do with that early childhood, the way that I came to language and metaphor and image and research and even musicality.”

“I’m interested in restorative justice, and I think it’s about remembering that there were all these other forces at work that were perhaps crushing [my stepfather's] soul, disfiguring it. I had to remember as I wrote about him, that he was a child once.”

“Imagine if instead of all those Confederate monuments all over the South there were monuments to the actual winners of that war, the nearly 200,000 African-American soldiers who fought in it. We would understand ourselves very differently as a nation.”

"It is both a time of so much loss and so much grief. A time for a real need to remember and memorialize the lives that we are constantly losing...I think we’re also having a real reckoning over what we remember and what stories we tell ourselves as a nation. I think we’ll be contending with how we remember this moment for a long time."

This week, Booklist editor Donna Seaman chats with Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage, which was a selection for Oprah’s Book Club.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Listen to more episodes here.

"Prison is family separation. It’s happening on our border but it’s also happening right in our cities. Every person in prison is separated from your loved ones and when you are taken from your loved ones you are taken away from the relationships that make you who you are. It necessarily robs you of some of your personality, some of the way you understand yourself."

"When I write novels I don’t know what’s gonna happen. I like to feel breathless and stressed when I write. The same way you read. Like, if I were to figure it out early, just like if someone spoils it you don’t want to keep reading, if I spoiled it for myself I wouldn’t want to keep writing it."

"I am obsessed with Toni Morrison. OBSESSED. I’ll tell you how obsessed. I have on my desk a little bit of dirt from the town of Lorain, Ohio where she’s from. And sometimes I sprinkle a little bit. And if I have a student with a really, really serious problem, I’ll give them just a pinch. Just a little pinch of that Toni Morrison dirt."

"I didn’t know that I could be a writer. I didn’t know that was something available for me to be."

"What he’s lost, I realized, is his citizenship in his own life. We are citizens of our own lives, of our communities, of our country by what we can give back. You join a community by giving to that community. And he didn’t realize he could give anyone anything."

This week, we are thrilled to present a discussion between award-winning poets Ross Gay and Eve L. Ewing, who talked about Gay’s recent collection The Book of Delights.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Listen to more episodes here.

“My first impulse when I have a delight, when I have something that’s delightful...I want to share it. Or I want to yell it. Delight seems always to make you either reach toward people, or it makes you aware of the way that people reach toward each other and care for each other and tend to each other.”

“For Black people to rest is radical, a counter-political act. And to be joyful and laughing together. Like if enough of us get together and laugh loud together what do you call it? A crime.”

“There is a concerted effort to make us feel that we are not capable of caring for each other or loving each other or being tender with each other. The fact of the matter is that we are constantly tender with each other...the subtle tenderness that we are constantly in the midst of is like the ground. It’s the ground of our existence in fact. And there is a terrible utility to making us think that’s not actually the case. The more we know that our thing is to be tender with each other, that is really big. That’s really important.”

“The reason that delight is a thing is because there are things that are not delightful. The reason delight feels valuable is because there is a concerted effort to study what is not delightful, because there is a lot of what is not delightful.”

“What I’m really interested in for my work going forward is joy. I want to study, study, study what it is. And what I think of joy is the impossible-to-sever, fundamental connections between us. And when that becomes luminous, that to me is joy. That awareness of interdependence, of connectedness.”

This week, we are thrilled to present a discussion between award-winning poets Ross Gay and Eve L. Ewing, who talked about Gay’s recent collection The Book of Delights.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Listen to more episodes here.

“My first impulse when I have a delight, when I have something that’s delightful...I want to share it. Or I want to yell it. Delight seems always to make you either reach toward people, or it makes you aware of the way that people reach toward each other and care for each other and tend to each other.”

“For Black people to rest is radical, a counter-political act. And to be joyful and laughing together. Like if enough of us get together and laugh loud together what do you call it? A crime.”

“There is a concerted effort to make us feel that we are not capable of caring for each other or loving each other or being tender with each other. The fact of the matter is that we are constantly tender with each other...the subtle tenderness that we are constantly in the midst of is like the ground. It’s the ground of our existence in fact. And there is a terrible utility to making us think that’s not actually the case. The more we know that our thing is to be tender with each other, that is really big. That’s really important.”

“The reason that delight is a thing is because there are things that are not delightful. The reason delight feels valuable is because there is a concerted effort to study what is not delightful, because there is a lot of what is not delightful.”

“What I’m really interested in for my work going forward is joy. I want to study, study, study what it is. And what I think of joy is the impossible-to-sever, fundamental connections between us. And when that becomes luminous, that to me is joy. That awareness of interdependence, of connectedness.”

This week, AWM Program Director Allison Sansone talks with writer and disabled rights advocate Keah Brown about her essay collection The Pretty One.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Listen to more episodes here.

"What I want so badly is disabled characters who aren’t plot devices for somebody else. I want disabled characters who get angry and who get sad and who are happy...I’m tired of being the token thing in someone’s story.”

“For me to be vulnerable was to tell the story that I believed in. And because I still believe in it, I’m good regardless of what people think.”

"In writing this book it was both an apology to my younger self who was so sad and depressed and didn’t like herself. And it was also a way for me to teach people about the identity of disability and what it’s like to live in my own disabled body and help change the perceptions that people have about disability."

“Sometimes you have to write even when you don’t want to. There’s never going to be a perfect time for you to sit down and write, you just have to make it work whenever you can get it in.”

“Whether you’re disabled or not I want people to leave the book feeling good about themselves and I want them to question the way they see the world and the people in it.”

This week, AWM Program Director Allison Sansone talks to award-winning poet Saeed Jones about his memoir How We Fight For Our Lives, which tells his incredible story of a young, black, gay man from the south fighting to carve out a place for himself in the world.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Listen to more episodes here.

“If America was going to hate me for being Black and gay, then I might as well make a weapon out of myself.”

“I’m not very kind to myself as a poet. I don’t think it’s about being nice to myself, I think it’s about being perfect. But with writing a memoir you just have to be more generous because it’s a marathon, and I think poems are a sprint.”

“I’m not one of those writers who alcohol helps the writing. No, alcohol helps the living.”

“Memory and its unreliability is a part of identity formation. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are how we become who we are. And so I wanted to embrace all of that instead of running from it because I just think that’s what a good memoir should do.”

“How could you read Gwendolyn Brooks or Toni Morrison and not want to have your own party writing?”

This week, AWM Program Director Allison Sansone talks to award-winning poet Saeed Jones about his memoir How We Fight For Our Lives, which tells his incredible story of a young, black, gay man from the south fighting to carve out a place for himself in the world.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Listen to more episodes here.

“If America was going to hate me for being Black and gay, then I might as well make a weapon out of myself.”

“I’m not very kind to myself as a poet. I don’t think it’s about being nice to myself, I think it’s about being perfect. But with writing a memoir you just have to be more generous because it’s a marathon, and I think poems are a sprint.”

“I’m not one of those writers who alcohol helps the writing. No, alcohol helps the living.”

“Memory and its unreliability is a part of identity formation. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are how we become who we are. And so I wanted to embrace all of that instead of running from it because I just think that’s what a good memoir should do.”

“How could you read Gwendolyn Brooks or Toni Morrison and not want to have your own party writing?”

This week, AWM Program Director Allison Sansone talks to National Book Award finalist David Treuer about his book The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, a sweeping history of Native American life from the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890 to today. This conversation was originally recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Listen to more episodes here.

“The astounding thing isn’t the degree to which the United States government, and before them other colonial powers, tried to rub us out. That’s not astounding, that’s not even terribly interesting. What’s astounding are the ways in which we’ve managed to survive.”

“That’s the messed up thing: writers of color are supposed to speak about cultural truths, while white writers get to talk about universal truths. Updike writes about love, but Toni Morrison only writes about the Black experience.”

“We have a really vigorous presence on social media, if you didn’t know. We used to use all the different parts of the buffalo and now we use all the different parts of the computer.”

“Really the book is about the ways in which history is not a dry set of details and events from the past. The book is really about the ways in which history, and in particular federal Indian policy, lives through us in the makeup of our character. History is expressed in our lived experiences, oftentimes unconsciously.”

"We are such a fundamental part of how America understands herself. We are fundamental to all the myths the country tells about itself, to itself. And yet people don’t have any kind of sustained interaction with us...We’re everywhere in the mind, but almost no place in everyone’s lived lives.”