We have been proud to partner with the National Book Foundation to present conversations featuring National Book Award finalists as part of the annual Literary Arts Portland Book Festival. The 2024 event was on the theme of awards and activism. National Book Foundation executive director Ruth Dickey led a conversation between journalist Robert Samuels, co-author of His Name Is George Floyd, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and poet m.s. RedCherries, author of Mother, a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award in poetry.

RedCherries’s Mother is a multidisciplinary work of poetry and prose about Indigenous identity; the narrator has been adopted out of her tribe and raised by a non-Indian family, and is now an adult seeking to connect with her origins. RedCherries brings in oral testimony, family lore, and more exploring pasts and futures both real and imaginary. She explains some of the research that she did for the project, and how it came to be in the form it took in Mother.

Likewise, in His Name Is George Floyd, Robert Samuels and his co-author conducted hundreds of interviews with his family and friends in order to understand George Floyd’s singular life, as well as reporting and research into the history of institutional racism in the United States to place that life in the context of the systems this one man was up against. The result is a portrait of a man as well as that man’s America.

The day this episode airs on the radio is May 25, 2025, which marks five years since George Floyd’s death – the book, His Name Is George Floyd, reckons with that day and its aftermath, but is, crucially, also the story of his life.

Both books are deeply personal stories that offer insight into wider histories, drawing together both individual and shared past, present, and future. As m.s. RedCherries says, “storytelling is an act of sovereignty;” telling stories ensure survival.

Robert Samuels is a national enterprise reporter for The Washington Post who focuses on politics, policy and the changing American identity. He is also the co-author of His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice, winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction and finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Nonfiction.  Samuels has covered social issues in the District of Columbia, national politics and also serves as the newsroom’s analyst for figure skating. He grew up in the Bronx and is an alumnus of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, where he was editor in chief of the school newspaper, the Daily Northwestern. He has also worked as a staff writer at The Miami Herald and the New Yorker.  

m.s. RedCherries received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a JD from Arizona State University College of Law. She is a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation and lives in Brooklyn.