Politics and Prose Presents

Music and hula by Halau Nohona Hawai'i.

From an early age, Sara Kehaulani Goo was enchanted by her family's land in Hawai'i. The vast area on the rugged shores of Maui's east side--given by King Kamehameha III in 1848--extends from mountain to sea, encompassing ninety acres of lush, undeveloped rainforest jungle along the rocky coastline and a massive sixteenth-century temple with a mysterious past.

When a property tax bill arrives with a 500 percent increase, Sara and her family members are forced to make a decision about the property: fight to keep the land or sell to the next offshore millionaire. When Sara returns to Maui from the mainland, she reconnects with her great-uncle Take and uncovers the story of how much land her family has already lost over generations, centuries-old artifacts from the temple, and the insidious displacement of Native Hawaiians by systemic forces.

Part journalistic offering and part memoir, Kuleana interrogates deeper questions of identity, legacy, and what we owe to those who come before and after us. Sara's breathtaking story of unexpected homecomings, familial hardship, and fierce devotion to ancestry creates a refreshingly new narrative about Hawai'i, its native people, and their struggle to hold on to their land and culture today.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781250333445?ic_referral=xcnp3VgXfoiT1NrOf-7UeDG-tFA6MSppwTFKdijhWaUwM56WY9q-ZIK-XFthLrHCLB32Zn-zwNuoRbrFhHZGFQFounhfVEzyfSQkmvo1XKxcVpOCNlmLzIN4IvylmJ2z5Ck_M2E

Sara Kehaulani Goo is a journalist and senior news executive who has led several news organizations including Axios, NPR and The Washington Post. She is the former editor-in-chief at Axios, where she launched the company's editorial expansion into national and local newsletters, podcasts and live journalism. Before Axios, she led online audience growth as a managing editor at NPR, overseeing the newsroom's digital news operation. Goo also served as news director at The Washington Post, where she also served as a business editor and reporter. Originally from Dana Point, California, she graduated from the University of Minnesota's journalism school. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Goo is in conversation with Niala Boodhoo, an American journalist, podcast and events host. You can hear her many Fridays on NPR stations hosting the Friday News Roundup on 1A. Currently the founder of Glad You’re Here Productions, she's launched shows for public media and podcasts, including Axios Today and 1 Big Thing, and hosts live news events for organizations that have included Axios, the World Bank, Ascend at the Aspen Institute and the Religion News Service.

*recorded 6/15/2025

Daily interactions between Jacob and Daniel are a powder keg of sexual tension and uncertainty. A recent Morehouse graduate and Brooklyn transplant, Jacob fears that accepting the truth of his sexuality will disappoint the hopes his parents have for him to lead a respectable life. Grieving the death of his mother while searching for answers about a father he has never known, Daniel, an Atlanta native, has resigned himself to the reality that men who love men don't have happy endings.

When Jacob meets Sherman, a social worker fighting for one of the families being displaced by the project, he must decide if rejecting security is worth the risk of embracing the unknown. In the midst of navigating his grief, and volatile relationship with Jacob, Daniel learns of his father's identity. Though meeting his father could provide Daniel with the closure he has always sought, the distance between what Daniel wants and what he's willing to do for it remains a question only he can answer.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668016282?ic_referral=KbyLDsvQkm5AJuCLD9OnwpTKvWenPlxysfzJlTWEn0EwMyoTolPqfgthqQ7c6PW1ykrCtQknWFTFHbst32Sd52QE1kGeermGKANRe31eZhv57TMjLYXpjyAJcnVRsRqtJNaswuU

Douglas E. Jones graduated from Morehouse College and received an MFA from Columbia University. In 2007, he was an inaugural Lambda Literary Fellow at American Jewish University, where he studied with Dorothy Allison. His nonfiction has been included in the anthology Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature & Art and his poetry has been published in Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS. Doug is a full-time, licensed real estate agent in Brooklyn, New York, and Atlanta, Georgia. He lives in Atlanta. The Fantasies of Future Things is his debut novel.

Jones is in conversation with Joseph Williams. A seasoned journalist, political analyst and essayist, Joseph Williams is Deputy Managing Director for Word In Black, a news consortium of 10 legacy Black newspapers. As a reporter and writer, Wiliams has been published in a variety of outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Nation and US News & World Report. A California native, Williams is a graduate of the University of Richmond and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

*recorded 6/14/2025

In And Housing for All, founder of the National Homelessness Law Center Maria Foscarinis reveals the human impact of the housing crisis by sharing personal stories and examining the flawed policies that have perpetuated it. As millions face rising housing costs and encampments spread nationwide, she uncovers why past efforts have failed and what must change to achieve lasting solutions.

Drawing from over 35 years of national advocacy, Foscarinis shares compelling stories of individuals and families impacted by homelessness, highlighting their resilience and growing leadership. Blending personal narratives with policy analysis, she reveals how deliberate decisions have fueled the crisis and how public narratives have sustained it.

And Housing for All is essential reading for social justice advocates, policymakers, lawyers, and anyone invested in solving one of America's most pressing challenges.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781633889767?ic_referral=p_lxTZuNQcoPrA9LfJMGgTEYLt4GmgKvys3kOIXd4x0wM3uf9aWPn3QwYb4z-10CHdX1DrKHJxnjk1WT13Yv0pzCoTg-GHlH0meAF-GANteJdTDt4GAuvI_gIOvSoVwmd5GPVKw

Maria Foscarinis founded the National Homelessness Law Center (formerly known as the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty) in 1985 to mount a campaign for a federal response to the crisis which was just beginning to explode across the country. The Law Center won legal victories including the only major federal legislation addressing homelessness--now known and the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act--, upholding education rights for homeless children, converting vacant properties to housing, and combatting the criminalization of homelessness, while also laying the groundwork for the recognition of housing as a human right. She has been named a Human Rights Hero by the American Bar Association, and is a recipient of the Katharine and George Alexander Law Prize from Santa Clara University School of Law, the John Macy Award from the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the Public Interest Law Award from the Public Interest Foundation at Columbia Law School, and a Rockefeller Foundation Practitioner Residency in Bellagio, Italy. Foscarinis has been regularly quoted in media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Bloomberg, CNN, BBC, CCTV, and Al-Jazeera, among many others, and has contributed opinion pieces to influential publications including USA Today, the Christian Science Monitor, the Huffington Post, and The Hill. She teaches a seminar on Homelessness Law and Policy at Columbia Law School.

Foscarinis is in conversation with Pam Fessler. Fessler was an editor and correspondent at NPR News for more than 28 years. As a correspondent on the National Desk, she covered voting issues, poverty, and philanthropy. While at NPR, Fessler did countless stories on everything from the debate over restrictive state voter laws to Russian interference and the spread of misinformation. Fessler also covered homelessness, hunger, affordable housing, and income inequality. She reported on efforts by non-profit groups, the government, and others to reduce poverty and how those programs worked. Her poverty reporting was recognized with a 2011 First Place National Headliner Award. Her first book, Carville’s Cure: Leprosy, Stigma, and the Fight for Justice, was published in 2020. It was named a Notable Book of the Year by the American Library Association. She lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

*recorded 6/12/2025

María Fernanda (she/hers) is a poet from DC. Her work explores the intimacy of sisterhood, the anchor of intergenerational coexistence, and grief. Awarded the Norma Elia Cantú Award in Creative Writing, her work appears in The Healing Verse Poetry Line, Cave Canem’s Dogbytes, Cheryl Clarke's born in a bed of good lessons: poems inspired by the works of Lucille Clifton, and more. She is the founder of a poetry garden, where Black poets and gardeners discuss their creative and historic connections to gardens. Connect with her at mariafernandapoet.com and @poetrywithmariafernanda.recorded 6/5/2025

Few people beyond South Carolina's Lowcountry knew of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston--Mother Emanuel--before the night of June 17, 2015, when a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist walked into Bible study and slaughtered the church's charismatic pastor and eight worshippers. Although the shooter had targeted the first AME church in the South in order to agitate racial strife, he did not anticipate the aftermath--an outpouring of forgiveness from the victims' families and a reckoning with the divisions of caste that have afflicted Charleston and the South since the earliest days of European settlement.

Mother Emanuel explores the fascinating history that brought the church to that moment, and the depth of the desecration committed in its fellowship hall. It reveals how African Methodism was cultivated from the harshest American soil and how Black suffering shaped forgiveness into both a religious practice and a survival tool. Kevin Sack, who has written about race in his native South for more than four decades, uses the church to trace the long arc of Black life in the city where nearly half of enslaved Africans disembarked in North America and where the Civil War began. Through the microcosm of one congregation, he explores the development of a unique practice of Christianity, from its daring breakaway from white churches in 1817, through the traumas of Civil War and Reconstruction, to its critical role in the Civil Rights Movement and beyond. We meet unsung heroes, including Denmark Vesey, the former slave whose aborted rebellion plot led to his hanging and the destruction of the original church; Rev. Richard Harvey Cain, Emanuel's first pastor after the Civil War, who also won election to Congress during Reconstruction; Rev. Benjamin J. Glover, who served simultaneously as pastor and a crusading NAACP leader during the 1960s; and Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a respected state legislator, whose 2015 murder inspired President Barack Obama's memorable "Amazing Grace" eulogy.

At its core, Mother Emanuel is an epic tale of perseverance, not just of a congregation but of a people who withstood enslavement and Jim Crow and all manner of violence with an unbending faith.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781524761301?ic_referral=S5oiv18jQBM51CWUxOq4BX1VAdJuDC5PodT__g8TXu0wM5oJaH72E7CfMo0Z7mKX21McCDelX8qWlF4TWLPu6TlvuEKggu19e8JAAAIf89x9VvWfkhtUA_nMHHcfO70W3lZ0JuI

Kevin Sack is a veteran journalist who has written broadly about national affairs for more than four decades and has shared in three Pulitzer Prizes. A native of Jacksonville, Florida, and a graduate of Duke University, he spent thirty years on the staff of The New York Times, where he specialized in writing longform narrative and investigative reports, often related to race. He also has written for the Los Angeles Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and his work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine. He was a 2019 Emerson Collective Fellow at New America.

Sack is in conversation with Robert Samuels. Samuels is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and national enterprise reporter at The Washington Post. For close to a decade, Robert has traveled across the country to chronicle politics, policy and the changing American identity. He is the co-author of "His Name is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice," which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Robert has also worked as a staff writer at The Miami Herald and the New Yorker. He grew up in The Bronx and resides in Washington, DC. 

Is there a single change that could simultaneously protect democracy, spur progress on climate change, enact sane gun policies, and improve our response to the next pandemic? Yes: changing the class dynamics driving American politics.

The far right manipulates class anger to undercut progressive goals and liberals often inadvertently play into their hands. In Outclassed, Joan C. Williams explains how to reverse that process by bridging the "diploma divide", while maintaining core progressive values. She offers college-educated Americans insights into how their values reflect their lives and their lives reflect their privilege. With illuminating stories --from the Portuguese admiral who led that country's COVID response to the lawyer who led the ACLU's gay marriage response (and more)-- Williams demonstrates how working-class values reflect working-class lives. Then she explains how the far right connects culturally with the working-class, deftly manipulating racism and masculine anxieties to deflect attention from the ways far-right policies produce the economic conditions disadvantaging the working-class. Whether you are a concerned citizen committed to saving democracy or a politician or social justice warrior in need of messaging advice, Outclassed offers concrete guidance on how liberals can forge a multi-racial cross-class coalition capable of delivering on progressive goals.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781250368966?ic_referral=AhCH2PwEPwnlCfbA41qJr5gGbW14gdI0f_hjufECKZcwMz-iHrBNSGu3-ALyc7yZ_Vjw6BDZN6kufYIkLSdPPbo6uRPjpHXsTwygZoMNsUH-vlMlG76R93qUU_aOUgN-qxZEfQ

Described as having "something approaching rock star status" in her field by The New York Times Magazine, Joan C. Williams is an award-winning scholar of social inequality. She is the author of White Working Class, and has published on class dynamics in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Republic and more. She is Distinguished Professor of Law and Hastings Foundation Chair (emerita) at University of California College of the Law San Francisco.

Williams is in conversation with Anne-Marie Slaughter is a global leader, scholar and public commentator. She is currently CEO of New America, a think and action tank dedicated to renewing the promise of America in a period of rapid demographic, technological, and global change. She previously served as a professor of international, foreign, and comparative law at Harvard Law School; dean of the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University; and as the first woman director of policy planning for the United States Department of State. 

*recorded 6/6/2025

In August 2017, over a thousand neo-Nazis, fascists, Klan members, and neo-Confederates descended on a small southern city to protest the pending removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Within an hour of their arrival, the city's historic downtown was a scene of bedlam as armored far right cadres battled activists in the streets. Before the weekend was over, a neo-Nazi had driven a car into a throng of counterprotesters, killing a young woman and injuring dozens.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Deborah Baker has written a riveting and panoptic account of what unfolded that weekend, focusing less on the rally's far right leaders than on the story of the city itself. University, local, and state officials, including law enforcement, were unable or unwilling to grasp the gathering threat. Clergy, activists, and organizers from all walks of life saw more clearly what was coming and, at great personal risk, worked to warn and defend their city.

To understand why their warnings fell on deaf ears, Baker does a deep dive into American history. In her research she discovers an uncannily similar event that took place decades before when an emissary of the poet and fascist Ezra Pound arrived in Charlottesville intending to start a race war. In Charlottesville, Baker shows how a city more associated with Thomas Jefferson than civil unrest became a flashpoint in a continuing struggle over our nation's founding myths.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781644453414?ic_referral=m9A7rCZYtbwPS4pagn-g6LiRk2nh2Wn0LqBbOCaQVMwwM06_FNMqzDjbJyDs4m17FY2tLG3R33Qu58vp88PRbNP2JMv26PzXKuAoP2_Id8vKCxV6ZvskI5Ud6PBa7T0txY10hFQ

Deborah Baker is the author of In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, as well as A Blue Hand; The Beats in India. She divides her time between Calcutta, Goa, and Brooklyn.

Baker is in conversation with Maurice Jackson, who teaches Atlantic world and African American history at Georgetown University. He is author of Let This Voice Be Heard, and coeditor of African Americans and the Haitian Revolution, DC Jazz, and Rhythms of Resistance. He was the inaugural chair of the Washington, DC, Commission on African American Affairs, appointed by the mayor.

*recorded 6/14/2025

They were crop dusters and debutantes, college girls and performers in flying circuses-all of them trained as pilots. Because they were women, they were denied the opportunity to fly for their country when the United States entered the Second World War. But Great Britain, desperately fighting for survival, would let anyone-even Americans, even women-transport warplanes. Thus, twenty-five daring young aviators bolted for England in 1942, becoming the first American women to command military aircraft.

In a faraway land, these "spitfires" lived like women decades ahead of their time. Risking their lives in one of the deadliest jobs of the war, they ferried new, barely tested fighters and bombers to air bases and returned shot-up wrecks for repair, never knowing what might go wrong until they were high in the sky. Many ferry pilots died in crashes or made spectacular saves. It was exciting, often terrifying work. The pilots broke new ground off duty as well, shocking their hosts with thoroughly modern behavior.

With cinematic sweep, Becky Aikman follows the stories of nine of the women who served, drawing on unpublished diaries, letters, and records, along with her own interviews, to bring these forgotten heroines fully to life. Spitfires is a vivid, richly detailed account of war, ambition, and a group of remarkable women whose lives were as unconventional as their dreams.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781635576566?ic_referral=WsY0dImv3jM4p4jHThOsaD3QpMUfl56igmFso3eYCRUwMxsMmL8iuKdDyieXzjzMME9XjHe_8oUnykAEZVFjwrqoBx5bb8XPMjktESolyYG9PTMow1vW8j_gNQh7pMMeJEXAD-A

Becky Aikman is the author of two books of narrative nonfiction: her memoir, Saturday Night Widows, and Off the Cliff: How the Making of Thelma & Louise Drove Hollywood to the Edge. A former journalist at Newsday, Aikman has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications. She lives in New York.

Aikman will be in conversation with Glenn Kessler, editor and chief writer of The Fact Checker since 2011, making him one of the pioneers of political fact-checking. He was The Washington Post’s chief State Department reporter for nine years, traveling around the world with three secretaries of state. For his work as Fact Checker, he has won the 2025 Nellie Bly award for investigative reporting, the 2022 Sigma Delta Chi award and honorable mention in the 2019 Toner prize for excellence in political reporting. He is the author of The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy (2007) and Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President's Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies (2020).

*recorded 6/14/2025

The ultrarich hold more of America's wealth than they did in the heyday of the Carnegies and Rockefellers. Here, Evan Osnos's incisive reportage yields an unforgettable portrait of the tactics and obsessions driving this new Gilded Age, in which superyachts, luxury bunkers, elite tax dodges, and a torrent of political donations bespeak staggering disparities of wealth and power.

With deft storytelling and meticulous reporting, this is a book about the indulgences, incentives, and psychological distortions that define our economic age. In each essay, Osnos delves into a world that is rarely visible, from the outrageous to the fabulous to the ridiculous: a private wealth manager who broke with members of an American dynasty and spilled their secrets; the pop stars who perform at lavish parties for thirteen-year-olds; the status anxieties that spill out of marinas in Monaco and Palm Beach like real-world episodes of Succession and The White Lotus; the ethos behind the largest Ponzi scheme in Hollywood history; the confessions of disgraced titans in a "white-collar support group." A celebrated political reporter, Osnos delves into the unprecedented Washington influence of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, drawing on in-depth interviews with Mark Zuckerberg and other billionaires, about their power and the explosive backlash it stirs.

Originally published in The New Yorker, these essays have been revised and expanded to deliver an unflinching portrait of raw ambition, unimaginable fortune, and the rise of America's modern oligarchy. Osnos's essays are a wake-up call--a case against complacency in the face of unchecked excess, as the choices of the ultrarich ripple through our lives. Entertaining, unsettling, and eye-opening, The Haves and the Have-Yachts couldn't be more relevant to today's world.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668204481?ic_referral=LKDxvQPOe7dDnMz11DBg6PsFYUedwJ2bYK8B2hen8ZowM2XWgKvgRZXj9nyacoKVGB5Q5Hy99qS_gymxO2Fq9DQZPh2o-f5hgS6iKE3xziKeg8r2t2h4tkTVLhe4nKsfRto8UQw

Evan Osnos has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2008. His most recent book, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury, was a New York Times bestseller. He is also the author of Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, which won the National Book Award. Previously, he was a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, where he shared two Pulitzer Prizes. He lives with his wife and children near Washington, DC.

*recorded 6/13/2025

In 1983, Thomas Mallon was still unknown. A literature professor at Vassar College, he spent his days traveling from Manhattan to campus, reviewing books to make ends meet and searching the city for his own purpose and fulfillment. The AIDS epidemic was beginning to surge in New York City, the ever-bustling epicenter of literary culture and gay life, alive with parties, art, and sex.

Though he didn't know it, everything would soon change for Mallon. Riding the success of his debut, A Book of One's Own, he became a fixture within the city's literary scene, crossing paths with cultural giants and becoming an editor at GQ. He captured it all in his daily journals. But in some ways it was the worst possible time for a gay coming-of-age in the city. One of his lovers succumbed to AIDS, and the illness of others was both a heartbreaking reality and a constant reminder of his own exposure.

Tracing his own life day by day, Mallon evokes all that those years encompassed: the hookups, intensifying politics, personal tragedies, as well as his own blossoming success and eventual romantic happiness. The Very Heart of It is a brilliant and bewitching look into the daily life of one of our most important literary figures, and a keepsake from a bygone era.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593801802?ic_referral=AKSWm3m5WRsx15L_5zcujyQMHzYNwc_r2gtAEyZoj1swM4_vKP91TTRKngjw0NaQcaFyzK1_TbanX-lfkti2CQgiD4H5-Zg47EAHR5PJGY7Z_MPkFU4nX39HqyVf9gNUBr2YJeM

Thomas Mallon is the author of eleven novels, including Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman, Fellow Travelers, Watergate, Landfall, and Up With the Sun. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and other publications. In 2011 he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Harold D. Vursell Memori al Award for prose style. He has been the literary editor of GQ and the deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Mallon is in conversation with Lisa Page. Page is co-editor of We Wear The Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America,  (Beacon Press).  Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, LitHub Weekly, The Crisis, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, Playboy, the Washington Post Book World, Playbill, The Chicago Tribune, and other publications and anthologies, including Skin Deep: Black Women & White Women Write About Race (Doubleday). She has worked as a freelance writer, editor, speechwriter, lyricist, instructor, actor and  literary consultant. She created the Playboy College Fiction Contest. She is the former President of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. Lisa Page is assistant professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the George Washington University where she previously served as Interim Director of Africana Studies. She is also a resident faculty member of the Yale Writers’ Workshop. She lives outside Washington, DC.

*recorded 6/11/2025