This week, to celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month, hear from Marie Arana, the Literary Director of the Library of Congress. Joined by author Juan Martinez, Arana discusses the importance of preserving and uplifting Latino history and her new book LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority.

This conversation originally took place May 19, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Festival.

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About LatinoLand:

"A perfect representation of Latino diversity" (The Washington Post), LatinoLand draws from hundreds of interviews and prodigious research to give us both a vibrant portrait and the little-known history of our largest and fastest-growing minority, in "a work of prophecy, sympathy, and courage" (Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author).

LatinoLand is an exceptional, all-encompassing overview of Hispanic America based on personal interviews, deep research, and Marie Arana's life experience as a Latina. At present, Latinos comprise twenty percent of the US population, a number that is growing. By 2050, census reports project that one in every three Americans will claim Latino heritage.

But Latinos are not a monolith. They do not represent a single group. The largest groups are Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Salvadorans, and Cubans. Each has a different cultural and political background. Puerto Ricans, for example, are US citizens, whereas some Mexican Americans never immigrated because the US-Mexico border shifted after the US invasion of 1848, incorporating what is now the entire southwest of the United States. Cubans came in two great waves: those escaping communism in the early years of Castro, many of whom were professionals and wealthy, and those permitted to leave in the Mariel boat lift twenty years later, representing some of the poorest Cubans, including prisoners.

As LatinoLand shows, Latinos were some of the earliest immigrants to what is now the US—some of them arriving in the 1500s. They are racially diverse—a random infusion of white, Black, indigenous, and Asian. Once overwhelmingly Catholic, they are becoming increasingly Protestant and Evangelical. They range from domestic workers and day laborers to successful artists, corporate CEOs, and US senators. Formerly solidly Democratic, they now vote Republican in growing numbers. They are as culturally varied as any immigrants from Europe or Asia.

Marie Arana draws on her own experience as the daughter of an American mother and Peruvian father who came to the US at age nine, straddling two worlds, as many Latinos do. "Thorough, accessible, and necessary" (Ms. magazine), LatinoLand unabashedly celebrates Latino resilience and character and shows us why we must understand the fastest-growing minority in America.

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

This week, we celebrate the legacy of Lorraine Hansberry with J. Nicole Brooks, Natalie Y. Moore, and Ericka Ratcliff. This conversation originally took place August 22, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

This program is presented in partnership with the Lorraine Hansberry Initiative, which was created by The Lillys (conceived by Lynn Nottage and Julia Jordan) to honor Lorraine Hansberry’s legacy through the tour and permanent placement of a figurative sculpture of the playwright, while investing in those following in her footsteps through the creation of a fellowship which supports the living expenses of women and non-binary writers of color during their pursuit of graduate degrees.

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About the panelists:

J. NICOLE BROOKS is an actor, author and director. Selected acting credits include Lottery Day (Goodman Theatre, New Stages Festival), Beyond Caring, Death Tax, and RACE (Lookingglass Theatre Company), Immediate Family (Center Theatre Group) and House Home (Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, China). Directing credits include Mr. Rickey Calls A Meeting, Thaddeus & Slocum: A Vaudeville Adventure and Black Diamond: The Years the Locusts Have Eaten. Brooks is author of HeLa, Fedra Queen of Haiti, Black Diamond, and 3 Weeks With Her Honor Jane Byrne. Television credits including recurring roles on Showtime’s The Chi and Comedy Central’s South Side. She is a multi-award winning artist honored by 3Arts, TCG Fox Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Black Ensemble Theatre Playwright of the Year, LA Ovation and Black Theatre Alliance. She is an ensemble member of Lookingglass Theatre Company.

NATALIE Y. MOORE is an award-winning journalist based in Chicago, whose reporting tackles race, housing, economic development, food injustice and violence. Natalie’s acclaimed book The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation received the 2016 Chicago Review of Books award for nonfiction and was Buzzfeed’s best nonfiction book of 2016. She is the author of the play The Billboard, set in Chicago. She is also co-author of The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of an American Gang and Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation.

ERICKA RATCLIFF works to amplify the mission of Congo Square by celebrating the complexities of Black life and culture on stage. She is a member of The Chicago Women In Philanthropy, Women’s Leadership Mentoring Program (WLMP), the 2023 Points of Light Conference Host Committee, and artEquity’s BIPOC Leadership Circle. Ericka is a nominee for Broadway World Chicago’s 2022 Regional Awards for “Best Direction of a Play” for her work on What To Send Up When It Goes Down and was recently featured in NewCity Magazine for her accomplished work in theatre. She is an artistic associate with Lookingglass Theater and was a recipient of the Chicago 3Arts Make A Wave Award in 2017.

This Labor Day, we take a look at writing labor history with Steve Watkins, author of The Mine Wars: The Bloody Fight for Workers’ Rights in the West Virginia Coalfields, a riveting true story of the West Virginia coal miners who ignited the largest labor uprising in American history. Watkins is joined by labor historian Rosemary Feurer. This conversation originally took place May 19, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Festival.

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About The Mine Wars:

In May of 1920, in a small town in the mountains of West Virginia, a dozen coal miners took a stand. They were sick of the low pay in the mines. The unsafe conditions. The brutal treatment they endured from mine owners and operators. The scrip they were paid-instead of cash-that could only be used at the company store.

They had tried to unionize, but the mine owners dug in. On that fateful day in May 1920, tensions boiled over and a gunfight erupted-beginning a yearlong standoff between workers and owners.

The miners pleaded, then protested, then went on strike; the owners retaliated with spying, bribery, and threats. Violence escalated on both sides, culminating in the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest labor uprising in United States history.

In this gripping narrative nonfiction book, meet the resolute and spirited people who fought for the rights of coal miners, and discover how the West Virginia Mine Wars paved the way for vital worker protections nationwide. More than a century later, this overlooked story of the labor movement remains urgently relevant.

STEVE WATKINS is an award-winning author of twelve books for young readers, including Down Sand Mountain, which won the 2009 Golden Kite Award for young adult fiction. He also writes books for grown-ups, and won a Pushcart Prize for one of the stories in his collection My Chaos Theory. He is co-editor of the online ideas and features magazine Pie & Chai, a former English professor at the University of Mary Washington, a longtime yoga instructor, and father of four daughters. He and his family live in Fredericksburg, VA.

ROSEMARY FEURER’S research and teaching interests focus on understanding the political economy of social conflict. She focuses on labor movements and conflict within the context of U.S. capitalist development spatially, socially and economically during the late nineteenth and twentieth century. Her new work follows the story that made for violent conflict in Illinois and also helped to make it the strongest unionized state in the nation, tentatively entitled The Illinois Mine Wars, 1860-1930. It covers the epic conflicts that helped to define Illinois as one of the strongest labor states in the nation. She is also working on a new biography of Mother Jones, the renowned labor activist and agitator of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. She has always connected her research to public history projects, including tours, electronic media, oral history and video production. Feurer is the author of Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism and Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900-1950.

This week, biographers and novelists share what it is like to write about other writers. Mary V. Dearborn covers Carson McCullers, George Getschow covers Larry McMurtry, Harold Holzer covers Abraham Lincoln, and Monika Zgutsova covers Véra Nabokov. Moderated by Peter Coviello. This conversation took place May 19, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Festival.

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The books:

Carson McCullers: A Life by Mary V. Dearborn — The first major biography in more than twenty years of one of America’s greatest writers, based on newly available letters and journals.

Pastures of the Empty Page: Fellow Writers on the Life and Legacy of Larry McMurtry edited by George Getschow — A collection of essays that offers an intimate view of Larry McMurtry, America's preeminent western novelist, through the eyes of a pantheon of writers he helped shape through his work over the course of his unparalleled literary life.

Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration by Harold Holzer — From acclaimed Abraham Lincoln historian Harold Holzer, a groundbreaking account of Lincoln's grappling with the politics of immigration against the backdrop of the Civil War.

A Revolver to Carry at Night by Monika Zgustova — A captivating, nuanced portrait of the life of Véra Nabokov, who dedicated herself to advancing her husband’s writing career, playing a vital role in the creation of his greatest works.

Is There God After Prince?: Dispatches from an Age of Last Things by Peter Coviello — Essays considering what it means to love art, culture, and people in an age of accelerating disaster.

The writers:

MARY V. DEARBORN holds a doctorate in English and comparative literature from Columbia University, where she was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. She is the author of seven books—among them, Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim and Ernest Hemingway. Dearborn has been a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in Buckland, Massachusetts.

GEORGE GETSCHOW is a Pulitzer Prize finalist for National Reporting and winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Award for distinguished writing about the underprivileged. He has earned numerous other awards for his writing and was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2012 for "distinctive literary achievement." Today, as director of the Archer City Writers Workshop, he helps organize and conduct annual writing workshops in Archer City for professional writers and college and high school students from across the country.

HAROLD HOLZER is the recipient of the 2015 Gilder-Lehrman Lincoln Prize. One of the country's leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era, Holzer was appointed chairman of the US Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission by President Bill Clinton and awarded the National Humanities Medal by

This week, dive into the New Fiction panel from the American Writers Festival, recorded live on May 19, 2024. Four novelists — Donna Hemans, Jessica Shattuck, Yukiko Tominaga, and Michael Zapata — discuss their craft, process, and recent novels:

The House of Plain Truth by Donna Hemans — A lyrical, lush, evocative story about a fractured Jamaican family and a daughter determined to reclaim her home.

Last House by Jessica Shattuck — A sweeping story of a nation on the rise, and one family’s deeply complicated relationship to the resource that built their fortune and fueled their greatest tragedy.

See: Loss. See Also: Love. by Yukiko Tominaga — A tender, slyly comical, and shamelessly honest debut novel following a Japanese widow raising her son between worlds with the help of her Jewish mother-in-law as she wrestles with grief, loss, and—strangest of all—joy.

The Lost Book of Adana Moreau by Michael Zapata — The mesmerizing story of a Latin American science fiction writer and the lives her lost manuscript unites decades later in post-Katrina New Orleans.

About the writers:

DONNA HEMANS is the author of the novels River Woman and Tea by the Sea. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Slice, Shenandoah, Electric Literature, Ms. Magazine and Crab Orchard Review. She received her undergraduate degree in English and Media Studies from Fordham University and an MFA from American University. She lives in Maryland and is the owner of DC Writers Room, a co-working studio for writers.

JESSICA SHATTUCK is the New York Times bestselling author of The Women in the Castle; The Hazards of Good Breeding, a New York Times Notable Book and finalist for the PEN/Winship Award; and Perfect Life. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Glamour, Mother Jones, and Wired, among other publications.

YUKIKO TOMINAGA was born and raised in Japan. She was a finalist for the 2020 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, selected by Roxane Gay. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Chicago Quarterly Review, The Bellingham Review, among other publications. She also works at Counterpoint Press where she helps to introduce never-before-translated books from Japan to English language readers. See: Loss. See Also: Love. is her first book.

MICHAEL ZAPATA is a founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine and the author of the novel The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, winner of the 2020 Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, finalist for the 2020 Heartland Booksellers Award in Fiction, and a Best Book of the Year for NPR, the A.V. Club, Los Angeles Public Library, and BookPage, among others. He is a recipient of a Meier Foundation Artist Achievement Award. He is on the faculty of StoryStudio Chicago and the MFA faculty of Northwestern University. As a public-school educator, he taught literature and writing in high schools servicing drop out students. He currently lives in Chicago with his family.

Ahead of the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, media historian Heather Hendershot discusses her book When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America, a riveting, blow-by-blow account of how the network broadcasts of the 1968 Democratic Convention shattered faith in American media. She sits down with historian Kevin Boyle to discuss these themes and shows how this historic moment has lead to our current media ecosystem and where we go from here.

This conversation originally took place May 19, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Festival.

About the writers:

HEATHER HENDERSHOT is the Cardiss Collins Professor of Communication Studies and Journalism at Northwestern University. Her most recent books are When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America and Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line.

KEVIN BOYLE is the William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University. Years ago, he stumbled across an obscure photo of a Chicago neighborhood celebrating the Fourth of July 1961. From that image – and the story it tells – he’s built The Shattering, his new history of the 1960s. His previous book, Arc of Justice, won the National Book Award for non-fiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He’s also the author of The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1948-1968 and co-author of Muddy Boots and Ragged Aprons. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Tribune, the Detroit Free Press, and other newspapers and magazines. He and his wife, Victoria Getis, now live in Evanston, IL with their manic one-year old Australian shepherd and, from time to time, with their marvelous daughters, Abby and Nan.

This week, we chat with members of the Ardent Dance Company about their upcoming ballet POE, based on the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe. Justine Kelly is the Artistic Director of Ardent Dance Company and Ben Locke is a dancer who plays the role of Poe in the upcoming show. You can learn more about Kelly and Locke below.

You can see Ardent Dance Company perform POE at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts on August 23rd and 24th at 7:30 pm, and August 25th at 3:00 pm. Learn more and get tickets here.

Justine and Ben are interviewed by Nate King, Digital Content Associate at the American Writers Museum. This conversation originally took place July 23, 2024 and was recorded live via Zoom.

About our guests:

JUSTINE KELLY, originally from the DMV area, grew up with the Cecchetti method under the training of her mother, Cynthia Kiehnau. She has worked professionally with many DMV-based companies including Lindsay Taylor Dance, Maryland Youth Ballet, Virginia Civic Ballet and Bowie Contemporary Dance Company and has received training from Pam Moore, Rosemary Floydand, and Sonia Cromiller. Justine moved to Chicago in 2012 and founded Ardent Dance Company in 2016 to reimagine classical and historical literature as full-length contemporary works. Working with over 100 professional dancers nationwide and in Chicago to help create Ardent’s shows, Justine is very grateful for all the dancers who have worked so hard these past few months. It is the countless hours of time, sweat, and dedication that allows Ardent to be vulnerable, be dramatic, and laugh together to create these stories.

BEN LOCKE has been dancing with Ardent for over seven years, appearing in shows like Dracula, Les Mis, Pandora's Box, Poe and more. He has a double degree in Theatre and Human Services from Millikin University and is currently getting his graduate degree in TV/Film Writing at Boston University. Outside of dance, Ben is an actor, director, writer and casting director. His hope is to make the arts equitable and accessible for all. His plays can be found at The New Play Exchange.

This week, speculative fiction writers Darcie Little Badger, Michi Trota, and Suzanne Walker discuss their work, crafting other worlds with writing, and the science fiction genre at large. This conversation originally took place May 19, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Festival.

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About the writers:

DARCIE LITTLE BADGER is a Lipan Apache writer with a PhD in oceanography. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, Elatsoe, was featured in TIME as one of the best 100 fantasy books of all time. Elatsoe also won the Locus Award for Best First Novel and was a Nebula, Ignyte, and Lodestar finalist. Her second fantasy novel, A Snake Falls to Earth, received the Newbery Honor, was a LA Times Book Prize Finalist, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Darcie is married to a veterinarian named Taran and splits time between California and Texas.

MICHI TROTA is a five-time Hugo Award-winning Filipino American writer, editor, and narrative expert. Her work explores how to use empowerment, representation, and storytelling to attain collective liberation and to dismantle oppressive institutions, not just survive them. She is the Executive Editor at the environmental justice and advocacy nonprofit Green America and her publications include the Wing Luke Museum 2018-19 exhibit Worlds Beyond Here: Expanding the Universe of APA Science Fiction and Chicago Magazine, and she’s been featured in The Guardian, Chicago Tribune, and CNN: Philippines. She is also a member of the Filipino Young Leaders Program 2022 Immersion cohort and a fire performer with Raks Geek/Raks Inferno Fire+Bellydance.

SUZANNE WALKER is a Chicago-based writer and editor. She is co-creator of the critically acclaimed, award-nominated graphic novel Mooncakes. Her short fiction has been published in Clarkesworld and Uncanny Magazine, and the Star Wars anthology From a Certain Point of View: Return of the Jedi. Her nonfiction works have appeared in a diverse array of publications, StarTrek.com, and academic anthologies. She has spoken on panels at numerous conventions on a variety of topics. She is a scholar of medieval Italian longsword and enjoys aerial silks, figure skating, and baseball. You can find her on Twitter or Instagram at @suzusaur.