AWM Author Talks

This week, AWM President Carey Cranston talks with Dr. Sam Weller, Ray Bradbury’s authorized biographer and author of The Bradbury Chronicles. He is also the author of his own short story collection Dark Black, which is hauntingly thrilling. This is the first of three episodes in a row about Bradbury in the lead-up to his August 22nd birthday. Visit our special exhibit Ray Bradbury: Inextinguishable to learn more about the writing legend, on display now at the American Writers Museum.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer.

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.

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“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, bestselling author R. O. Kwon discusses her new novel Exhibit, an exhilarating, blazing-hot novel about a woman caught between her desires and her life. Kwon is joined by fellow author Nami Mun. This conversation originally took place May 5, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

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At a lavish party in the hills outside of San Francisco, Jin Han meets Lidija Jung and nothing will ever be the same for either woman. A brilliant young photographer, Jin is at a crossroads in her work, in her marriage to her college love Philip, and in who she is and who she wants to be. Lidija is an alluring, injured world-class ballerina on hiatus from her ballet company under mysterious circumstances. Drawn to each other by their intense artistic drives, the two women talk all night.

Cracked open, Jin finds herself telling Lidija about an old familial curse, breaking a lifelong promise. She's been told that if she doesn't keep the curse a secret, she risks losing everything; death and ruin could lie ahead. As Jin and Lidija become more entangled, they realize they share more than the ferocity of their ambition, and begin to explore hidden desires. Something is ignited in Jin: her art, her body, and her sense of self irrevocably changed. But can she avoid the specter of the curse?

Vital, bold, powerful, and deeply moving, Exhibit asks: how brightly can you burn before you light your life on fire?

R. O. KWON is the author of the nationally bestselling novel The Incendiaries, which was named a best book of the year by more than forty publications and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award. With Garth Greenwell, Kwon coedited the bestselling Kink, a New York Times Notable Book. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, and MacDowell. Born in Seoul, Kwon has lived most of her life in the United States.

NAMI MUN grew up in Seoul, South Korea and Bronx, New York. For her first book, Miles from Nowhere, she received a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers and the Asian American Literary Award. Miles From Nowhere was selected as Editors’ Choice and Top Ten First Novels by Booklist; Best Fiction of 2009 So Far by Amazon; and as an Indie Next Pick. Chicago Magazine named her Best New Novelist of 2009.

This week, award-winning author Elizabeth Nunez discusses her novel Now Lila Knows, with Booklist editor Donna Seaman. This conversation originally took place May 15, 2022 and was recorded live at the American Writers Festival.

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Lila Bonnard has left her island home in the Caribbean to join the faculty as a visiting professor at Mayfield College in a small Vermont town. On her way from the airport to Mayfield, Lila witnesses the fatal shooting of a Black man by the police. It turns out that the victim was a professor at Mayfield, and was giving CPR to a white woman who was on the verge of an opioid overdose.

The two Black faculty and a Black administrator in the otherwise all-white college expect Lila to be a witness in the case against the police. Unfortunately, Lila fears that in the current hostile political climate against immigrants of color she may jeopardize her position at the college by speaking out, and her fiancé advises her to remain neutral.

Now Lila Knows is a gripping story that explores our obligation to act when confronted with the unfair treatment of fellow human beings. A page-turner with universal resonance, this novel will leave readers rethinking the meaning of love and empathy.

ELIZABETH NUNEZ is the award-winning author of a memoir and ten novels, four of them selected as New York Times Editors’ Choice. Anna In-Between won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award and was long-listed for an IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award. Nunez also received the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in nonfiction for Not for Everyday Use; an American Book Award; and a NALIS Lifetime Literary Award from the Trinidad and Tobago National Library. Her other novels are: Even in Paradise, Boundaries, Prospero’s Daughter, Bruised Hibiscus, Beyond the Limbo Silence, Grace, Discretion, and When Rocks Dance. She is a cofounder of the National Black Writers Conference and executive producer of the CUNY-TV series Black Writers in America. Nunez is a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, where she teaches fiction writing. She divides her time between Amityville and Brooklyn, New York.

DONNA SEAMAN is Editor, Adult Books for Booklist. A recipient of the Louis Shores Award for excellence in book reviewing, the James Friend Memorial Award for Literary Criticism, and the Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award, Seaman is a member of the Content Leadership Team for the American Writers Museum, a frequent presenter at various literary events and programs, and an adjunct profes

In this special episode, we take a look back at some of our favorite moments from the top episodes of our two ongoing series – Nation of Writers and AWM Author Talks.