This week, tune into the panel discussion Making Up True Stories: Novels and Books About Real People. Our featured writers are Amanda Flower, Sarah James, Brianna Labuskes, and Brianna Madia. Moderated by Dipika Mukherjee. This conversation originally took place May 19, 2024 and was recorded live at the 2024 American Writers Festival.

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About the writers:

AMANDA FLOWER is the USA Today bestselling and Agatha Award–winning mystery author of over twenty-five novels, including the nationally bestselling Amish Candy Shop Mystery Series, the Amish Matchmaker Mysteries, the Emily Dickinson Mysteries, the Katharine Wright Mysteries, and several series written under the name Isabella Alan. An organic farmer and former librarian, Amanda lives in Northeast Ohio and can be found online at AmandaFlower.com.

SARAH JAMES is the international bestselling author of The Woman with Two Shadows and Last Night at the Hollywood Canteen. Her work has appeared in Baseball Prospectus, Pittsburgh City Paper, Reductress, and more. Sarah is a graduate of the MFA Writing for Screen and Television program at USC and currently lives in Los Angeles.

BRIANNA LABUSKES is the Washington Post bestselling author of The Lost Book of Bonn, The Librarian of Burned Books as well as eight thrillers. For the first decade of her career, Brianna worked as a journalist for national news organizations covering politics and policy.

BRIANNA MADIA has lived a life of relentless intention, traveling the deserts of the American West in an old Ford van. She made a name for herself on social media with her inspiring captions-cum-essays about bravery, identity, nature, and subverting expectations. She lives in Utah with her four dogs. Her first book, Nowhere for Very Long, was a New York Times bestseller. Never Leave the Dogs Behind is her second book.

DIPIKA MUKHERJEE’S collection of travel essays, Writer’s Postcards (Penguin), was published in October 2023. Her work is included in The Best Small Fictions 2019 and appears in World Literature Today, Asia Literary Review, Del Sol Review, and Chicago Quarterly Review, Newsweek, Los Angeles Review of Books, Hemispheres, Orion and more, and she has been translated into French, Portuguese, Bengali and Mandarin Chinese. She is the author of the novels Shambala Junction (Aurora Metro, winner of the Virginia Prize f

This week, writers John Berendt and Taylor Mac discuss the Goodman Theatre’s world-premiere stage musical adaptation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Berendt is the author of the original book the musical is based on, and Mac wrote the book for the adaptation. Learn more about Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: The Musical, here. This conversation originally took place July 8, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

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More about Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: The Musical

Southern charm is bountiful in Savannah, Georgia. But behind polite smiles, the eccentric residents are filled with secrets and motives. When wealthy antiques dealer Jim Williams is accused of murder, the sensational trial uncovers hidden truths and exposes the fine line between good and evil—which sparks Lady Chablis and other Savannahians to change the city forever.

The world-premiere stage musical adaptation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil—John Berendt’s 1994 blockbuster non-fiction book, a Pulitzer-Prize finalist that was on the New York Times Best-Seller list for 216 weeks—is realized at Goodman Theatre by creators MacArthur “Genius” Grantee Taylor Mac (book), Tony Award winner Jason Robert Brown (music and lyrics) with choreography by Tanya Birl-Torres. Tony Award winner Rob Ashford directs a cast led by Tony- and Grammy-Award winning actor J. Harrison Ghee as The Lady Chablis; Tony Award nominee Tom Hewitt as Jim Williams; and Olivier Award nominee Sierra Boggess as Emma Dawes.

JOHN BERENDT was born and raised in Syracuse, New York. He attended Harvard, where he majored in English and wrote for the Harvard Lampoon. Upon graduation he was hired by Esquire magazine—first as an editor, then as a monthly columnist. Later, he became the editor of New York Magazine. It was during a trip to the South in the mid-1980s that he discovered Savannah—a cloistered, inward-looking garden city that basked on the Georgia coast, reveling in its own peculiarities and giving not a thought to the outside world. He was enchanted and began writing about the city and its people in what would eventually become the non-fiction book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

TAYLOR MAC is a MacArthur Fellow, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist, a Tony Award Nominee (for Best Play), and the recipient of the Kennedy Prize (with Matt Ray), the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Guggenheim, a Drama League Award, a NY Drama Critics Circle Award, two Obie’s, two Bessies, and the first American to receive the International Ibsen Award. Mac is the author of Joy and Pandemic (Huntington Theater); The Hang (with Matt Ray); Gary, A Sequel to Titus Andronicus; A 24-Decade History of Popular Music; Hir; The Fre, The Walk Across America For Mother Earth, The Lily’s Revenge; The Young Ladies Of; and The Be(A)st of Taylor Mac. The documentary Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music recently premiered on HBO to critical acclaim.

This week, journalist Mark Bowden discusses his new book The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped It, co-written with Matthew Teague. Bowden is interviewed by reporter Natalie Y. Moore. This conversation originally took place May 19, 2024 and was recorded live at the 2024 American Writers Festival.

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MARK BOWDEN is the author of fifteen books, including the #1 New York Times bestseller Black Hawk Down, Killing Pablo, Hue 1968, and The Last Stone. He reported at the Philadelphia Inquirer for twenty years and now writes for The Atlantic and other magazines.

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 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.