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.

AWM PODCAST NETWORK HOME

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.

AWM PODCAST NETWORK HOME

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.

AWM PODCAST NETWORK HOME

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.

This week, we have the first of many programs from the 2024 American Writers Festival for you.

In this episode, comedians Jamie Loftus and Chelsea Hood talk about Chicago hot dogs, comedy writing, and Jamie’s cross-country journey to write Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs. Moderated by food writer David Hammond.

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

AWM PODCAST NETWORK HOME

About the panelists:

DAVID HAMMOND is the Dining and Drinking Editor for Newcity/Chicago, and a regular contributor of food/beverage-related articles to Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, Men’s Book, Plate, Wednesday Journal, and Where Chicago. Between 2010-2014, he wrote weekly “Food Detective” and “What to Do With” columns for Chicago Sun-Times; since 2010 he has written weekly restaurant and product reviews for Wednesday Journal.

CHELSEA HOOD is a stand up comedian living in Chicago, IL by way of the comedy scenes in both Dallas, TX and Brooklyn, NY. You may have seen her on WGN, The CW Network’s Eye Opener, or CW33’s Nightcap. She was also featured on Stand Up Records’ “Texas Mess” album recorded at SXSW. She was most frequently featured performer at Limestone Comedy Festival, one of eight chose as the Best of the Midwest at Gilda’s LaughFest and a Comic to Watch at RIOT LA.

JAMIE LOFTUS is a comedian, Emmy-nominated TV writer, and podcaster. She wrote and starred in her own web series for Comedy Central. She regularly works on viral videos for Super Deluxe. She has credits in The New Yorker, Playboy Magazine, VICE, Reductress, Paste Magazine, and many more. She writes and hosts popular limited-run podcasts—"My Year In Mensa" (2019), "Lolita Podcast" (2020), "Aack Cast" (2021), and "Ghost Church" (2022)—and cohosts, with screenwriter Caitlin Durante, a podcast on the How Stuff Works Network called "the Bechdel Cast."

This week, we get spooky. National bestselling author Paul Tremblay discusses his latest summer blockbuster Horror Movie: A Novel, a chilling twist on the "cursed film" genre from the author of The Pallbearers Club, A Head Full of Ghosts, and The Cabin at the End of the World. Tremblay’s latest is an obsessive, psychologically chilling, and suspenseful feat of storytelling genius that builds inexorably to an unforgettable, mind-bending conclusion. He is joined in conversation by fellow writer Gus Moreno.

This conversation originally took place May 13, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

AWM PODCAST NETWORK HOME

More about Horror Movie:

In June 1993, a group of young guerilla filmmakers spent four weeks making Horror Movie, a notorious, disturbing, art-house horror flick.

The weird part? Only three of the film’s scenes were ever released to the public, but Horror Movie has nevertheless grown a rabid fanbase. Three decades later, Hollywood is pushing for a big budget reboot.

The man who played "The Thin Kid" is the only surviving cast member. He remembers all too well the secrets buried within the original screenplay, the bizarre events of the filming, and the dangerous crossed lines on set that resulted in tragedy. As memories flood back in, the boundaries between reality and film, past and present start to blur. But he’s going to help remake the film, even if it means navigating a world of cynical producers, egomaniacal directors, and surreal fan conventions—demons of the past be damned.

But at what cost?

PAUL TREMBLAY has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the nationally bestselling author of The Beast You Are, The Pallbearers Club, Survivor Song, Growing Things and Other Stories, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. His novel The Cabin at the End of the World was adapted into the Universal Pictures film Knock at the Cabin. He lives outside Boston with his family.

GUS MORENO is the author of This Thing Between Us, a "Best Book Of 2021" pick by NPR and the New York Public Library. His stories have appeared in the Southwest Review, Aurealis, Pseudopod, and the Burnt Tongues anthology, among others. He lives in the suburbs with his wife and two dogs, but never think that he’s not from Chicago.

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.

AWM PODCAST NETWORK HOME

More about Exhibit:

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, we present a panel discussion with a range of scholars exploring religion through narrative games. This is a special episode in conjunction with our new exhibit Level Up: Writers & Gamers, on display now at the American Writers Museum.

This conversation originally took place April 11, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

Featured panelists: Emily Crews, Executive Director of the Marty Center at University of Chicago Divinity School; Keisha Howard, creator of Sugar Gamers; Ghnewa Hayek, Assoicate Professor of Modern Arabic Literature at University of Chicago; and Alireza Doostdar, Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and the Anthropology of Religion at University of Chicago.

AWM PODCAST NETWORK HOME

This week, we’re on a mission from God. Journalist and author Daniel de Visé discusses his book The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Classic. Hit it.

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

AWM PODCAST NETWORK HOME

More about The Blues Brothers:

"They're not going to catch us," Dan Aykroyd as Elwood Blues tells his brother Jake, played by John Belushi. "We're on a mission from God."

So opens the musical action comedy The Blues Brothers, which hit theatres on June 20, 1980. Their scripted mission was to save a local Chicago orphanage; but Aykroyd, who conceived and wrote the film, had a greater mission: to honor the then-seemingly forgotten tradition of rhythm and blues, some of whose greatest artists—Aretha Franklin, James Brown, John Lee Hooker, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles—made the film as unforgettable as its wild car chases.

Late and vastly over budget, beset by mercurial and oft drugged-out stars, The Blues Brothers opened to tepid reviews at best. However, in the 44 years since it has been acknowledged a classic: inducted into the National Film Registry for its cultural significance; even declared a “Catholic classic” by the Church itself; and re-aired thousands of times on television to huge worldwide audiences. It is, undeniably, one of the most significant films of the 20th century.

The story behind any classic is rich; the saga behind The Blues Brothers, as Daniel de Visé reveals, is epic, encompassing the colorful childhoods of Belushi and Aykroyd; the comedic revolution sparked by Harvard’s Lampoon and Chicago’s Second City; the birth and anecdote-rich, drug-filled early years of Saturday Night Live, where the Blues Brothers were born as an act amidst turmoil and rivalry; and of course the indelible behind-the-scenes narrative of how the film was made, scene by memorable scene. Based on original research and dozens of interviews probing the memories of principals from director John Landis and producer Bob Weiss to SNL creator Lorne Michaels and Aykroyd himself, The Blues Brothers vividly portrays the creative geniuses behind modern comedy.