This week, acclaimed book critic and editor Donna Seaman discusses her new book River of Books: A Life in Reading, a memoir of reading and working with books by the renowned Booklist editor. Seaman is interviewed by AWM President Carey Cranston. This conversation originally took place December 16, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

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About River of Books:

With the infectious curiosity of an inveterate bibliophile and the prose of a fine stylist, Donna Seaman charts the course of her early reading years in a book-by-book chronicle of the significance books have held in her life. River of Books recounts Seaman's journey in becoming an editor for Booklist, a reviewer, an author, and a literary citizen, and lays bare how she nourished both body and soul in working with books. Seaman makes palpable the power and self-recognition that she discovered in a life dedicated to reading.

DONNA SEAMAN is the Editor-in-Chief at Booklist, a member of the Content Leadership Team for the American Writers Museum, an adjunct professor for Northwestern University's Graduate Creative Writing Program, School of Professional Studies, and 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 created the anthology In Our Nature: Stories of Wildness; her author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air: Conversations About Books, and she is the author of Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists. She lives in Chicago. Visit: https://www.donnaseaman.com

This week, we take a look back at some of our top episodes of 2024 from both of our podcast series: AWM Author Talks and Nation of Writers.

This is our final episode of 2024. We’ll return next year with even more episodes featuring the writers you love and the stories they tell.

Presented in order of release date, we hope you enjoy entering the Mind of a Writer.

• Jennifer Keishin Armstrong
  • Book title: So Fetch: The Making of Mean Girls (And Why We're Still So Obsessed With It)
• W. S. Merwin
  • Guest: Sonnet Coggins
• Audre Lorde
  • Guest: R. O. Kwon
• The Lasting Influence of Lorraine Hansberry
  • Panelists: J. Nicole Brooks, Natalie Y. Moore, and Ericka Ratcliff
• Gloria E. Anzaldúa
  • Guests: AnaLouise Keating and ire’ne lara silva
• Freedom to Read
  • Panelists: Heather Booth, Anna Claussen, Sara Paretsky, and Donna Seaman
• Level Up: Writing & Gaming
  • Panelists: Keith Ammann, Derek Tyler Attico, Keisha Howard, Carly A. Kocurek and Samantha Ortiz
• Yay Panlilio
  • Guest: Jen Soriano
• James Welch
  • Guest: Stephen Graham Jones
• Mike Thomas and Rick Kogan
  • Book title: Carson the Magnificent

This week, journalist Larry Tye discusses his recent book The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America with reporter Gregory Royal Pratt, accompanied by live jazz from the Richard D. Johnson Trio. This conversation originally took place May 19, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Festival.

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More about The Jazzmen:

From the New York Times bestselling author of Satchel and Bobby Kennedy, a sweeping and spellbinding portrait of the longtime kings of jazz—Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie—who, born within a few years of one another, overcame racist exclusion and violence to become the most popular entertainers on the planet.

This is the story of three revolutionary American musicians, the maestro jazzmen who orchestrated the chords that throb at the soul of twentieth-century America.

Duke Ellington, the grandson of slaves who was christened Edward Kennedy Ellington, was a man whose story is as layered and nuanced as his name suggests and whose music transcended category. Louis Daniel Armstrong was born in a New Orleans slum so tough it was called The Battlefield and, at age seven, got his first musical instrument, a ten-cent tin horn that drew buyers to his rag-peddling wagon and set him on the road to elevating jazz into a pulsating force for spontaneity and freedom. William James Basie, too, grew up in a world unfamiliar to white fans—the son of a coachman and laundress who dreamed of escaping every time the traveling carnival swept into town, and who finally engineered his getaway with help from Fats Waller.

What is far less known about these groundbreakers is that they were bound not just by their music or even the discrimination that they, like nearly all Black performers of their day, routinely encountered. Each defied and ultimately overcame racial boundaries by opening America's eyes and souls to the magnificence of their music. In the process they wrote the soundtrack for the civil rights movement.

Based on more than 250 interviews, this exhaustively researched book brings alive the history of Black America in the early-to-mid 1900s through the singular lens of the country's most gifted, engaging, and enduring African-American musicians.

About the writers:

LARRY TYE is a former reporter at the Boston Globe, off now writing books and running a Boston-based fellowship program for health journalists. The Jazzmen is his ninth book, with others including Home Lands, the upbeat tale of a thriving Jewish diaspora; Superman, the biography of America’s longest-lasting (Jewish) hero; and Bobby Kennedy, which looks at RFK’s transformation from Joe McCarthy’s protege to a liberal icon. Tye graduated from Brown University and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. Tye is co-spearheading a drive to revive local journalism on Cape Cod, where he spends 90 percent of his time.

GREGORY ROYAL PRATT covered every day of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s term and was deeply sourced in City Hall, as well as in the other offices of local, state, and national politics that shaped the mayor’s administration. Pratt has won several national awards for his political and investigative reporting and he is a regular commentator about the city on local and national media, including appearances on CNN and NPR.

RICHARD D. JOHNSON was invited to become a member of Wynton Marsalis’ Septet an...