Marking Disability Pride month by revisiting my 2020 interview with Rebekah Taussig who discusses her memoir in essays (and current NEA Big Read title) Sitting Pretty The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body.
Author and 2021 National Humanities Medalist Amy Tan discusses “The Joy Luck Club,” her writing with its themes of family and identity, and her relationship with her mother.
Author of the NEA Big Read title "Nothing to See Here" Kevin Wilson discusses the serious issues at the heart of this outrageous (and outrageously funny) novel.
Sarah Smarsh discusses her book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, which is a 2022-2023 NEA Big Read title.
The author discusses the NEA Big Read selection, The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, his novel about an Ethiopian exile in a gentrifying Washington, DC neighborhood.
Tim O'Brien, who served in Vietnam, talks about his novel (and Big Read selection) The Things They Carried and how fiction can often tell a deeper truth about war.
The NEA Big Read author on the inspiration for his novel "Into the Beautiful North," which takes place from Sinaloa, Mexico, all the way north to Kankakee, Illinois.
Rudolfo Anaya talks about the writing of his acclaimed novel "Bless Me, Ultima" as well as in the influence of the oral tradition and folk tales on his writing and his life growing up in New Mexico.
NEA Literature Fellow and National Medal of Arts recipient Julia Alvarez discusses how her life as a reader led to her life as a writer and the rich source material she finds in her family's immigrant experience.
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