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William T. Vollmann | Carbon Ideologies

The Artist's Life: John Yau

Poet, critic, and arts editor of the Brooklyn Rail John Yau talks about becoming a poet, his upbringing, and writing about art.

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Rwanda Women Rising
Swanee Hunt discussed her book "Rwandan Women Rising," the story of how the female population of the tiny African nation led that country's rebirth after the horrific 1994 genocide that left nearly a million dead.

Speaker Biography: A former U.S. Ambassador to Austria, Swanee Hunt chairs the Washington-based Institute for Inclusive Security. She is the Eleanor Roosevelt Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, CEO of Hunt Alternatives and a member of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations.
Ada Limon interview at AWP 2018
We welcome Ada Limón to the set, author of Bright Dead Things: Poems. Limón was a finalist for the National Book Award, The National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award. Limon’s next book, The Carrying: Poems is due to be released this summer.

FROM THE PUBLISHER:

From National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Ada Limon comes The Carrying—her most powerful collection yet.

Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility—"What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?"—and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: "Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal." And still Limon shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives. "Fine then, / I'll take it," she writes. "I'll take it all."

In Bright Dead Things, Limon showed us a heart "giant with power, heavy with blood"—"the huge beating genius machine / that thinks, no, it knows, / it's going to come in first." In her follow-up collection, that heart is on full display—even as The Carrying continues further and deeper into the bloodstream, following the hard-won truth of what it means to live in an imperfect world.
Mike Epps | Unsuccessful Thug
Comedian/actor Mike Epps gets semi-serious in this wide-ranging fan Q&A on his career in Hollywood, his advice to up-and-coming comics, and why Richard Pryor wasn’t too impressed with his backyard. His new memoir is “Unsuccessful Thug: One Comedian’s Journey from Naptown to Tinseltown.”

Michael Elliot Epps is a stand-up comedian, actor, film producer, writer, and rapper. He is best known for playing Day-Day Jones in “Next Friday” and its sequel, “Friday After Next,” and also appearing in “The Hangover” as "Black Doug". He was the voice of Boog in “Open Season 2.” As of 2010, Epps was the executive producer on a documentary about the life story of a former member of Tupac Shakur's Outlawz, “Napoleon: Life of an Outlaw.” He is also known for playing Lloyd Jefferson "L.J." Wade in “Resident Evil: Apocalypse” and “Resident Evil: Extinction.”
NBCC Finalists Readings for Award Year 2017
On Wednesday, March 14, 2018, the night before the awards ceremony, many of the finalists read from their work at the New School Here is the complete video. See below for order of appearances.

Welcome: Luis Jaramillo, Interim Director, The New School Writing Program

Opening Remarks: Kate Tuttle, President, National Book Critics Circle

Poetry

Nuar Alsadir, Fourth Person Singular (Liverpool University Press/Oxford)

James Longenbach, Earthling (Norton)

Layli Long Soldier, Whereas (Graywolf)

Frank Ormsby, The Darkness of Snow (Wake Forest University Press)

Criticism

Carina Chocano, You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages (Mariner)

Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story (Graywolf)

Camille T. Dungy, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History (Norton)

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (Coffee House)

Kevin Young, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts and Fake News (Graywolf)

Autobiography

Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir (Abrams)

Biography

Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Metropolitan Books)

Edmund Gordon, The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography (Oxford)

Howard Markel, The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek (Pantheon)

William Taubman, Gorbachev: His Life and Times (Norton)

Kenneth Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (Knopf)

Fiction

Joan Silber, Improvement (Counterpoint)

Nonfiction

Jack E. Davis, The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea (Liveright)

Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (Simon & Schuster)

Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (Riverhead)
Njinga of Angola: Africa's Warrior Queen
Linda Heywood discussed her book "Njinga of Angola: Africa's Warrior Queen," about this multifaceted and successful 17th-Century African ruler.

Speaker Biography: Linda Heywood is a professor of African history and the history of the African diaspora and African-American studies at Boston University.
Alexander Chee interview at AWP 2018
Alexander Chee is with us at AWP 2018 talking about his newest book, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays. Mr. Chee has won numerous awards and fellowships, is an Associate Professor at Dartmouth College as well as being a contributing editor at The New Republic, an editor at large at The Virginia Quarterly Review and a critic at large at The Los Angeles Times.

FROM THE PUBLISHER:

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is the author’s manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nation’s history, including his father’s death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, the jobs that supported his writing—Tarot-reading, bookselling, cater-waiting for William F. Buckley—the writing of his first novel, Edinburgh, and the election of Donald Trump.
Sarah McBride & Jennifer Finney Boylan | Tomorrow Will Be Different
Trans advocates Sarah McBride and Prof. Jennifer Finney Boylan discuss McBride’s powerful new memoir, “Tomorrow Will Be Different.”

Before Sarah McBride became the first transgender person to speak at a national political convention, Sarah struggled with the sadly familiar challenge several young members of the LGBTQ community face: whether or not to come out – not just to family, but to her peers, her classmates she led from her role as student body president.

Sarah knew she was a girl from her earliest memories, but it wasn’t until the Facebook post announcing her truth went viral that she realized just how much impact her story could have on the country. Four years later, she had become one of the most prominent transgender activists, working within the walls of the White House, advocating the passing of laws, and addressing the country in the midst of a heated presidential election.

Informative, heartbreaking, and empowering, “Tomorrow Will Be Different” is Sarah’s story of love and loss, a powerful entry into the LGBTQ community’s battle for equal rights and what it means to be openly transgender.

Sarah McBride is a LGBT rights activist and political figure. She is currently the National Press Secretary of the Human Rights Campaign, and is largely credited with the passage of legislation in Delaware banning discrimination on the basis of gender identity in employment, housing, insurance, and public accommodations. She has been a speaker at the Democratic National Convention, becoming the first openly transgender person to address a major party convention in American history.

Professor Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of fifteen books, is the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University. Her column “Men & Women” appears on the op/ed page of the New York Times on alternate Wednesdays. From 2011 to 2018 she served on the Board of Directors of GLAAD, the media advocacy group for LGBT people worldwide. She was a consultant and cast member for I AM CAIT, the docu-series about Caitlyn Jenner that debuted on the E! network in July of 2015; and also served as a consultant to the Amazon series TRANSPARENT. Her 2003 memoir, “She’s Not There: a Life in Two Genders” (Broadway/Doubleday/Random House) was the first bestselling work by a transgender American.
Inauguration of Jacqueline Woodson as the Ambassador for Young People's Lit
The Library of Congress in collaboration with the Children's Book Council and Every Child a Reader inaugurated Jacqueline Woodson as the new National Ambassador for Young People's Literature.

Speaker Biography: Carla Hayden is the 14th Librarian of Congress.

Speaker Biography: Gene Yang was the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature from 2016 to 2017.

Speaker Biography: Carl Lennertz is the executive director of the Children's Book Council.

Speaker Biography: Jacqueline Woodson is the new National Ambassador for Young People's Literature from 2018 to 2019.
Stephen Fry: The Waterstones Interview
The font of all knowledge on QI for many years, Stephen Fry has the kind of voice and authority that makes listening to him such a joy. His latest book Mythos is a retelling of the Greek myths and in this exclusive interview he told us about why he finds them so enthralling and why these ancient tales still speak so clearly to readers today.
Shelfie with Sarah Winman
Every single person who has reviewed Sarah Winman's Costa Book Award-nominated novel, Tin Man, on our website has given it five stars. As you let that sink in, enjoy her recent visit to Waterstones Tottenham Court Road where she picked out five books that helped shape her as a writer.
Jimmy O. Yang + Awkwafina: HIGHLIGHTS
Actor/comedian Jimmy O. Yang and actress/rapper Awkwafina (aka Nora Lum) discuss Yang’s new book “How to American,” their roles in the upcoming film adaptation of “Crazy Rich Asians,” growing up Asian-American and why Nora never became a meat inspector.

As a stand-up comedian, actor, and fan favorite as the character Jian Yang from the popular HBO series Silicon Valley, Jimmy O. Yang has achieved the American dream, but he wasn’t born into it. He started his journey as a teenage immigrant from Hong Kong, determinedly chasing the elusive Hollywood career. He defied his parents’ wishes, learning English by watching BET RapCity for three hours a day, and worked as a strip club DJ while pursuing a career in comedy. He was almost deported during a trip abroad before finally becoming a US citizen. Now he’s written a memoir recounting it all.

In his book “How to American,” Jimmy O. tells those stories and many more, while sharing some hard-earned lessons and insightful advice for those looking to achieve the American Dream.
Martin Amis | Appel Salon
"You've got to hold on to the meanings of words for as long as you can, and then cease to use them when they become ambiguous." —Martin Amis

One of the world's most provocative and widely read writers discuss his definitive collection of essays and reportage written during the past 30 years. Martin Amis in conversation with Brent Bambury.
NBCC Awards Ceremony for Award Year 2017
Event held on March 15, 2018 at the New School, New York, NY

Welcome: Luis Jaramillo, Interim Director, The New School Writing Program

Opening Remarks: Kate Tuttle, President, National Book Critics Circle

John Leonard Prize: Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties (Graywolf)

Introduced by Daniel Akst

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing: Charles Finch

Introduced by Katherine A. Powers

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award: John McPhee

Introduced by Michael Schaub and Stacey Vanek Smith

Poetry

Layli Long Soldier, Whereas (Graywolf)

Introduced by Tess Taylor

Criticism

Carina Chocano, You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages (Mariner) Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story (Graywolf)

Introduced by Carlin Romano

Autobiography

Xiaolu Guo, Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China (Grove)

Introduced by Laurie Hertzel

Biography

Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Metropolitan Books)

Introduced by Elizabeth Taylor

Nonfiction

Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (Simon & Schuster)

Introduced by Mary Ann Gwinn

Fiction

Joan Silber, Improvement (Counterpoint)

Introduced by Tom Beer
FIRST LOOK: Trump U., the Inside Story of Trump University
"Trump U." is the only insider account to emerge from Trump University, one of the president's signature cons. At the heart of the outrage is Stephen Gilpin, a self-taught real estate wunderkind who found himself unwittingly at the center of a shadowy "cabal of charlatans."
Brit Bennett interview at AWP 2018
Brit Bennett on The Mothers

Rich Fahle talks with Brit Bennett about her debut novel, The Mothers at the 2018 AWP Conference & Book Fair.

FROM THE PUBLISHER:

Set within a contemporary black community in Southern California, Brit Bennett's mesmerizing first novel is an emotionally perceptive story about community, love, and ambition. It begins with a secret.

"All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we'd taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season."

It is the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken, seventeen-year-old beauty. Mourning her own mother's recent suicide, she takes up with the local pastor's son. Luke Sheppard is twenty-one, a former football star whose injury has reduced him to waiting tables at a diner. They are young; it's not serious. But the pregnancy that results from this teen romance—and the subsequent cover-up—will have an impact that goes far beyond their youth. As Nadia hides her secret from everyone, including Aubrey, her God-fearing best friend, the years move quickly. Soon, Nadia, Luke, and Aubrey are full-fledged adults and still living in debt to the choices they made that one seaside summer, caught in a love triangle they must carefully maneuver, and dogged by the constant, nagging question: What if they had chosen differently? The possibilities of the road not taken are a relentless haunt.

In entrancing, lyrical prose, The Mothers asks whether a "what if" can be more powerful than an experience itself. If, as time passes, we must always live in servitude to the decisions of our younger selves, to the communities that have parented us, and to the decisions we make that shape our lives forever.

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