This week we interview Anastasia Curwood, Professor of History at the University of Kentucky and author of Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics, scheduled for publication by the University of North Carolina Press in January 2023. Curwood has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University. Her first book, Stormy Weather: Middle-Class … Read More »
This week we interview Winston James, author of Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik, published by Columbia University Press in July 2022. A Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, James also authored, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America, winner of the Gordon K. Lewis Memorial Award for Caribbean Scholarship from the Caribbean Studies Association. His three other books examined pioneering Pan-Africanist writer… Read More »
This week we interview Mark Clague, author of O Say Can You Hear: A Cultural Biography of The Star-Spangled Banner, published by W.W. Norton & Company in June 2022. Clague serves as Professor of Musicology, Arts Leadership, and American Culture at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance, where he also serves as an associate dean. His other anthem-related publications include the recording Poets & Patriots: A Tuneful History of The … Read More »
This week we interview Allison Gilbert, an award-winning journalist and co-author (with writer Julia Scheeres) of Listen, World!: How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman. Published by Seal Press in September 2022, this biography of William Randolph Hearst’s highest-paid woman writer has been called “broadminded, sharp-witted, fast-paced, and funny” by Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Debby Applegate. Gilbert has authored three books on grief and loss: Passed and Present, Always Too Soon,… Read More »
This week we interview Soyica Diggs Colbert, the Idol Family Professor of African American Studies and Performing Arts at Georgetown University. Her book, Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry, published by Yale University Press in April 2021, was described in the New York Times as a captivating portrait of writer Lorraine Hansberry’s life, art, and political activism. Diggs Colbert’s writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Public Books, Metrograph, and… Read More »
This week we interview E. Stanly Godbold, author of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: Power and Human Rights, 1975–2020. This dual biography of President Carter and his wife Rosalynn was published by Oxford University Press in September 2022. The first volume of Godbold’s extensive examination of the Carters, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: The Georgia Years, 1924–1974, was also published by Oxford University Press. Godbold is Professor Emeritus of History at Mississippi State University, and… Read More »
This week we interview Bernice Lerner, a senior scholar at Boston University’s Center for Character and Social Responsibility. Her latest book is a dual biography of a high-ranking British military doctor during World War II, and Lerner’s mother, Rachel Genuth, a poor Jewish teenager from the Hungarian provinces and Holocaust survivor. The book, All the Horrors of War: A Jewish Girl, a British Doctor, and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, was published by Johns Hopkins University… Read More »
This week we interview Li Shan Chan, a Singaporean writer, mental health advocate, and doctoral student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who was awarded the Biography Prize by Honolulu’s Center for Biographical Research. Her latest book, Searching for Lee Wen: A Life in 135 Parts, about a unique Singaporean Chinese artist, was published by Epigram Books in May 2022. Her previous books include Yellow Man and her memoir, A Philosopher’s Madness.… Read More »
