This week we interview Paulina L. Alberto, an Argentine-born historian of Afro-Latin America and Professor of History, Spanish, and Portuguese at the University of Michigan. Her biography, Black Legend: The Many Lives of Raúl Grigera and the Power of Racial Storytelling in Modern Argentina, was published by Cambridge University Press in January 2022. As the author of Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Brazil, she received the Roberto Reis Prize for Best… Read More »

This week we interview award-winning author and Brigham Young University music professor Brian Harker. His latest biography, Sportin’ Life: John W. Bubbles an American Classic, was published by Oxford University Press in January 2022. John Bubbles was one of the jazz world’s most singular and elusive architects. Harker also explored jazz music in his previous books, Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings and Jazz: An American Journey. Brian Harker was interviewed… Read More »

This week we interview Kathleen Stone, a Boston-based lawyer whose reviews, essays and have appeared in MS Magazine, Arts Fuse, Ploughshares, Pangyrus, The Timberline Review, Los Angeles Review of Books and Grist. She also co-hosts Booklab, a literary salon in Boston. Stone’s biography, her first, explores the lives of seven remarkable women from a wide range of backgrounds. They Called Us Girls: Stories of Female Ambition from Suffrage to Mad Men, was published in… Read More »

This week we offer the second part of two special episodes featuring David Maraniss, the veteran journalist and author of 13 highly regarded books. His latest book, Path Lit By Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, will be published by Simon and Schuster in August 2022. Maraniss is a New York Times bestselling author, associate editor at The Washington Post and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. In addition, his reporting and writing has earned him… Read More »

This week we offer the first of two special episodes featuring David Maraniss, the veteran journalist and author of 13 highly regarded books. His latest book, Path Lit By Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, will be published by Simon & Schuster in August 2022. Maraniss is a New York Times bestselling author and associate editor at The Washington Post. In 1992 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on then presidential… Read More »

This week we interview Tomiko Brown-Nagin, author of Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality, published by Pantheon in January 2022. Brown-Nagin serves as Dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, and Professor of History at Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In 2019, she was appointed chair of the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the… Read More »

This week we interview John Markoff, a Pulitzer Prize winning, veteran science and technology journalist for The New York Times, the Pacific News Service, InfoWorld, Byte Magazine, and The San Jose Mercury. Markoff also has shared his journalistic skills as a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley School of Journalism, and as an adjunct faculty member of the Stanford Graduate Program on Journalism. His latest biography about a man… Read More »

This week we interview Alejandro Madrid, an award-winning Cornell University musicologist who specializes in music and expressive culture from Latin America and Latinxs in the United States. He has authored more than a half dozen books, including his latest, Tania Léon’s Stride. A Polyrhythmic Life, published by the University of Illinois Press in December 2021. Tania Léon, now in her late 70s, is a sought-after composer, conductor, educator, and tireless advocate for the arts.… Read More »

This week we interview Paulina Bren, an award-winning writer and Vassar College historian. Her latest book, The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free is a New York Times Editor’s Choice. The Barbizon has received international press coverage and it has been optioned by HBO and Game of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke. Foreign rights have been sold to Italy, Spain, Hungary, South America, China, Russia and South Korea. Paulina Bren is a well-known scholar of… Read More »

This week we interview Sheena Harris, a Woodburn Associate Professor of history and coordinator of the Africana Studies Program at West Virginia University. Previously, she served as an Associate Professor of history and the Inaugural Director of Student Engagement Initiatives at Tuskegee University. She is a first-time biographer and author of Margaret Murray Washington: The Life and Times of a Career Clubwoman, published by the University of Tennessee Press in February 2021. A powerful… Read More »