This week we interview Scott Shane, author of Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland. Published by Celadon Press in September 2023, Shane has written a riveting account of the life of Thomas Smallwood–the formerly enslaved man credited with naming the Underground Railroad. Shane is a veteran reporter for The Baltimore Sun and The New York Times, where he was twice a member of teams that won… Read More »

This week we interview award winning author Cynthia Carr, whose latest book, Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar, was published by Farrar Straus and Giroux in March 2024. Carr’s previous biographies include, Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz – a Lambda Literary Award winner and finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize – along with Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White … Read More »

This week we interview journalist Larry Rohter, author of the biography about a brilliant Brazilian explorer. Rohter’s Into the Amazon: The Life of Cândido Rondon, Trailblazing Explorer, Scientist, Statesman, and Conservationist, was published by W. W. Norton and Company in May 2023. Rohter served as the Rio de Janeiro bureau chief for the New York Times from 1998 to 2008, and he held the same role at Newsweek from 1977 to 1982. He divides… Read More »

This week we interview Danny Fingeroth, a veteran biographer and cultural historian/commentator who specializes in history at the intersection of Jewish and American cultures. His latest book, Jack Ruby: The Many Faces of Oswald’s Assassin, was published in November 2023 by Chicago Review Press. Fingeroth made his mark as a cultural observer with books like Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves and Our Society and Disguised as Clark Kent: … Read More »

This week we interview Jack Kelly, an award-winning author and historian. Kelly’s latest book,  God Save Benedict Arnold: The True Story of America’s Most Hated Man, was published in December 2023 by St. Martin’s Press. Kelly’s previous fiction and nonfiction books were well received, including his Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America’s Independence, which received the DAR History Medal. Kelly is a New York Foundation for the Arts nonfiction literature… Read More »

This week we interview Joy-Ann Reid, host of MSNBC’s The Reid Out and a New York Times bestselling author. Reid’s latest book, Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America, was published by Mariner Books in February of this year. Her previous books include the bestseller The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story. Reid served as the former managing editor of The … Read More »

This week we interview award-winning author Natalie Dykstra. Her latest biography, Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, will be published by Mariner on March 26, 2024. Dykstra’s work on Stewart Gardner has won a Public Scholars Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities and an inaugural Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowship sponsored by the Biographers International Organization. Dykstra, an emerita professor of English at Hope College in Michigan, lives with her… Read More »

This week we interview Nicholas L. Syrett, the author of four books and most recently, The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America’s Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime, published by The New Press in October 2023. As an associate dean and professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Kansas, Syrett also is the co-editor of the Journal of the History of Sexuality. Nicholas… Read More »

This week we interview J. C. Hallman, author of Say Anarcha: A Young Woman, a Devious Surgeon, and the Harrowing Birth of Modern Women’s Health, published by Henry Holt and Company in June 2023. Hallman’s previous work on Anarcha has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, the Forum (of the African American Policy Forum), the Baffler, Montgomery Advertiser, and Urology. Hallman also has published five previous works of nonfiction and a book of… Read More »

This week we interview author and theater arts professor Rachel Shteir, whose latest book, Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disruptor, was published by Yale University Press in September 2023. Friedan was the trendsetting feminist writer and activist. Shteir has written three precious books, Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show; Gypsy: the Art of the Tease; and The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting, along with many essays and articles, and she… Read More »