This week, scholar Thomas A. Tweed discusses his new book Religion in the Lands that Became America. A sweeping retelling of American religious history, Tweed shows how religion has enhanced and hindered human flourishing from the Ice Age to the Information Age. Tweed is joined by fellow Indigenous Studies professor John N. Low. This conversation originally took place November 10, 2025 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

AWM PODCAST NETWORK HUB

This episode is presented in conjunction with the American Writers Museum’s new special exhibit American Prophets: Writers, Religion, and Culture. This exhibit and programming series explores the profound ways writing reflects and influences our understanding of religion. American Prophets is now open.

More about Religion in the Lands that Became America:

Until now, the standard narrative of American religious history has begun with English settlers in Jamestown or Plymouth and remained predominantly Protestant and Atlantic. Driven by his strong sense of the historical and moral shortcomings of the usual story, Thomas A. Tweed offers a very different narrative in this ambitious new history. He begins the story much earlier—11,000 years ago—at a rock shelter in present-day Texas and follows Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, transnational migrants, and people of many faiths as they transform the landscape and confront the big lifeway transitions, from foraging to farming and from factories to fiber optics.

Setting aside the familiar narrative themes, he highlights sustainability, showing how religion both promoted and inhibited individual, communal, and environmental flourishing during three sustainability crises: the medieval Cornfield Crisis, which destabilized Indigenous ceremonial centers; the Colonial Crisis, which began with the displacement of Indigenous Peoples and the enslavement of Africans; and the Industrial Crisis, which brought social inequity and environmental degradation. The unresolved Colonial and Industrial Crises continue to haunt the nation, Tweed suggests, but he recovers historical sources of hope as he retells the rich story of America’s religious past.

About the speakers:

THOMAS A. TWEED is the Harold and Martha Welch Professor of American Studies and professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. A past president of the American Academy of Religion, he is editor of Retelling U.S. Religious History and author of Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion and Religion: A Very Short Introduction.

JOHN N. LOW received his Ph.D. in American Culture at the University of Michigan, and is an enrolled citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians. He is also the recipient of a graduate certificate in Museum Studies and a Juris Doctorate from the University of Michigan. He earned a BA from Michigan State University, a second BA in American Indian Studies from the University of Minnesota, and an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago.

Professor Low previously served as Executive Director of the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian in Evanston, Illinois, and served as a member of the Advisory Committee for the Indians of the Midwest Project at the D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library, and the State of Ohio Cemetery Law Task Force. He has presented frequently at conferences including the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA)), American Society for Ethnohist...

This week, we revisit our Faith is Funny program with four comedians—Gibran Saleem, Hari Kondabolu, Peter Sagal, and Kate Sidley—who discuss the role of religion in comedy. This conversation originally took place June 23, 2025 and was recorded live at the Studebaker Theater.

This episode is presented in conjunction with the American Writers Museum’s forthcoming exhibit American Prophets: Writers, Religion, and Culture. This exhibit and programming series explores the profound ways writing reflects and influences our understanding of religion. American Prophets opens November 21, 2025.

AWM PODCAST NETWORK HUB

About the comedians:

GIBRAN SALEEM is a writer and comedian whose work spans broadcast and digital platforms. Born in North Carolina to traditional Pakistani immigrants, he was raised in a Muslim household and began performing stand-up in New York while completing a graduate degree in psychology. A semi-finalist for the Humanitas New Voices Fellowship and alum of NYU’s Episodic Writers’ Room, he has also toured with Hasan Minhaj, appeared on FX, ABC, and Hulu, and continues to develop screenwriting projects and perform stand-up across the U.S.

HARI KONDABOLU is a comedian, writer & podcaster based in Brooklyn, NY. He has been described by The NY Times as “one of the most exciting political comics in stand-up today.” He has performed on The Late Show with David Letterman, Conan, Jimmy Kimmel Live, John Oliver’s NY Stand-Up Show, @Midnight & has his own half-hour special on Comedy Central. A former writer & correspondent on the Chris Rock produced FX TV show Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell. In 2017, he released his critically acclaimed documentary The Problem with Apu on truTV.

PETER SAGAL is the host of NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, the most listened-to hour on public radio. A playwright, screenwriter and journalist, he is also the author of The Book of Vice: Naughty Things and How To Do Them and The Incomplete Book of Running, a memoir about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and other adventures while running long distances. On TV, Peter has made appearances on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and other shows, and hosted Constitution USA with Peter Sagal for PBS and National Geographic Explorer for the NatGeo Channel.

KATE SIDLEY is a comedy writer and performer originally from Cleveland, Ohio. She writes for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and her work can be seen in the New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and Reductress. Kate has multiple Emmy-nominations, a Peabody Award, a Writers Guild Award and, thanks to her years of Catholic school, a visceral aversion to plaid wool skirts. Her forthcoming book is called How to Be a Saint: An Extremely Weird and Mildly Sacrilegious History of The Catholic Church’s Biggest Names.

American Prophets is supported by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. through its Religion and Cultural Institutions Initiative.

Beloved author Susan Orlean discusses her new book Joyride, a masterful memoir of finding her creative calling and purpose that invites us to approach life with wonder, curiosity, and an irrepressible sense of delight. Orlean is interviewed by journalist Chris Borrelli.

This conversation originally took place October 24, 2025 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum. We hope you enjoy entering the Mind of a Writer.

AWM PODCAST NETWORK HUB

More about Joyride:

"The story of my life is the story of my stories," writes Susan Orlean in this extraordinary, era-defining memoir from one of the greatest practitioners of narrative nonfiction of our time. Joyride is a magic carpet ride through Orlean's life and career, where every day is an opportunity for discovery and every moment holds the potential for wonder. Throughout her storied career, her curiosity draws her to explore the most ordinary and extraordinary of places, from going deep inside the head of a regular ten-year-old boy for a legendary profile ("The American Man Age Ten") to reporting on a woman who owns twenty-seven tigers, from capturing the routine magic of Saturday night to climbing Mt. Fuji.

Not only does Orlean's account of a writing life offer a trove of indispensable gleanings for writers, it's also an essential and practical guide to embracing any creative path. She takes us through her process of dreaming up ideas, managing deadlines, connecting with sources, chasing every possible lead, confronting writer's block and self-doubt, and crafting the perfect lede—a Susan specialty.

While Orlean has always written her way into other people's lives in order to understand the human experience, Joyride is her most personal book ever—a searching journey through finding her feet as a journalist, recovering from the excruciating collapse of her first marriage, falling head-over-heels in love again, becoming a mother while mourning the decline of her own mother, sojourning to Hollywood for films based on her work including Adaptation and Blue Crush, and confronting mortality. Joyride is also a time machine to a bygone era of journalism, from Orlean's bright start in the golden age of alt-weeklies to her career-making days working alongside icons such as Robert Gottlieb, Tina Brown, David Remnick, Anna Wintour, Sonny Mehta, and Jonathan Karp—forces who shaped the media industry as we know it today.

Infused with Orlean's signature warmth and wit, Joyride is a must-read for anyone who hungers to start, build, and sustain a creative life. Orlean inspires us to seek out daily inspiration and rediscover the marvels that surround us.

SUSAN ORLEAN has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. She is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including The Library Book, Rin Tin Tin, Saturday Night, and The Orchid Thief, which was made into the Academy Award–winning film Adaptation. She lives with her family and her animals in Los Angeles and may be reached at SusanOrlean.com and on Substack at SusanOrlean.Substack.com.

CHRIS BORRELLI is a longtime features writer at the Chicago Tribune and a Nieman fellow at Harvard University. His subjects have included endangered species and Godzilla and hand dryer technology and low-wage restaurant work and prop warehouses and accordion-shop owners and comedy writers and existential threat. He’s a militant Rhode Islander and a Chicago resident....

This week in honor of Halloween, we discuss the use of religion and spirituality in horror writing. We are joined by leading horror writers Tananarive Due, Juan Martinez, and Matt Ruff. This conversation originally took place October 10, 2025 and was recorded live at the University of Chicago Divinity School. We hope you enjoy entering the Mind of a Writer.

This episode is presented in conjunction with the American Writers Museum’s forthcoming exhibit American Prophets: Writers, Religion, and Culture. This exhibit and programming series explores the profound ways writing reflects and influences our understanding of religion. American Prophets opens November 21, 2025.

AWM PODCAST NETWORK HUB

About the authors:

TANANARIVE DUE is an award-winning author who teaches Black Horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA. A leading voice in Black speculative fiction for more than 20 years, Due has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award, and her writing has been included in best-of-the-year anthologies. Her books include The Reformatory (winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Chautauqua Prize, Bram Stoker Award, Shirley Jackson Award, World Fantasy Award, and a New York Times Notable Book), The Wishing Pool and Other Stories, Ghost Summer: Stories, My Soul to Keep, and The Good House. She and her late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, co-authored Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights.

She was an executive producer on Shudder’s groundbreaking documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. She and her husband/collaborator, Steven Barnes, wrote “A Small Town” for Season 2 of Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone on Paramount Plus, and two segments of Shudder’s anthology film Horror Noire. They also co-wrote their Black Horror graphic novel The Keeper, illustrated by Marco Finnegan. Due and Barnes co-host a podcast, “Lifewriting: Write for Your Life!” She and her husband live with their son, Jason.

JUAN MARTINEZ is a writer and an associate professor of English at Northwestern University. He is the author of the horror novel Extended Stay (University of Arizona Press / Camino del Sol, 2023) and of the story collection Best Worst American (Small Beer Press, 2017). He is also the fiction editor for Jackleg Press. Juan lives with his family near Chicago.

MATT RUFF is the award-winning author of eight novels, including Fool on the Hill, Set This House in Order, Bad Monkeys, The Mirage, 88 Names, and the bestselling Lovecraft Country, which was adapted as an HBO series. His most recent book is The Destroyer of Worlds: A Return to Lovecraft Country.

This week, religious scholar Paul Elie discusses his latest book The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s. This enthralling group portrait brings to life a moment when popular culture became the site of religious strife—strife that set the stage for some of the most salient political and cultural clashes of our day. Elie is interviewed by Emily D. Crews, the Executive Director of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School. This conversation originally took place May 30, 2025 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

This episode is presented in conjunction with the American Writers Museum’s forthcoming exhibit American Prophets: Writers, Religion, and Culture. This exhibit and programming series explores the profound ways writing reflects and influences our understanding of religion. American Prophets opens November 21, 2025.

We hope you enjoy entering the Mind of a Writer.

AWM PODCAST NETWORK HUB

More about The Last Supper:

Circa 1980, tradition and authority are in the ascendant, both in Catholicism (via Pope John Paul II) and in American civic life (through the Moral Majority and the so-called televangelists). But the public is deeply divided on issues of body and soul, devotion and desire.

Enter the figures Paul Elie calls "crypto-religious." Here is Leonard Cohen writing "Hallelujah" on his knees in a Times Square hotel room; Andy Warhol adapting Leonardo's The Last Supper in response to the AIDS pandemic; Prince making the cross and altar into "signs o' the times." Through Toni Morrison, spirits speak from the grave; Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen deepen the tent-revival intensity of their work; Wim Wenders offers an angel's-eye view of Berlin; U2, the Neville Brothers, and Sinéad O’Connor reckon with their Christian roots in music of mystic yearning. And Martin Scorsese overcomes fundamentalist ire to make The Last Temptation of Christ—a struggle that anticipates Salman Rushdie's struggle with Islam in The Satanic Verses.

In Elie's acclaimed first book, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Catholic writers ventured out into the wilds of postwar America; in this book, creative figures who were raised religious go to the margins of conventional belief, calling forth controversy. Episodes such as the boycott sparked by Madonna's "Like a Prayer" video and the tearing-up of Andres Serrano's Piss Christ in Congress are early skirmishes in the culture wars—but here the creators (not the politicians) are the protagonists, and the work they make speaks to conflicts that remain unsettled.

The Last Supper explores the bold and unexpected forms an encounter with belief can take. It traces the beginnings of our postsecular age, in which religion is at once surging and in decline. Through a propulsive narrative, it reveals the crypto-religious imagination as complex, credible, daring, and vividly recognizable.

PAUL ELIE is the author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own (2003) and Reinventing Bach (2012), both National Book Critics Circle Award finalists. He is a senior fellow in Georgetown University's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, and a regular contributor to The New Yorker. He lives in Brooklyn.

This week, screenwriter and author Nicholas Meyer discusses his latest mystery novel Sherlock Holmes and the Real Thing. In this latest book, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson delve into the world of art forgery. Meyer is interviewed by Allison Sansone, Director of Programs at the American Writers Museum.

This conversation originally took place September 18, 2025 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum. We hope you enjoy entering the Mind of a Writer.

PODCAST NETWORK HUB

More about Sherlock Holmes and the Real Thing:

London, 189–: The great city is brought to a standstill by a series of blizzards and Sherlock Holmes is bored to distraction. It would take a miracle to bring a case to the detective’s door...

What arrives is not promising: a landlady who complains her artist tenant is behind on rent. Not exactly the miracle for which Holmes was hoping. But, next thing you know, there are several corpses and Sherlock Holmes and his biographer, John H. Watson, MD, find themselves drawn into one of the most bizarre cases of the great detective’s career. And into the cutthroat big business of Art, where chicanery and mendacity (and cut throats) proliferate.

What makes a work of art worth killing for? Is it the artist, his mistress, his dealer, or his blackmailer? The cast of characters is large. But are they perpetrators, accomplices, or victims? And just who is Juliet Packwood, with whom Watson has become infatuated?

Oh, and there’s one other problem: Is this a genuine Holmes case or a clever forgery? Is this the real thing?

If you can’t tell the difference, what is the difference?

About Nicholas Meyer:

NICHOLAS MEYER is the "editor" of several Watson manuscripts, including The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, which spent forty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. His screenplay of the film received an Oscar nomination. His film credits include writing and directing Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. He wrote and directed Time After Time, co-created Medici: Masters of Florence, and directed The Day After, about nuclear war that attracted the largest audience ever for a television movie. A native of New York City, he lives in Santa Monica, California.

How does the son of a Presbyterian minister wind up winning a Pulitzer Prize for writing a wildly inaccurate newspaper column read by millions of people? America's most beloved wiseass, Dave Barry, finally tells his life story with all the humor you'd expect from a man who made a career out of making fun of pretty much everything.

This week, Barry discusses his memoir Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass with Mark Bazer of The Interview Show. This conversation originally took place May 15, 2025 and was recorded live at Chicago Hope Academy. We hope you enjoy entering the Mind of a Writer.

This episode is presented in conjunction with our special exhibit and programming initiative American Prophets: Writers, Religion, and Culture, which opens in November 2025. American Prophets is supported by a generous grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. through its Religion and Cultural Institutions Initiative.

AWM PODCAST NETWORK HOME

More about Class Clown:

In Class Clown, Dave Barry takes us on a hilarious ride, starting with a childhood largely spent throwing rocks for entertainment—there was no internet—and preparing for nuclear war by hiding under a classroom desk. After literally getting elected class clown in high school, he went to college, where, as an English major, he read snippets of great literature when he was not busy playing in a rock band (it was the sixties).

He began his journalism career at a small-town Pennsylvania newspaper where he learned the most important rule of local journalism: never confuse a goose with a duck. His journey then took a detour into the business world, where as a writing consultant he spent years trying, with limited success, to get corporate folks to, for God’s sake, get the point. Somehow from there he wound up as a humor columnist for The Miami Herald, where his boss was a wild man who encouraged him to write about anything that struck him as amusing and to never worry about alienating anyone.

His columns were not popular with everyone: He managed to alienate a vast army of Neil Diamond fans, and the entire state of Indiana. But he also developed a loyal following of readers who alerted him to the threat of exploding toilets, not to mention the fire hazards posed by strawberry pop-tarts and Rollerblade Barbie, which he demonstrated to the nation on the David Letterman show. He led his readers on a crusade against telemarketers that ultimately caused the national telemarketers association to stop answering its own phones because it was getting—irony alert—too many unwanted calls. He has also run for president multiple times, although so far without success.

He became a book author and joined a literary rock band, which was not good at playing music but did once perform with Bruce Springsteen, who sang backup to Dave. As for his literary merits, Dave writes: “I’ll never have the critical acclaim of, say, Marcel Proust. But was Marcel Proust ever on Carson? Did he ever steal a hotel sign for Oprah?”

Class Clown isn’t just a memoir; it’s a vibrant celebration of a life rich with humor, absurdity, joy, and sadness. Dave says the most important wisdom imparted by his Midwestern parents was never to take anything too seriously. This laughter-filled book is proof that he learned that lesson well.

About the speakers:

DAVE BARRY is the author of more bestsellers than you can count on two hands, including Swamp Story, Less...

This week, we kick off our new exhibit and content initiative American Prophets: Writers, Religion, and Culture with four writers of speculative fiction: N. K. Jemisin, Matthew J. Kirby, Nnedi Okorafor, and Nghi Vo. Moderated by Michi Trota, the panel of authors discuss religion in their writing, the importance of considering socio-spiritual systems when world-building, and how these influence the ways their characters move through the worlds they create.

This conversation originally took place April 22, 2025 and was recorded live at the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago. We hope you enjoy entering the Mind of a Writer.

American Prophets: Writers, Religion, and Culture opens November 2025 at the American Writers Museum in Chicago. Learn more about the exhibit and upcoming programming schedule here. American Prophets is supported by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. through its Religion and Cultural Institutions Initiative.

AWM PODCAST NETWORK HOME

More about the writers:

N. K. JEMISIN is a fantasy author and 2020 MacArthur Fellow whose fiction has been recognized with multiple Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. Most of her works have been optioned for television or film, and collectively her novels, including the Broken Earth trilogy — The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky — have sold over two million copies. Her speculative works range widely in theme, though with repeated motifs: resistance and oppression, loneliness and belonging, and Wouldn’t It Be Cool If This One Ridiculous Thing Happened. In her spare time she’s into tabletop and video games, biking, fanfiction, and urban gardening. She lives and writes in Brooklyn, with her son and two cats.

MATTHEW J. KIRBY is the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of numerous books for young readers, including The Clockwork Three, Icefall, The Lost Kingdom, the Dark Gravity Sequence, the Assassin’s Creed series Last Descendants, A Taste for Monsters, and Star Splitter. He has also written adult titles for the Assassin’s Creed and Diablo video game franchises. He has won the Edgar Award for Best Juvenile Mystery, the PEN Center USA award for Children’s Literature, and the Judy Lopez Memorial Award.

NNEDI OKORAFOR is the author of multiple award-winning and New York Times bestsellers, including Death of the Author, the Binti trilogy, Who Fears Death, and Lagoon, currently in development at Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment. She has won every major prize in speculative fiction, including the World Fantasy, Nebula, and Eisner Awards; multiple Hugo Awards; and the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. Born in Cincinnati to Igbo Nigerian immigrant parents, she now resides in Phoenix, Arizona, with her daughter, Anyaugo.

NGHI VO is the author of the novels Siren Queen and The Chosen and the Beautiful, as well as the acclaimed novellas of the Singing Hills Cycle, which began with The Empress of Salt and Fortune. The series entries have been finalists for the Nebula Award, the Locus Award, and the Lambda Literary Award, and have won the Crawford Award, the I...