Boston Book Festival

This session explores how race, or more specifically how being nonwhite in America, has formed the identities and lives of our three memoirists. Sejal Shah, in her meditative memoir in essays, This Is One Way to Dance, explores how we are all marked by culture, language, family, and place. In her moving memoir, Say I’m Dead, E. Dolores Johnson tells the astonishing story of her black father and white mother’s flight from Indiana’s antimiscegenation laws to Buffalo, where they married in the 1940s and raised her and her siblings. Journalist Issac Bailey, author of My Brother Moochie and Why Didn’t We Riot? calls out the myth that whites where he lives, in Trumpland, support Trump because of economic distress rather than racism. Listen in to this powerful and timely set of conversations, hosted by Paris Alston, producer for Radio Boston at WBUR. Find the transcript for this session here: https://tinyurl.com/y6osqy4f

These three authors were launched from situations and families that were out of the ordinary. Poet, playwright, and memoirist Honor Moore, after having written a memoir about her extraordinary father, turns to examining her relationship with her mother in Our Revolution. This mother of nine lived among the poor with Moore’s father, the Archbishop of New York, was a published author and playwright, and died young of cancer while racing to finish a memoir. In My Captain America, Megan Margulies writes lovingly about her close and formative relationship with her grandfather, the man who created the superhero comic Captain America. And Mikel Jollett, frontman for the indie band Airborne Toxic Event, describes in Hollywood Park a harrowing childhood in a cult where he barely knew his parents until the day his mother arrived to rescue him and his brother. Richard Hoffman, author of the poetry collection Noon Until Night and the memoirs Half the House and Love & Fury, hosts this session. Find the transcript for thi

A novelist and essayist, a computer scientist, and a scholar of human development discuss their lives and intellectual development. Claire Messud is the beloved author of many works of fiction and criticism. In Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write, she examines her lived life and her literary life--which are bound together inextricably. Rana El Kaliouby talks about her personal journey and her efforts to humanize artificial intelligence by teaching machines to measure and interpret human emotions in Girl Decoded. And finally, the great Howard Gardner, originator of the theory of multiple intelligences, discusses his intellectual development in A Synthesizing Mind. Darrin McMahon, author of Divine Fury: A History of Genius, is the apt and able host of this revelatory session. Find the transcript for this event here: https://tinyurl.com/y2jgb85b