Conversations from the Sun Valley Writers' Conference - 2021
Author Daniel James Brown
Author Daniel James Brown talks about his latest book, “Facing the Mountain.”
Daniel James Brown, the best-selling author of “The Boys in the Boat,” talks about his newest book, “Facing the Mountain,” which honors the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a segregated unit of Japanese-Americans who fought in World War II despite the fact that many of their families were incarcerated in the United States simply for being of Japanese descent.
Public Historian Tom Ikeda
Tom Ikeda talks with Marcia Franklin about his nonprofit, Densho.
Tom Ikeda, who provided critical research for Daniel James Brown’s book “Facing the Mountain,” discusses his Seattle-based non-profit, Densho. It preserves the stories of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. Ikeda’s parents and grandparents were imprisoned in the Minidoka camp in Idaho.
Author Catherine Grace Katz
Catherine Grace Katz discusses her book, “The Daughters of Yalta.”
Catherine Grace Katz talks with Marcia about “The Daughters of Yalta,” her first book. In it, she illuminates the contributions that Anna Roosevelt, Sarah Churchill and Kathleen Harriman made during the seminal 1945 meeting of world leaders at Yalta, which included their fathers, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Averell Harriman.
Author Sarah Broom
Sarah Broom discusses her award-winning memoir, “The Yellow House.”
Sarah Broom unpacks her National Book Award-winning memoir, “The Yellow House,” which chronicles the devastating effects that decades of neglect and bureaucratic amnesia have had on her childhood neighborhood of New Orleans East. The book also pays homage to the house she and her 11 siblings grew up in, which was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina, but which lives on in Broom’s prose.
Author Susan Orlean
New Yorker writer Susan Orlean discusses her works and writing style.
Longtime New Yorker writer and author Susan Orlean rounds out the month with a lively chat with Franklin about her writing style and her work, including hundreds of magazine articles, “The Library Book,” and an upcoming memoir.
Novelist Tayari Jones
Tayari Jones talks about her novel, “An American Marriage.”
Novelist Tayari Jones describes the process of writing “An American Marriage,” a novel that chronicles the trajectory of a marriage when one of the spouses is wrongfully convicted of a crime. Jones talks with Marcia about the serendipity that led to the book’s characters, as well as how her writing is informed by the experiences of her parents, who were both active in the civil rights movement.