In this episode of the Watchung Booksellers Podcast, Kate Zernike and Rachel Swarns talk about their professions as journalists and authors, and how they developed their long-form articles into books.
Rachel L. Swarns is a journalism professor at New York University and a contributing writer for The New York Times. She is the author of The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church and American TapestryThe Story of the Black, White, and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama, and a co-author of Unseen. Her work has been recognized and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Biographers International Organization, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the MacDowell artist residency program, and others.
Kate Zernike has been a reporter for The New York Times since 2000. She was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for stories about al-Qaeda before and after the 9/11 terror attacks. She was previously a reporter for The Boston Globe, where she broke the story of MIT’s admission that it had discriminated against women on its faculty, on which The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science is based. The daughter and granddaughter of scientists, she is a graduate of Trinity College at the University of Toronto and the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.
Resources:
Isabel Wilkerson interviewing to look for ‘the onion’
Michelle Obama Genealogy NY Times Piece
The Washington Post Georgetown’s History with Slavery
Books:
A full list of the books and authors mentioned in this episode is available here.
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The Watchung Booksellers Podcast is produced by Kathryn Counsell and Marni Jessup and is recorded at Watchung Booksellers in Montclair, NJ.
The show is edited by Kathryn Counsell.
Original music is composed and performed by Violet Mujica.
Art & design and social media by Evelyn Moulton. Research and show notes by Caroline Shurtleff.
Thanks to all the staff at Watchung Booksellers and The Kids’ Room!
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