The Second Draft: From History to Narrative Nonfiction, Journalists on Reporting the Past
Date & Time:
Much of today’s best long-form nonfiction — books, magazines, podcasts, documentaries and more — comes from the pages of history, from the recent to the long-ago past.
Joanna Hernandez, director of diversity initiatives at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, will lead a panel discussion at the school in Midtown Manhattan this Thursday featuring experienced journalists and authors talking about the challenges, opportunities, and earning potential for writers. She will also discuss her own work on a book that combines memoir with a multigenerational cultural history of her Puerto Rican family’s immigration and struggles to assiminlate.
Other panelists include:
Paul Moses, a longtime New York City newspaper reporter who is now a Brooklyn College journalism professor, will talk about his award-winning books The Saint and the Sultan: The Crusades, Islam and Francis of Assisi’s Mission of Peace (Doubleday 2009) and An Unlikely Union: The Love-Hate Story of New York’s Irish and Italians (NYU Press 2015).
Eileen Markey, a freelance journalist, will discuss her new book is A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura (Nation Books 2016), about of the nuns murdered by US-backed militia in El Salvador in 1980. Her journalism has been published in The New York Times, City Limits, The New York Daily News, New York Magazine, The Village Voice, The Wall Street Journal, Newsday and elsewhere.
Barbara Gray, formerly the chief editorial librarian at The New York Times and now head of the Research Center and research education for reporters at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, will go over her research strategies and tools she using in her book-in-progress about America’s most notorious woman criminal in the late 19th century.
Cara Bedick, senior editor at Touchstone, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, will speak to the editorial process with emphasis on narrative nonfiction, including Run the World: My 3,500-Mile Journey Through Running Cultures Around the Globe by Becky Wade (William Morrow 2016) and the upcoming Awkward: The Science of Why We’re Socially Awkward and Why That’s Awesome (William Morrow 2017).