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...

This week, we discuss McSweeney’s new quarterly issue: McSweeney’s 78: The Make Believers, featuring writers of the Vietnamese diaspora. We are joined by contributors and guest editors of the issue, Thi Bui and Vu Tran, as well as McSweeney’s Quarterly Editor Rita Bullwinkel. You can learn more about their work in the episode description below.

During the episode, Thi, Vu, and Rita mention upcoming events in celebration of this issue. You can learn more about these special events at the links below. We hope to see you at one of these!

Asian Art Museum | San Francisco | May 1 | 3:45 pm Natasha Reichle, Associate Curator of Southeast Asian Art, leads a special curator's choice discussion with McSweeney’s 78: The Make Believers co-guest editor Vu Tran and contributing author Doan Bui.

Tenderloin Museum | San Francisco | May 1 | 6:00 pm A block party in the heart of Little Saigon. Readings by Vu Tran and Doan Bui, plus a DJ set by Topazu.

University of Chicago | Chicago | May 15 | 5:00 pm Co-editors Vu Tran and Thi Bui will be joined by fellow contributor Isabelle Pelaud for a reading and celebration of the issue's publication.

This conversation originally took place April 7, 2025 and was recorded via Zoom. We hope you enjoy entering the Mind of a Writer.

AWM PODCAST NETWORK HOME

More about The Make Believers:

In McSweeney’s 78: The Make Believers (guest edited by Thi Bui and Vu Tran), ten writers of the Vietnamese diaspora write from the eclectic hodgepodge that is their shared imagination of what it means to be "Vietnamese." Packaged in a beautiful foil-stamped cigar box (with art by Bui on each and every surface), and including two booklets, one menu, and a glossary of broken Vietnamese, the work in this issue spans from highbrow to lowbrow, proper to naughty, logical to absurd, and painful to funny. Published on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, its contributors work across perspectives and multiple languages. In this completely singular, nothing-else-of-its-kind anthology, these artists write (and illustrate!) from a place of collective loss and joy.

Featuring work by: Doan Bui, Thi Bui, H'Rina DeTroy, Anna Moï, Hoài Huong Nguyen, Vaan Nguyen, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Bao Phi, Paul Tran, and Vu Tran. Order your copy of McSweeney's 78: The Make Believers here.

About our guests:

THI BUI is a writer and artist from Viet Nam, California, and New York, now planting roots in New Orleans. Best known for her graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do, she has also been a longtime educator in public high schools, a professor of comics, an organizer and artist-activist, an ambivalent sculptor and puppeteer, and a fledgling screenwriter. She received a Caldecott Honor as the illustrator of her first children’s book, A Different Pond, by Bao Phi.

VU TRAN is the author of Dragonfish and a forthcoming novel, Your Origins. His other writing has appeared in publications like The O. Henry Prize Stories 2007:...