Donna Seaman is the Editor for Adult Books at Booklist, a member of the Content Leadership Team for the American Writers Museum, and a recipient of the James Friend Memorial Award for Literary Criticism and the Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award. Seaman has written for the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications. She has been a writer-in-residence for Columbia College Chicago and has taught at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. Seaman created the anthology In Our Nature: Stories of Wildness; her author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air: Conversations about Books, and she is the author of Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists. Seaman lives in Chicago.

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Favorite writing memory: My earliest writing memory, and so perhaps my favorite, goes all the way back to elementary school, maybe first grade? Second? I can't recall. But I was sitting in class, grasping a pencil and printing the word "island" on lined paper, and  suddenly I saw that it had two words inside it, "is" and "land." And this thrilled me. I wrote those down, too, though that wasn't part of the assignment, and I started thinking about how you could use them together in a sentence. I've loved the word "island" ever since.

 

 

Favorite book in high school:  My favorite book in high school? That's a tough question. Then, as now, I was forever reading. And often over my head. But if I have to choose one, I will admit to being utterly obsessed with Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five.