This week in honor of Halloween, we discuss the use of religion and spirituality in horror writing. We are joined by leading horror writers Tananarive Due, Juan Martinez, and Matt Ruff. This conversation originally took place October 10, 2025 and was recorded live at the University of Chicago Divinity School. We hope you enjoy entering the Mind of a Writer.

This episode is presented in conjunction with the American Writers Museum’s forthcoming exhibit American Prophets: Writers, Religion, and Culture. This exhibit and programming series explores the profound ways writing reflects and influences our understanding of religion. American Prophets opens November 21, 2025.

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About the authors:

TANANARIVE DUE is an award-winning author who teaches Black Horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA. A leading voice in Black speculative fiction for more than 20 years, Due has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award, and her writing has been included in best-of-the-year anthologies. Her books include The Reformatory (winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Chautauqua Prize, Bram Stoker Award, Shirley Jackson Award, World Fantasy Award, and a New York Times Notable Book), The Wishing Pool and Other Stories, Ghost Summer: Stories, My Soul to Keep, and The Good House. She and her late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, co-authored Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights.

She was an executive producer on Shudder’s groundbreaking documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. She and her husband/collaborator, Steven Barnes, wrote “A Small Town” for Season 2 of Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone on Paramount Plus, and two segments of Shudder’s anthology film Horror Noire. They also co-wrote their Black Horror graphic novel The Keeper, illustrated by Marco Finnegan. Due and Barnes co-host a podcast, “Lifewriting: Write for Your Life!” She and her husband live with their son, Jason.

JUAN MARTINEZ is a writer and an associate professor of English at Northwestern University. He is the author of the horror novel Extended Stay (University of Arizona Press / Camino del Sol, 2023) and of the story collection Best Worst American (Small Beer Press, 2017). He is also the fiction editor for Jackleg Press. Juan lives with his family near Chicago.

MATT RUFF is the award-winning author of eight novels, including Fool on the Hill, Set This House in Order, Bad Monkeys, The Mirage, 88 Names, and the bestselling Lovecraft Country, which was adapted as an HBO series. His most recent book is The Destroyer of Worlds: A Return to Lovecraft Country.

This week, religious scholar Paul Elie discusses his latest book The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s. This enthralling group portrait brings to life a moment when popular culture became the site of religious strife—strife that set the stage for some of the most salient political and cultural clashes of our day. Elie is interviewed by Emily D. Crews, the Executive Director of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School. This conversation originally took place May 30, 2025 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

This episode is presented in conjunction with the American Writers Museum’s forthcoming exhibit American Prophets: Writers, Religion, and Culture. This exhibit and programming series explores the profound ways writing reflects and influences our understanding of religion. American Prophets opens November 21, 2025.

We hope you enjoy entering the Mind of a Writer.

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More about The Last Supper:

Circa 1980, tradition and authority are in the ascendant, both in Catholicism (via Pope John Paul II) and in American civic life (through the Moral Majority and the so-called televangelists). But the public is deeply divided on issues of body and soul, devotion and desire.

Enter the figures Paul Elie calls "crypto-religious." Here is Leonard Cohen writing "Hallelujah" on his knees in a Times Square hotel room; Andy Warhol adapting Leonardo's The Last Supper in response to the AIDS pandemic; Prince making the cross and altar into "signs o' the times." Through Toni Morrison, spirits speak from the grave; Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen deepen the tent-revival intensity of their work; Wim Wenders offers an angel's-eye view of Berlin; U2, the Neville Brothers, and Sinéad O’Connor reckon with their Christian roots in music of mystic yearning. And Martin Scorsese overcomes fundamentalist ire to make The Last Temptation of Christ—a struggle that anticipates Salman Rushdie's struggle with Islam in The Satanic Verses.

In Elie's acclaimed first book, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Catholic writers ventured out into the wilds of postwar America; in this book, creative figures who were raised religious go to the margins of conventional belief, calling forth controversy. Episodes such as the boycott sparked by Madonna's "Like a Prayer" video and the tearing-up of Andres Serrano's Piss Christ in Congress are early skirmishes in the culture wars—but here the creators (not the politicians) are the protagonists, and the work they make speaks to conflicts that remain unsettled.

The Last Supper explores the bold and unexpected forms an encounter with belief can take. It traces the beginnings of our postsecular age, in which religion is at once surging and in decline. Through a propulsive narrative, it reveals the crypto-religious imagination as complex, credible, daring, and vividly recognizable.

PAUL ELIE is the author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own (2003) and Reinventing Bach (2012), both National Book Critics Circle Award finalists. He is a senior fellow in Georgetown University's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, and a regular contributor to The New Yorker. He lives in Brooklyn.

This week, screenwriter and author Nicholas Meyer discusses his latest mystery novel Sherlock Holmes and the Real Thing. In this latest book, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson delve into the world of art forgery. Meyer is interviewed by Allison Sansone, Director of Programs at the American Writers Museum.

This conversation originally took place September 18, 2025 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum. We hope you enjoy entering the Mind of a Writer.

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More about Sherlock Holmes and the Real Thing:

London, 189–: The great city is brought to a standstill by a series of blizzards and Sherlock Holmes is bored to distraction. It would take a miracle to bring a case to the detective’s door...

What arrives is not promising: a landlady who complains her artist tenant is behind on rent. Not exactly the miracle for which Holmes was hoping. But, next thing you know, there are several corpses and Sherlock Holmes and his biographer, John H. Watson, MD, find themselves drawn into one of the most bizarre cases of the great detective’s career. And into the cutthroat big business of Art, where chicanery and mendacity (and cut throats) proliferate.

What makes a work of art worth killing for? Is it the artist, his mistress, his dealer, or his blackmailer? The cast of characters is large. But are they perpetrators, accomplices, or victims? And just who is Juliet Packwood, with whom Watson has become infatuated?

Oh, and there’s one other problem: Is this a genuine Holmes case or a clever forgery? Is this the real thing?

If you can’t tell the difference, what is the difference?

About Nicholas Meyer:

NICHOLAS MEYER is the "editor" of several Watson manuscripts, including The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, which spent forty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. His screenplay of the film received an Oscar nomination. His film credits include writing and directing Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. He wrote and directed Time After Time, co-created Medici: Masters of Florence, and directed The Day After, about nuclear war that attracted the largest audience ever for a television movie. A native of New York City, he lives in Santa Monica, California.