Stu Levitan welcomes award-winning and bestselling author Andrew Maraniss for a special Pride month conversation about Glenn Burke, who was a rising young star in Major League Baseball in the late seventies until he was effectively run out of the game because he was gay. The book is Singled Out: The True Story of Glenn Burke, from the good people at Philomel Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

Andrew is that rarest of authors – not just a true son of Madison, but a grandson of Madison, born right here in 1970 to Linda and David Maraniss, Linda an environmentalist and David of course also being an award-winning and bestselling author and the son of Mary Maraniss, a book editor at the UW Press, and her husband Elliott, the subject of David’s most recent book and during the very period that Andrew writes about, my editor at the Capital Times.

This is Andrew’s third book examining the intersection of sports and society, and our third conversation, following Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the collision of race and sports in the south in 2015 and Games of Deception: The True Story of the First U.S. Olympic Basketball Team at the 1936 Olympics in Hitler's Germany in 2019. He received the Lillian Smith Book Award and the lone Special Recognition honor at the RFK Book Awards for Strong Inside and the Sydney Taylor Honor Award for Games of Deception. He is also a Visiting Author at Vanderbilt University Athletics and a contributor to ESPN’s TheUndefeated.com.

It is a pleasure to welcome back to Madison BookBeat, Andrew Maraniss.