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Gwen Thompkins

Home Featured Authors & Panelists Featured Participant Lineup 2025 Gwen Thompkins

A New Orleans native, Gwen Thompkins is a journalist and writer whose stories have been featured by NPR’s news magazines, NPR Music, Oxford American, the Library of Congress Recording Registry, The Massachusetts Review, and The New Yorker. Thompkins was the longtime senior editor of NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon and later NPR’s East Africa bureau chief. Following a fellowship at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, she returned to New Orleans as the executive producer and host of Music Inside Out. Currently, she is a PhD candidate in history at Tulane University and writing a book based on the Music Inside Out interviews. For a full archive of the program, go to: MusicInsideOut.org.

Schedule

10:00 am to 10:45 am
State Library, First Floor Seminar Center
Stomp Off, Let’s Go: The Early Years of Louis Armstrong
Ricky Riccardi with moderator Gwen Thompkins

1:00 pm to 1:45 pm
State Library, Fourth Floor
How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History from NPR Music
Alison Fensterstock and Gwen Thompkins with moderator Megan Holt

2:00 pm to 2:45 pm
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History from NPR Music

Drawn from NPR Music’s acclaimed, groundbreaking series Turning the Tables, the definitive book on the vital role of Women in Music—from Beyoncé to Odetta, Taylor Swift to Joan Baez, Joan Jett to Dolly Parton—featuring archival interviews, essays, photographs, and illustrations.

Turning the Tables, launched in 2017, has revolutionized recognition of female artists, whether it be in best album lists or in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History from NPR Music brings this impressive reshaping to the page and includes material from more than fifty years of NPR’s coverage plus newly commissioned work. A must-have for music fans, songwriters, feminist historians, and those interested in how artists think and work, including: 

  • Joan Baez talking about nonviolence as a musical principle in 1971
  • Dolly Parton’s favorite song and the story behind it 
  • Patti Smith describing art as her “jealous mistress” in 1974
  • Nina Simone, in 2001, explaining how she developed the edge in her voice as a tool against racism
  • Taylor Swift talking about when she had no idea if her musical career might work
  • Odetta on how shifting from classical music to folk allowed her to express her fury over Jim Crow

 This incomparable hardcover volume is a vital record of history destined to become a classic and a great gift for any music fan or creative thinker.