Please join us for a Q&A with Zayd Ayers Dohrn, author of Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young. Zayd will be stopping by from June 1 through June 3.
Zayd Ayers Dohrn was born underground and raised in New York City. His new book DANGEROUS, DIRTY, VIOLENT, AND YOUNG was published on May 19, 2026. It was just named a New York Times “Editor’s Choice” and one of the “Best Books of 2026” in The New Yorker. It was recently featured as a BookBrowse First Impressions book and received rave reviews from our members.
Zayd’s plays have been produced across the country and internationally. His punk/hip-hop musical REVOLUTION(S), featuring the music of Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Tom Morello, recently had a twice sold-out run at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. His Crooked Media podcast MOTHER COUNTRY RADICALS reached Top 10 on Apple Podcasts and won the duPont-Columbia Journalism Award and the Prize for “Best Audio Storytelling” at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Zayd holds degrees from Brown, BU, Columbia, and NYU, and was a Lila Acheson Wallace Fellow at Juilliard. He is the Daniel Hale Williams Professor and Director of the MFA in Writing for the Screen + Stage at Northwestern University.
Please join me in welcoming Zayd to the BookBrowse Community Forum. As a reminder, to reply to an existing comment, click the grey Reply on the right side under the comment. To ask a new question, click the blue Reply button a little lower down.
Zayd: Thank you so much for agreeing to chat with us. Is there anything you’d like to add to the bio above before we jump into the Q&A?
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Thanks, Kim. Nothing much to add to the bio, though I’m happy to follow up if folks have questions. Excited to talk to the BookBrowse community.
I received an advanced copy of your book which I truly enjoyed. Did you find writing it cathartic. During your research and interviews, what or who surprised you the most. What’s your next project. Perhaps a play or a movie adaptation of your book.
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Thanks, Jill. I’m glad you enjoyed it. It was cathartic in the sense that it answered a lot of questions I always had about my family, and filled in the gaps about some of the secrets from my childhood.
One of the biggest surprises for me was finding out my parents had kept participating in violent revolutionary actions after I was born. In the book, I tell the story of a camping trip we took to West Virginia when I was a little kid—my first time learning to put up a tent, to cook food on an outdoor stove. It was only in a research for the book I realized we were actually there to case a federal prison for an attempted jail break for one of my parents’ comrades.
I have a couple new projects in the works. Yes, a potential film/TV adaptation of the book, and also a film adaptation of a short story I wrote for Apple TV.
Good morning, Zayd! Thanks again for being here!
I just finished listening to your podcast, Mother Country Radicals last night. Based on some of the content, it seemed like that project came before Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young. Is that safe to say? If so, what made you decide to adapt your research into print form?
The two share a lot of content, but not everything; for example, I think the book talks more about how your parents’ activities impacted you and your brothers (particularly Chesa). How did you decide what to include and what to exclude?
The podcast came first. I started working on it during the pandemic, just as a way to record some of the voices of the people, including my parents, involved in the radical undergrounds of the 1960s and 1970s. I thought that would be the end of the project.
But after the podcast came out, I learned a lot more: I finally got my hands on 7000 pages of classified FBI files about my mom, from when she was on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List. Old friends reached out to me, wanting to talk about stories they hadn’t shared before. Others sent me letters written by my mom during my childhood, that revealed a whole new side of her inner life as a young mother who was also living as a fugitive.
I realized there was a lot more to say about my childhood memories, and about my parents’ journey from ordinary suburban kids to violent revolutionaries, and the book grew out of my need to tell that more personal side of our family story.
Thanks for the prompt response. Grew up outside of Chicago, so your parents and the events they were involved in are familiar to me. Your childhood was unique to say the least. How do you plan to explain it to your daughter as she gets older. In light of current times, do you think we have made any progress towards your parents’ vision of an egalitarian world.
I think the book is my attempt to explain our family history to my daughters, and to people of their generation (Gen Z) who might not remember the radical resistance moveemnts of the 60s and 70s.
Our current moment feels, in many ways, like a backlash to the progress of the 60s. A backlash against feminism and queer rights and the civil rights movement (the Supreme Court, of course, just overturned the Voting Rights Act—the central accomplishment of that era). So it’s certainly a moment when progress feels like it’s under threat.
That said, looking at the history of the resistance movements of the 60s and 70s gives me hope. Because one lesson you can draw from the history is that times of rising authoritarianism and racism and misogyny will prompt young people to fight back in order to try to build a better future.
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And to follow up on Jill’s questions, do your parents ever get discouraged that we haven’t made more progress?
I have to admit I literally cried when Obama got elected, thinking, progress at last! only to become super sad that the pendulum has swung back the other way.
Yes, the pendulum always swings. I don’t think we should fool ourselves into thinking any progress is permanent. There will always be forces in this country fighting to reassert white supremacy and traditional patriarchy. But there will also always be people fighting to make progress. The struggle continues. But that doesn’t mean it’s pointless. In fact, for all our pessimism in this current moment, I think the history of the 1960s and 70s shows that, in fact, things have been worse. Racism was worse. Police violence was worse. Sexism was worse. And we have made progress since then. And we can continue to make progress. But it will always be a struggle.
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Thank you for your encouraging words! I was born in 1961, so much of what you write about was familiar to me. I just want to say how much I appreciate this book from the standpoint that it shed some light on my own mother’s opinions. I was a typical know-it-all teenager in the 1970s, and admired the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers without really knowing much about them. I looked down on my mother’s fear of Black people and her concern about my liberal tendencies.
How did you convince your parents to tell their stories, and how did the creation process impact your relationships with them (during interviews, after they heard the podcast, after they read the book)?
Your book has been paired in some reviews with “The Hill,” by Harriet Clark. It is a fictionalized version of her childhood visits to prison to see her mother, also a member of the Weather Underground, who was jailed for a botched robbery that led to the murder of a security guard. Have you read it and though it is fiction, does it ring true for you.
Thanks, Kim. I’m glad you enjoyed the book.
In fact, despite my parents’ history of secrecy, it wasn’t too hard to convince them to tell their stories. I think they felt that I, as their son, had a right to know about my family history. Of course, we had some ground rules: I told them that if there was something I asked that they didn’t want to talk about, they could just stay that it was off limits. But I think in three years of interviews, they only invoked that privilege twice, both times to decline to talk about crimes that could have implicated friends or former comrades. Any questions that were just about them, they were willing to answer.
In terms of how it impacted our relationship, I would say we remain close. Like most adults, I’m still navigating my relationship with my parents, and of course telling our family story meant revisiting some painful memories and difficult times from my childhood. But I’m grateful that they trusted me to tell their stories.
It’s a pretty big leap going from something to do during the pandemic to a full-blown podcast. Had you already been working on similar projects, or was this something new? How did it go from idea to reality? And once that was completed, how did you go about getting the book published?
Yes, Harriet and I met for the first time just a few weeks ago, when the New York Times interviewed us together about our books. I really liked “The Hill.” It’s Harriet’s story of growing up with her mother in prison, and it certainly rang true for me, both as someone whose mom was also locked up when I was a child, and as someone whose adopted brother’s parents did decades behind bars.
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On that recommendation, I will add it to my reading queue. Do you have any other recommendations or authors that you like generally.
The podcast, Mother Country Radicals, really did start just as recorded zoom conversations with my parents. But you’re right, Kim, it was a big leap to a full-blown narrative podcast. Once I realized how much important historical material was in those interviews, I started thinking of building it into an audio documentary. I knew nothing about how to make a podcast, but Crooked Media (of Pod Save America fame) was interested in the project, and they helped bring together a team of producers, editors, sound designers, etc. to get that job done.
After the podcast came out, and once it found an audience, I had several people approach me and ask me if I wanted to develop it as a book. I wrote a proposal, and my agent and I sent it out, and that’s how we found a publisher (W.W. Norton ended up publishing the book).
So it sounds like you started the research as a result of the Zoom calls with your parents, uncovered a lot of important material, and that sparked your project.
Where/how did you find the recordings of your mom that you played during the podcast? What was it like hearing your mom’s voice from all those years ago?
Did you continue to uncover information about the era and your parents (and your parents’ associates) after the podcast, or was your research basically done after it was aired?