Marking Disability Pride month by revisiting my 2020 interview with Rebekah Taussig who discusses her memoir in essays (and current NEA Big Read title) Sitting Pretty The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body.
Author and 2021 National Humanities Medalist Amy Tan discusses “The Joy Luck Club,” her writing with its themes of family and identity, and her relationship with her mother.
Author and Library of Congress’s 2023-24 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Meg Medina wants to spark joy in young readers as they find themselves and others in books.
Novelist and poet Bushra Rehman celebrates the Pakistani American community of 1980s Corona, Queens, and the coming of age of a queer Muslim girl and budding writer in her novel "Roses in the Mouth of a Lion."
Author of the NEA Big Read title "Nothing to See Here" Kevin Wilson discusses the serious issues at the heart of this outrageous (and outrageously funny) novel.
Kelli Jo Ford (Cherokee) discusses her novel Crooked Hallelujah which gives us the stories of four generations of Cherokee women and the love, support, and conflict they share as they navigate their lives in and out of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma...
Sarah Smarsh discusses her book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, which is a 2022-2023 NEA Big Read title.
You may know Daniel K. Isaac as Ben Kim from the television series “Billions,” but he’s also a committed and talented actor in theater and an accomplished playwright. In this podcast, he talks about his career on the stage and the screen.
Peng Shepherd discusses her speculative mystery The Cartographers, her fascination with maps, her love of speculative fiction, and the challenges of writing “the second book.”
We're celebrating poetry in this week's podcast. The first Latino and non-academic Poet Laureate of Kansas (and National Council on the Arts member) Huascar Medina reads from and talks about his poetry, making Kansas his home as a Latino poet, his de...
This week, the podcast is divided into two parts with one subject—poetry. Part 1 is excerpts from my 2018 interview with poet Melissa Range while part 2 excerpts my 2021 interview with 2017-2019 US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. In this poetry-filled ...
Novelist Marjan Kamali talks about her recent novel The Stationery Shop-- a story that begins in 1953 in Iran and spans 60 years. We talk about Persian poetry and food, living on the hyphen between Iranian and American, and the juggling act of writin...
We’re marking Women’s history month by replaying my in-depth interview with the late Valerie Boyd who wrote the acclaimed “Wrapped in Rainbows: the Biography of Zora Neale Hurston.” In this podcast, Boyd discusses Hurston’s life and work, especially...
