The Blood-Jet Writing Hour, a Writing Podcast

Meredith Talusan is an award-winning journalist and author. She has written features, essays, and opinion pieces for many publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, VICE, Matter, Backchannel, The Nation, and the American Prospect. She has contributed to several books including the New York Times Bestselling Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture edited by Roxane Gay. Her memoir, Fairest, is forthcoming from Viking / Penguin Random House.

Marianne Chan is the author of ALL HEATHENS. She grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan. Her poems have appeared in West Branch, The Journal, Poetry Northwest, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, Carve Magazine, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She serves as poetry editor at Split Lip Magazine.

Kazumi Chin's first poetry collection, Having a Coke with Godzilla, was published in 2017 by Sibling Rivalry Press. Their most recent work can be found in Underblong, AAWW's the Margins, and in AALR's Book of Curses. They are the co-organizer and host of Kearny Street Workshop's key reading series and currently a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at UC Davis. Michelle Lin is a poet, community arts organizer, and author of A House Made of Water from Sibling Rivalry Press. She is a Kundiman fellow, co-organizer for Kearny Street Workshop's reading series, and fundraising manager for RYSE Center in Richmond, California, a social justice youth center. You can follow her @sadwitheyebrows.

New York Times–bestselling author Erin Entrada Kelly was awarded the Newbery Medal for Hello, Universe.  Her debut novel, Blackbird Fly, was a Kirkus Best Book, a School Library Journal Best Book, an ALSC Notable Book, and an Asian/Pacific American Literature Honor Book. She is also the author of The Land of Forgotten Girls, winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and You Go First, a New York Times bestseller, Spring 2018 Indie Next Pick, Kirkus Reviews Best Book, and School Library Journal Best Book.  Her book, Lalani and the Distant Sea, was released in September 2019.  She grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and now lives in Delaware. www.erinentradakelly.com

Episode #130: Sara Borjas, Poet and Author of Heart Like A Window, Mouth Like A Cliff by The Blood-Jet Writing Hour, a Writing Podcast

MT Vallarta is a poet and Ph.D. candidate in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside, where they study feminist theory, queer theory, and Filipinx poetics. Their work is published in Nat. Brut, Rabbit Catastrophe Press, Broadly, Apogee Journal, Weird Sister, TAYO Literary Magazine, and others. They were raised and live in Los Angeles, CA.

Episode #128: Victor LaValle, writer and co-editor of A PEOPLE'S FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES! Victor LaValle is the author of the short story collection Slapboxing with Jesus, four novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, and The Changeling and two novellas, Lucretia and the Kroons and The Ballad of Black Tom. He is also the creator and writer of a comic book Victor LaValle's DESTROYER. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Whiting Writers' Award, a United States Artists Ford Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Shirley Jackson Award, an American Book Award, and the key to Southeast Queens. He was raised in Queens, New York. He now lives in Washington Heights with his wife and kids. He teaches at Columbia University. He can be kind of hard to reach, but he still loves you. *** Thank you to our sponsor, Libro.FM!  Support your favorite independent bookstore and purchase your audiobooks from Libro.FM.  If you use the code WRITINGHOUR, you'll get three audiobooks for the price of a one-month, $14.99 membership.

We're kicking off National Poetry Month a few days early with an episode with Erika Ayón!  Rachelle and Erika talk about Los Angeles, the color and fruit orange, and migration.  Tune in! Erika Ayón emigrated from Mexico when she was five years old and grew up in South Central, Los Angeles. She attended UCLA and graduated with a B.A. in English. In 2009 she was selected as a PEN Emerging Voices Fellow. In 2014 her poem “Hibiscus Skies,” was selected as a top ten poem from the Poetry in the Windows VI project sponsored by the Arroyo Arts Collective. Erika has taught poetry to middle and high school students across Los Angeles. She was a 2016-2017 Community Literature Initiative Scholar. Her debut collection of poetry Orange Lady was published by World Stage Press in March 2018. Available at http://www.worldstagepress.org/product/orange-lady. Erika currently resides in the San Fernando Valley where she lives with her husband and two cats.

Las Peregrinas was an idea first birthed by Yaccaira Salvatierra and co-organized with Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo. They wanted California women's voices to be in conversation with other border states and communities as a way to share and heal. Each of the four peregrinas honors her antepasados and the border in her poetry and together they share a reverence for those who have gone before them. Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, a first-generation Chicana, is the author of Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications 2016). A former Steinbeck Fellow, Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner and Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grantee, she's received residencies from Hedgebrook, Ragdale, National Parks Arts Foundation and Poetry Foundation. Her work is published in Acentos Review, CALYX, crazyhorse, and American Poetry Review among others. A dramatization of her poem "Our Lady of the Water Gallons," directed by Jesús Salvador Treviño, can be viewed at latinopia.com. She is a cofounder of Women Who Submit and a member of Macondo Writers' Workshop. Marisol Baca is the author of Tremor (Three Mile Harbor Press). She has been published in Narrative Northeast, Riverlit, Shadowed: An Anthology of Women Writers, Acentos Review, among other publications. Marisol won the Andres Montoya poetry scholarship prize. She received her Master of Fine Arts from Cornell University where she won the Robert Chasen poetry award for her poem, Revelato. Currently, Marisol is an English professor at Fresno City College. Yaccaira Salvatierra's poems have appeared in Huizache, Diálogo, Puerto del Sol, and Rattleamong others. She is a VONA alumna, the recipient of the Dorrit Sibley Award for achievement in poetry, and the 2015 winner of the Puerto del Sol Poetry Prize. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net. An educator and art instructor, she lives in San José, California with her two sons. Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley borderlands to formerly undocumented Mexican immigrants. Her work has recently appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day feature, Buzzfeed Reader, Pinwheel, Epiphany, Southern Indiana Review, Apogee, Poor Claudia, PBS Newshour and elsewhere. She is the author of the collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series, 2017) and is currently pursuing her doctorate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she is raising her son with the help of a loyal dog.

Episode #125 - We're rebooting the podcast w/ new podcast producer and host, Muriel Leung!

Episode #124 - Angela Garbes, author of LIKE A MOTHER

Episode #123: John Jennings, illustrator and co-adaptor of Octavia Butler's KINDRED John Jennings is Professor, Media and Cultural Studies, University of California, Riverside. His work centers around intersectional narratives regarding identity politics and popular media. Jennings is co-editor of the Eisner Award-winning essay collection The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art and co-founder/organizer of The Schomburg Center's Black Comic Book Festival in Harlem. He is co-founder and organizer of the MLK NorCal's Black Comix Arts Festival in San Francisco and also SOL-CON: The Brown and Black Comix Expo at the Ohio State University. Jennings sits on the editorial advisory boards for The Black Scholar and the new Ohio State Press imprint New Suns: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Speculative.

Lilliam Rivera is an award-winning writer and author of The Education of Margot Sanchez, a contemporary young adult novel forthcoming from Simon & Schuster on February 21, 2017. She is a 2016 Pushcart Prize winner and a 2015 Clarion alumni with a Leonard Pung Memorial Scholarship. She has been awarded fellowships from PEN Center USA, A Room Of Her Own Foundation, and received a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. Her short story "Death Defiant Bomba" received honorable mention in Bellevue Literary Review's 2014 Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, selected by author Nathan Englander. Lilliam was also a finalist for AWP's 2014 WC&C Scholarship Competition.

Episode #121 -Jade Chang, author of THE WANGS VS. THE WORLD

Episode #120: Writers and poets, Lauren Lola, Jane Wong and Tamiko Beyer share quotations and poems of resistance and refusal.

Episode #119 - Ramzi Fawaz, author of NEW MUTANTS

Episode #118 with poet Angela Peñaredondo Born in Iloilo City, Philippines, Angela Peñaredondo is a Filipinx poet and artist (on other days, she identifies as a usual ghost, comet or part-time animal) . Her first full-length book, All Things Lose Thousands of Times, is the winner of the Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize. She is author of the chapbook, Maroon (Jamii Publications). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in AAWW's The Margins, Four Way Review, Cream City Review, Southern Humanities Review, Dusie and elsewhere. She is a VONA/Voices of our Nations Art fellow as well as a recipient of a University of California Institute for Research in the Arts Grant, Gluck Program of the Arts Fellowship, Naropa University's Zora Neal Hurston Award, Squaw Valley Writers Fellowship and Fishtrap Fellowship. She has received scholarships from Tin House, Split This Rock, Dzanc Books International Literary Program and others. She resides in Southern California, drifiting between the deserts, beaches, lowly cities and socially engineered suburbs.

Episode #117: Salt and Bone - An Interview with Muriel Leung and Grace Shuyi Liew

Episode #116! An interview with Stephanie Barbé Hammer, author of HOW FORMAL? and THE PUPPET TURNERS OF NARROW INTERIOR. Intro music by T. Fowler.

Yumi Sakugawa is a comic book artist and illustrator based in Southern California. A graduate of the fine art program of University of California, Los Angeles, Yumi is a regular comic contributor for The Rumpus and Wonderhowto. Her illustrations and comics have been featured on Buzzfeed, Lifehacker, PAPERMAG, Apartment Therapy and all over Tumblr. Her short comic story "Mundane Fortunes for the Next Ten Billion Years" was selected as Notable Comics of 2012 by the Best American Comics anthology editors. She is the author of I THINK I AM IN FRIEND-LOVE WITH YOU and YOUR ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO BECOMING ONE WITH THE UNIVERSE. Visit her on the web at www.yumisakugawa.com.

Episode #113! Featuring an interview with W. Todd Kaneko, author of DEAD WRESTLER ELEGIES.

Many years ago, on a distant star, a small boy was born. His home was one of intellectuals, artists, poets, and storytellers. The boy became schooled in the arts. Such faith he held in them that they granted him great power. With the arts he could move worlds and open minds. One day a traveller from the future appeared to the people of the star and proclaimed, "There is no future in art." Disillusioned and distraught, the society fell apart. Creativity disappeared and was replaced by economics and politics. The boy got a real job. It was laborious and lacked creativity. He did not remember the past - no one could. But no matter how bleak, he had a future. One day the boy, now a man, was fired and everything came back to him. He remembered the arts. He is rebuilding his power and is coming to restore the creative world again.

Episode #111! Featuring an interview with MariNaomi, author and illustrator of DRAGON'S BREATH and KISS AND TELL.

Episode #110! Featuring an interview with Oliver de la Paz, author of POST SUBJECT, and a review by David Campos of Sheryl Luna's SEVEN!

Episode #108! TBJ contributor, Muriel Leung interviews Sally Wen Mao, author of MAD HONEY SYMPOSIUM! Sally Wen Mao is the author of Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014), which is the winner of the 2012 Kinereth Gensler Award and a Publishers Weekly anticipated pick of spring 2014. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2013 and is published or forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Third Coast, and West Branch, among others. The recipient of fellowships and scholarships from Kundiman, 826 Valencia, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and Saltonstall Arts Colony, she holds an M.F.A. from Cornell University. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Episode #107! Featuring an interview with Andy Fitch, editor of 60 MORNING TALKS, and a review by David Campos of Matthew Zapruder's SUN BEAR! Music by El Amparito and Vic Chesnutt ("Flirted With You All My Life.") Andy Fitch's most recent book is Sixty Morning Talks. Ugly Duckling soon will release his Sixty Morning Walks and Sixty Morning Wlaks. With Cristiana Baik, he is currently assembling the Letter Machine Book of Interviews. He has collaborative books forthcoming from 1913 and Subito. He edits Essay Press and teaches in the University of Wyoming's MFA program. *** Matthew Zapruder is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon 2010), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Sun Bear (Copper Canyon, 2014), as well as a book of prose, Why Poetry, forthcoming from Ecco Press in 2015. He is also co-translator from Romanian, along with historian Radu Ioanid, of Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems of Eugen Jebeleanu (Coffee House Press, 2007). His poems, essays and translations have appeared in many publications, including Tin House, Paris Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Bomb, Slate, Poetry, and The Believer. He has received a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, a William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship in Marfa, TX. An Assistant Professor in the St. Mary's College of California MFA program and English Department, he is also Editor-at-Large at Wave Books. He lives in Oakland, CA.

Born in Kobe, Japan to a Japanese mother and a French Canadian-American father, Mari L'Esperance is the author of The Darkened Temple (awarded a Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and published in September 2008 by the University of Nebraska Press) and an earlier collection Begin Here (awarded a Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press Chapbook Prize). Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine, co-edited with Tomás Q. Morín, was published by Prairie Lights Books in May 2013. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and recipient of awards from the New York Times, New York University, Hedgebrook, and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, L'Esperance lives in the Los Angeles area.

Featuring Megan Volpert and anthology contributors Bonnie Kaplan and Douglas Ray. Music by El Amparito. *** Megan Volpert is the author of five books on communication and popular culture, most notably about Andy Warhol. She has been teaching high school English in Atlanta for the better part of a decade, is currently serving as her school's Teacher of the Year, and edited the American Library Association-honored anthology, This assignment is so gay: LGBTIQ Poets on the Art of Teaching.

Feliz Lucia Molina was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. A Kundiman and MacDowell Colony Fellow, she holds a BA from Naropa University, an MFA from Brown University, and is a PhD candidate at the European Graduate School. She is an editor at Continent and lives in Los Angeles. UNDERCASTLE (Magic Helicopter Press, 2013) is her first book.

Michelle Chan Brown's Double Agent was the winner of the 2011 Kore First Book Award, judged by Bhanu Kapil. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Cimarron Review, Linebreak, The Missouri Review, Quarterly West, Sycamore Review, Witness and others. A Kundiman fellow, Michelle received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she was a Rackham Fellow. She was a Tennessee Williams scholar at the Sewanee Writers' Conference and received scholarships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Wesleyan Writers' Conference. Her chapbook, The Clever Decoys, is available from LATR Editions. She lives with her husband, the musician Paul Erik Lipp, in Washington DC, where she teaches, writes, and edits Drunken Boat.

Bushra Rehman, originally from Corona, Queens, is the author of Corona (Sibling Rivalry Press) and co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (Seal Press, 2002). Rebecca Walker has called Colonize This! “a must for young women of color searching for themselves within contemporary feminist/womanist discourse, and anyone else who wants to get down with the fierceness of fly, intellectual divas of color.” Colonize This! was included in Ms. Magazine's “100 Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time.” Her writing has also been featured on BBC Radio 4, WNYC, and KPFA and in The New York Times, India Currents, Crab Orchard Review, Sepia Mutiny, Color Lines, The Feminist Wire and Mizna: Prose, Poetry and Art Exploring Arab America.

Episode #101! Featuring Kamilah Aisha Moon and music by El Amparito. Kamilah Aisha Moon is the author of She Has A Name (Four Way Books, 2013). A recipient of fellowships to the Cave Canem Foundation, the Prague Summer Writing Institute, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and the Vermont Studio Center, Moon's work has been featured in several journals and anthologies, including Harvard Review, jubilat,Sou'wester, Oxford American, Lumina, Callaloo, Essence, Bloom, Gathering Ground, The Ringing Ear and Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. A featured poet in conferences and venues around the country, she has also led creative writing residencies for several arts-in-education organizations in diverse settings. She has taught English and Creative Writing at Medgar Evers College-CUNY, Drew University and Adelphi University. Moon holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. A native of Nashville, TN, Moon currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Episode #100! Featuring poet Serena Chopra, author of THIS HUMAN and music by El Amparito. Serena Chopra is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Denver, a 2009 graduate of University of Colorado at Boulder's MFA program, and a 2011-2013 Writer-In-Residence at RedLine Gallery in Denver. She has been published in Bombay Gin, Denver Quarterly, The Laurel Review, VOLT, Versal, Vinyl, Hot Metal Bridge, and No Tell Motel. Her chapbook, Penumbra, was released 2012 from Flying Guillotine Press, and a version of her book, Livid Season, was released in chapbook form from Free Poetry in 2012. In February 2013, Coconut Books Press published her first full-length collection, This Human: A Poem in Seven Parts. She was a finalist for the 2011 Dorset prize and a 2010 Kundiman fellow. Serena is also a dancer with Evolving Doors Dance Company and a visual artist, participating in recent gallery shows, Material Engagements, Off the Beaten Path: Violence, Women and Art, and Notes on Feeling at RedLine Gallery in Denver. She lives and works in Denver.