The Working Poet Radio Show

Host Joseph Lapin sat down with Anna Thomas to discuss her creative journey and her new book "Vegan Vegetarian Omnivore." Anna Thomas wrote The Vegetarian Epicure in 1973, which transformed the landscape of American cooking. She is the author, most recently, of the James Beard Award–winning cookbook Love Soup. She lives in Los Angeles and Ojai, California.

Host Joseph Lapin sat down with Joe Clifford at the 2016 Miami Book Fair to discuss the creative journey, work, and the pressures of writing, as well as many of the emotional overtones of his work. Joe Clifford is acquisitions editor for Gutter Books and producer of Lip Service West, a "gritty, real, raw" reading series in Oakland, CA. His bestselling Jay Porter Thriller Series (Oceanview Publishing) has received rave reviews from Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among many others. The third in the series, Give Up the Dead, released June 2017. Joe is also editor of Trouble in the Heartland: Crime Stories Based on the Songs of Bruce Springsteen and the forthcoming Just to Watch Him Die: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Johnny Cash. Currently Joe teaches online writing courses for LitReactor and around the country at various conferences and retreats.

In her fifth novel, HEAT AND LIGHT, Jennifer Haigh returns to Bakerton, Pennsylvania, a dying coal town that's offered a second chance when the natural gas industry comes to town. It has been named a Best Book of 2016 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and NPR. Her previous books include FAITH, THE CONDITION, BAKER TOWERS and MRS. KIMBLE, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction, and the short story collection NEWS FROM HEAVEN, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award and the PEN New England Award in Fiction. Her short stories have been published in Granta, Electric Literature, The Best American Short Stories and many other places. A native of western Pennsylvania and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she now lives in Boston.

Manuel Gonzales is the author of the novel The Regional Office is Under Attack! and the acclaimed story collection The Miniature Wife, winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. A graduate of the Columbia University Creative Writing Program, he teaches writing at the University of Kentucky and the Institute of American Indian Arts. He has published fiction and nonfiction in Open City, Fence, One Story, Esquire, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, and The Believer. Gonzales lives in Kentucky with his wife and two children.

Host Joseph Lapin sat down with Michele Oka Doner to discuss creativity, the influence of Miami on her work, and her new book "Into the Mysterium." Michele Oka Doner is an internationally renowned artist whose career spans four decades. The breadth of her artistic production encompasses sculpture, design objects, furniture, jewelry, public art and video installations.Michele Oka Doner's work is fueled by a lifelong study and appreciation of the natural world, from which she derives her formal vocabulary. Her work encompasses materials including glass, bronze and silver and in a variety of scales she mirrors the world around her – from the small and intimate to the large and magnificent. Michele is well known for creating over 35 public art installations throughout the United States and in Europe, including Radiant Site at New York's Herald Square subway (1987), Flight at Washington's Reagan International Airport and A Walk on the Beach at The Miami International Airport (1995-2010) which features 9000 bronze sculptures inlaid over a mile and a quarter long concourse of terrazzo with mother-of-pearl – it is one of the largest public artworks in the world.

Joseph Lapin sat down with Nick Flynn to talk about his creative journey and his new poetry book "My Feelings" at the Miami Book Fair in 2016. Flynn is also the author of the books of poetry Blind Huber (2002), The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands (2011), and My Feelings (2015). He has also written several memoirs, including Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), Being Flynn (2005), The Ticking is the Bomb (2010), and The Reenactments (2013); and the play Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins (2008). His book The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir of Bewilderment (2010) addresses the Abu Ghraib scandal.

The Working Poet Radio Show's producer and poet Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello sat down with legendary poet Gary Snyder to talk about American poetry, work, and translation. Gary Snyder has published numerous books of poetry and prose, including Danger on Peaks (Counterpoint Press, 2005)The Gary Snyder Reader (1952-1998) (1999); Mountains and Rivers Without End (1997); No Nature: New and Selected Poems (1993), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; The Practice of the Wild (1990); Left Out in the Rain, New Poems 1947-1985; Axe Handles (1983), for which he received an American Book Award; Turtle Island (1974), which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry; Regarding Wave (1970); and Myths & Texts (1960). Snyder has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Bollingen Prize, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the Bess Hokin Prize and the Levinson Prize from Poetry, the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Times, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the Shelley Memorial Award. Snyder was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2003. He was the recipient of the 2012 Wallace Stevens Award for lifetime achievement by the Academy of American Poets. He is a professor of English at the University of California, Davis.

From the Miami Book Fair, Jill Bialosky, editor, poet, and novelist, sat down with host Joseph Lapin to discuss the creative life. Bialosky is currently an editor at W. W. Norton & Company, and her collections of poems are Subterranean (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001) and The End of Desire (1997). Bialosky is also the author of the novel The Prize, House Under Snow (2002), and The Life Room (2007) and co-editor, with Helen Schulman, of the anthology Wanting A Child (1998).

From the Miami Book Fair, Glenn Taylor, author and professor, sat down with host Joseph Lapin to discuss the creative life. Glenn Taylor is the author of the novels A Hanging at Cinder Bottom, The Marrowbone Marble Company and The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, GQ, and Electric Literature, among others. He resided for a time in Austin, Texas, and after that, Chicago. He earned an MFA from Texas State University. Glenn was born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia, and he now lives with his wife and three sons in Morgantown, where he teaches in the MFA Program at West Virginia University.

At the Miami Book Fair, Joseph Lapin, host of The Working Poet Radio Show, interviewed author Les Standiford on his creative journey and his new book "Water to the Angels."

If you're familiar with the Los Angeles literary scene or are just a book aficionado, then you know David L. Ulin--author of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, book critic, and former book editor of the Los Angeles Times. David L. Ulin is the author or editor of eight previous books, including The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and the Library of America's Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. He sat down with host Joseph Lapin at the Miami Book Fair.

At the Miami Book Fair, I interviewed Colin Channer, author of the poetry collection Providential and the novella The Girl With the Golden Shoes. We talked about Jamaica, Caribbean literature, and his creative journey.

Joseph Lapin, host of The Working Poet Radio Show--a podcast for creative inspiration--interviewed Gail Holst-Warhaft, a journalist, broadcaster, writer, academic, musician, poet, and independent scholar. Holst-Warhaft discussed her creative journey, her love for Greek culture and music, and her personal experience with the legendary Mikis Theodorakis.

The Working Poet Radio Show (WPRS) is a podcast and interview series dedicated to the working lives of creative people. Inspired by late-night talk shows, Joseph Lapin journalist, author and host of WPRS, explores the poetry that powers the creative impulse. In a live show filmed during the Miami Book Fair, Joe Lapin interviewed author Derf, Abrams ComicArts editorial director Charles Kochman, and actor/director/author John Leguizamo. DJ Lolo provided the music.

I interviewed Kentaro Toyama, author, award-winning computer scientist, and former Microsoft employee, about how his new book, Geek Heresy and his creative journey. After a decade designing technologies meant to address education, health, and global poverty, award-winning computer scientist Kentaro Toyama came to a difficult conclusion: Even in an age of amazing technology, social progress depends on human changes that gadgets just can't deliver. Listen to the podcast to learn about how he came to this conclusion.

At the Miami Book Fair 2015, I interviewed Rick Moody, author of Garden State, The Ice Storm, Demonology, Hotels of North America, and more, for The Working Poet Radio Show--a podcast that explores the working lives of creative people.

Miami Episode One National Poetry Month Mixdown by Joseph Lapin

Murder, California Innocence, and Creativity with Michael Semanchik by Joseph Lapin