Podcasts about Colorado Review

In this episode of The Poetry Vlog (TPV), author and artist Jessica Tanck reads from her book Winter Here (UGA Press, 2024) to lead a discussion on the beauty of contrast, the battle to resist conformity, and the importance of queer community.Jessica Tanck is the author of Winter Here (UGA Press, 2024), winner of the 2022 Georgia Poetry Prize. She holds degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she completed a B.A. in English Literature - Creative Writing and Comparative Literature and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing - Poetry. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review, Meridian, New England Review, New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, Waxwing, and others. Jess was born in Chicago, IL, but grew up in Sheboygan, WI, on the shores of Lake Michigan. The recipient of a Vice Presidential Fellowship and a Clarence Snow Memorial Fellowship, Jess lives and writes in Salt Lake City, where she is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah. She served as the 2022-2023 Editor of Quarterly West, where she is currently guest-editing a special issue on “Extreme Environments”— a central concern of hers, as well as the focus of her doctoral dissertation and the reading for her qualifying exams.Learn more about Jess at:✔︎ https://www.jessicatanck.com/

Meghan is joined by Kathryn Sonntag to discuss how to heal our deep, dark places through understanding our Heavenly Mother. Topics included: - Ethnic Traditions of the Tree of Life - Cycles of Descending and Ascending- Jesus Christ as an Example of Balanced Masculine and Feminine- Daily Practices for Connecting with the DivineKathryn Knight Sonntag is the author of The Mother Tree: Discovering the Love and Wisdom of Our Divine Mother (Faith Matters Publishing), winner of the 2022 BIBA Literary Award in Non-Fiction: Religion, and The Tree at the Center (BCC Press), a 2019 Association for Mormon Letters Awards finalist in Poetry and Criticism. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Image Journal, Colorado Review, Dialogue, Rock & Sling, and Blossom as the Cliffrose: Mormon Legacies and the Beckoning Wild (Torrey House Press). Kathryn works as a landscape designer and land planner for Salt Lake City and serves as the poetry editor for Wayfare Magazine.Have Feedback? Send the LDD team a text! Celebrating the Divine Feminine: a Restoration of Wholeness - Online symposium, January 31st and February 1st. Get notifications by signing up here!Join us at Embodying Eve: a Women's Retreat! February 22nd, 2025, 9am-6pm at Catalyst Center in Kaysville, UT. For more information go to: latterdaydisciples.com/retreat or Register at https://tinyurl.com/3p3e9ajd "Consider Yourself as Eve: A Guide to Spiritual Development for Women (and the Men Who Love Them)" is available on Amazon in paperback, hardback, and ebook formats. Get your copy today!

Episode 134: Tidbits & Trolls  Join us for a conversation about new poems by Kelly Egan and a discussion about line breaks, image systems, and the surprise turns poems make. Keep your eyes and ears open, Slushies, the landscape is full of lore. Egan has us pondering possibilities. Once upon a time folks believed in Selkies, shapeshifting seals who make folks fall in love with them in their human form. Who knew it's bad luck to open the door on Christmas Eve for fear trolls will maraud your house? You've been warned. Check out Danish artist Thomas Dambo's mammoth sculpted trolls hidden in plain sight. And if you want to deep dive into another legendary landscape – aka a brick-and-mortar bookstore – be sure to check out Parker Posey's documentary The Booksellers.    At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Samantha Neugebauer, Dagne Forrest, Lisa Zerkle, Divina Boko, Jess Fielo (sound engineer)    Kelly Egan writes from dream, reverie, and long drives. She is the author of two chapbooks—Millennial, from White Stag, and A Series of Septembers, from Dancing Girl Press. Her poems can also be found in Maiden Magazine, Interim, Colorado Review, Laurel Review, RHINO, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. Kelly has an MFA from Saint Mary's College of CA and has participated in writing residencies in Iceland and the Peruvian Amazon. She lives in California's Bay Area. Find her at kellyjeanegan.com.  

How to write an identity not your own! Also: on inhabiting your character, on easy reading being damned hard writing, on grounding the reader in a scene, and expecting that you WILL make mistakes (and that's okay.) Alex Temblador is the Mixed Latine award-winning author of Writing An Identity Not Your Own, Secrets of the Casa Rosada and Half Outlaw. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Oklahoma and is a contributor to Living Beyond Borders: Growing Up Mexican in America and Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology. Her work has also appeared in PALABRITAS, D Magazine, and Colorado Review. Alex has taught creative writing seminars, workshops, and classes with the Women's Fiction Writers Association, WritingWorkshops.com, the Writer's League of Texas, and more, as well as spoken about diversity in the literary world with Macmillan, Texas Library Association, Abydos Learning Conference, and at many other festivals, conferences, and universities. Links mentioned: ✏️ Write More, Worry Less: A Year of Pressure-Free ProductivityJan 4, 2025 - CLICK HERE for the details! Don't miss the early-bird pricing, good till Dec 10th!NZ Ahead with Liz and Brian Story Magic - Lower Your Expectations

Notes and Links to Greg Mania's Work         Greg Mania's words have been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, HuffPost, Oprah Daily, PAPER, among other international online and print platforms. He is also a contributing editor to BOMB Magazine, he hosts The Rumpus's #ShowUsYourDesk on Instagram Live, and co-hosts Empty Trash, a reading series in Los Angeles. His debut memoir, Born to Be Public, is out now from CLASH Books.    He lives in Los Angeles, where he spends his days writing and hanging out with his boyfriend, the poet and TV writer Tommy Pico, whose commitment to the bit rivals his own.       Buy Born to Be Public   Greg Mania's Website   Lambda Literary Review of Born to Be Public   “How Born to Be Public Author Greg Mania Lived a Double Life Before Coming Out” for Oprah Daily At about 2:10, Greg talks about growing up in Central New Jersey, and his cultural life and the ways in which New York City held a special magnetism for him At about 5:35, Greg describes the different parts of New Jersey and its immortal malls  At about 6:45, Greg responds to Pete's questions about growing up speaking Polish and whether his writing in English has parallels in Polish  At about 8:15, Greg explains how he's a “word nerd” and how this and his family affects his joke creation  At about 9:40, Greg talks about how he and Ruth Madievsky vibe for me many reasons, including a shared affinity for dark humor At about 12:30, Greg notes that Born to Be Public has been **translated into Polish** At about 13:20, Greg gives background on Poland and its evolving conservatism and liberalism  At about 14:15, Greg shows his Beverly Cleary-related tattoo and shouts out his love of Garfield and other dark/weird humor in growing up; Phyllis Diller gets stanned  At about 16:30, n expanding upon his love for Pee Wee Herman, Greg talks about his love for and interest in persona  At about 17:40, Phyllis Diller gets stanned more as Greg notes an incredible sign from Phyllis/the universe At about 19:25, Greg discusses the litany of publications with which he works, and being a “freelance” writer in a year of transformation At about 21:20, Greg responds to Pete's question about his writing routine At about 24:50, Greg gives information on his upcoming novel project  At about 27:15, Greg answers Pete's question about how taking his nonfiction to fiction is “freeing” At about 30:10, Greg lists Ruth Madievsky, Samantha Irby, Emily Austin, Rufi Thorpe, Kristen Arnett, Chantal Johnson, Kimberly King Parsons as some of the writers who thrill and challenge her At about 32:40, Greg responds to Pete's asking about how one is funny on the page At about 34:25, Greg makes a startling Friends'-related admission At about 35:15, Pete and Greg discuss the interplay between the humor and heaviness in his book At about 39:20, Sand art! At about 40:30, Greg talks about advice from a writer about how he ended up writing a book that has resonated with so many  At about 41:30, Greg reflects on childhood fears and the ways in which he has worked through these fears and compulsions  At about 43:45, The two discuss fixations with death At about 44:40, Greg gives background on his childhood fascination with chimneys and diesel trains, and his dad's selflessness At about 47:30, Greg talks about the ways in which his parents' generosity and love was counterbalanced by homophobia and migraines and anxiety  At about 51:00, Greg details some harmful words from a childhood doctor  At about 53:15, Greg responds to Pete's question about his mindset in retorting to bullies and he mentions the “power” that came with quips  At about 55:15, Pete connects Greg's humor to a Tillie Olsen line and wonders about Greg's feelings at the time  At about 57:45, Greg details how his friend Rachel brought him so much confidence and helped him build his humor At about 1:00:00, Greg talks about the “no inhibitions” that govern his relationships with his boyfriend Tommy in the same way as with Rachel At about 1:01:15, Greg charts how educating himself on his fears has been helpful, particularly with regards to “fight or flight”   At about 1:05:15, Pete notes a “LOL” moment that sums up a classic college trope  At about 1:07:30, Greg speaks to the idea of “identity as never neat” At about 1:09:00, Greg talks about the links between his first friends in New York and Lady Gaga and the ways in which “Greg Mania” (MAYN-ee-uh) grew to fit him At about 1:10:10, Greg discusses how his writing mentors in high school and college helped him on his way to professional writing  At about 1:13:20, Greg talks about the book as A memoir, and how it's him “pars[ing] the different parts of [him]” At about 1:15:50, Greg responds to Pete's questions about his days at “Magic Mondays” and its connection to the worlds of publishing At about 1:19:00, Greg talks about his “majestic” hair (Pete's words) and the ways in which it was his calling card in his clubbing days At about 1:20:40, Greg answers Pete's questions about what comedy writing “satisfies” for him, and Greg expands on the “sacred[ness]” of joke writing At about 1:23:00, Greg details the “reward” in writing jokes and talking humor with his boyfriend At about 1:24:40, Greg talks about the difference between memoir/memoirs and how his book applies to the former        You can now subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, and leave me a five-star review. You can also ask for the podcast by name using Alexa, and find the pod on Stitcher, Spotify, and on Amazon Music. Follow me on IG, where I'm @chillsatwillpodcast, or on Twitter, where I'm @chillsatwillpo1.        I am very excited to have one or two podcast episodes per month featured on the website of Chicago Review of Books. The audio will be posted, along with a written interview culled from the audio. A big thanks to Rachel León and Michael Welch at Chicago Review.     Sign up now for The Chills at Will Podcast Patreon: it can be found at patreon.com/chillsatwillpodcastpeterriehl      Check out the page that describes the benefits of a Patreon membership, including cool swag and bonus episodes. Thanks in advance for supporting my one-man show, my DIY podcast and my extensive reading, research, editing, and promoting to keep this independent podcast pumping out high-quality content! This month's Patreon bonus episode features segments from conversations with Jeff Pearlman, Matt Bell, F. Douglas Brown, Jorge Lacera, Jean Guererro, Rachel Yoder, and more, as they reflect on chill-inducing writers who have inspired their own work. I have added a $1 a month tier for “Well-Wishers” and Cheerleaders of the Show.    This is a passion project of mine, a DIY operation, and I'd love for your help in promoting what I'm convinced is a unique and spirited look at an often-ignored art form.    The intro song for The Chills at Will Podcast is “Wind Down” (Instrumental Version), and the other song played on this episode was “Hoops” (Instrumental)” by Matt Weidauer, and both songs are used through ArchesAudio.com.     Please tune in for Episode 262 with Rus Bradburd, who teaches writing classes in New Mexico State University's MFA program and coached basketball at UTEP and New Mexico State for fourteen seasons. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, Colorado Review, Puerto del Sol, SLAM Magazine, Bounce, Los Angeles Times, and many others. Rus is a two-time guest spoke about 2018 nonfiction book, All the Dreams We've Dreamed: A Story of Hoops and Handguns on Chicago's West Side on Chills at Will Episode 15. November 19 is Pub Day for Big Time, his fourth book and second novel. The episode airs on Pub Day. Lastly, please go to ceasefiretoday.com, which features 10+ actions to help bring about Ceasefire in Gaza.

On how to quit imposter syndrome (yes, it's doable!) and on giving voice to the inanimate - you'll love this episode! Lynne Thompson served as Los Angeles' fourth Poet Laureate, 2021-2022. Thompson is the author of four collections of poetry, Beg No Pardon, Start With A Small Guitar, Fretwork, and most recently, Blue on a Blue Palette. She serves on the Boards of Cave Canem, Poetry Foundation, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Scripps College which she lead as Board Chair, 2018-2022. Her work can be found in the Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, and Pleiades, among others.

Stephanie G'Schwind is the editor-in-chief of Colorado Review and the director of the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University. She has edited two anthologies, Man in the Moon: Essays on Father and Fatherhood and Beautiful Flesh: A Body of Essays, which won the 2018 Colorado Book Award for Anthology. Harrison Canelaria Fletcher is the author of Descanso for My Father, Presentimiento: A Life in Dreams, and Finding Querencia: Essays from in Between. Besides being G'Schwind's fellow nonfiction editor at Colorado Review, he's been an editor at Shadowbox, Upstreet and Speculative Nonfiction. He teaches at Colorado State University and Vermont College of Fine Arts. All four of the essays from recent back issues discussed in this episode involve identity, place, and survival. The first is “Who Lives in That House” by Emily Winakur. For her the home operates on the level of being a dream about the self, what matters, what the risks are, why it is that a party of our brain is devoted to memories and specifically a sense of place. As a psychologist, Winakur uses her curiosity and concern for her patients to serve almost like a home inspector, making sure they're safe. In turn, Shze-Hui Tjoa's “The Story of Body” concerns a mind-body split that causes the author to mostly describe herself as a distanced, alienated “Body” and “Mind” that struggles under parental demands to become an exceptional musician. In Sarah Curtis's “The Ghost of Lubbock,” she's not a musician, but her dad is; in fact, he played with Buddy Holly and wrote “I Fought the Law” among other notable songs. But who is her dad, really: the stage performer, or the quiet guy who deflects questions? In Jarek Steel's “Nesting,” confinement and becoming are the dominant motifs. As a pregnant 19-year-old, she occupies a “garbagehouse” of a place, but transforms herself into a man who can look back at a very primal, vulnerable part of life and put the pieces together. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with poet Daniel Khalastchi about hist new collection The Story of Your Obstinate Survival (2024, University of Wisconsin Press).The Story of Your Obstinate Survival is a propulsive collection. It's very funny, uncannily mundane and starkly surreal. The poems are a collision of juxtapositions and images, each one brimming with a vigor and vitality that demands re-reading, reading aloud, and maybe even setting to music. The lyrical wordplay will stop you in your tracks, either with laughter or with an appreciation for the delightfully weird scenes unfolding before you. The poems speak to an obstinate persistence, to enduring beyond a routinely felt sense of an ending.Daniel Khalastchi is an Iraqi Jewish American. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a former fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, he is the author of four books of poetry—Manoleria (Tupelo Press), Tradition (McSweeney's), American Parables (University of Wisconsin Press, winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry), and The Story of Your Obstinate Survival (University of Wisconsin Press). His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The American Poetry Review, The Believer Logger, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Electric Lit, Granta, The Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, and Best American Experimental Writing. Daniel has taught advanced writing, literature, and publishing courses at Augustana College, Marquette University, and the University of Iowa, most recently as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He currently lives in Iowa City where he directs the University of Iowa's Magid Center for Writing. He is the cofounder and managing editor of Rescue Press.Author photo courtesy of University of Wisconsin Press

Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn joins Let's Talk Memoir for a conversation about listening to and putting our younger selves on the page, recognizing family codes we can no longer adhere to, place as a character in memoir, writing like nobody will ever see our work, how shame and pain can manifest as silence, sharing with readers what we may not be able to reveal to loved ones, the contracts we enter as writers of memoir, creating intimacy on the page, and her new memoir Loose of Earth.   Also mentioned in this episode:  -the toll of forever chemicals on our bodies and homes -incorporating environmental elements -managing our grief   Books mentioned in this episode: -Mil Town by Kerrie Arsenault -Full Body Burden by Kristen Iverson -The Yellow House by Sarah Broom -Ground Glass by Karen Savage   Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn teaches in the University of Chicago Creative Writing Program. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee whose work has appeared in Colorado Review, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, and swamp pink, and was listed as notable in Best American Essays.   Connect with Kathleen: Website: https://www.kdblackburn.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thequietwildlife/ Get her book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/loose-of-earth-a-memoir-kathleen-dorothy-blackburn/20690152 — Ronit's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, The Washington Post, Writer's Digest, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named Finalist in the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts' 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories. She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and lives in Seattle with her family where she teaches memoir workshops and is working on her next book. More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com   Sign up for monthly podcast and writing updates: https://bit.ly/33nyTKd   Follow Ronit: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/ https://twitter.com/RonitPlank https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank   Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll's Fingers

Sarah Kain Gutowski discusses her book-length narrative in poems, The Familiar, the way she's made space for her Extraordinary and Ordinary Selves, figuring out how to market herself and her work, finding the meaning in darkness, collaborating with Texas Review Press, and more! Sarah Kain Gutowski is the author of Fabulous Beast, winner of the 14th annual National Indies Excellence Award for Poetry and a 2019 Foreword Indies Finalist. With interdisciplinary artist Meredith Starr, she is co-creator of Every Second Feels Like Theft, a conversation in cyanotypes and poetry, and It's All Too Much, a limited edition audio project. Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Threepenny Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and The Southern Review, and her criticism has been published by Colorado Review, Calyx, and New York Journal of Books. Her new collection is a book-length narrative in poems titled The Familiar, which explores female mid-life existential crisis through two characters, the Ordinary Self and the Extraordinary Self, who send a single household into chaos as they vacillate between the siren call of ambition, the necessity of the workplace, and responsibility to love and family. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

February 2024 Dante's Old South Autumn Nicholas: (she/he/they/them) Autumn Nicholas is a gifted songwriter and performer who has amazed audiences around the country. Autumn is one of Music Forward Foundation's Emerging LGBTQ+ Artists for 2023 and one of Nashville Scene's Country Music Almanac 2024 Artists to Watch. www.autumnnicholas.com Emily Strasser's first book, Half-Life of a Secret, is a deeply researched memoir that traces her journey to reckon with the toxic legacies of secrecy of her grandfather's work building nuclear weapons in the atomic city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Emily's work has appeared in Catapult, Ploughshares, Guernica, Colorado Review, The Bitter Southerner, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Gulf Coast, among others. She was also the presenter of the 2020 BBC podcast “The Bomb.” www.emilystrasser.com Kayla Lookinghorse stands apart from other designers because of her hunkpapa/Itazipco Lakota/Dakota heritage and the way it is artfully woven into her designs. K. Lookinghorse is a contemporary brand that honors the designer's heritage with an aesthetic specific to her tiospaye (family). Her signature symbols, three lines Horizontal pays homage to the past, present and future. As a mother, designer, artist, and tribal citizen, Kayla Lookinghorse has forged her own path by creating iconic printed dresses and signature jackets which are the cornerstone of the K.lookinghorse brand. Working toward bridging the gap and creating space for Authentic-Inspired Native design, not Native-Inspired. From her creations to your closest shop, her collections naturally empower through storytelling and design. www.klookinghorse.com Wilder Adkins is a folk musician, dad, librarian, and gardener from Birmingham, AL. He loves the weight of handmade quilts, and his songs are kind of heavy and comfortable like that. In late summer he can be found every day out by the fig tree scaring away the birds and looking for ripe fruit (for making jam). In winter, he retreats into a cave to sleep for three months and process all that he's learned that year. He's friendly, but you might have to speak to him first. His songs call on an array of influences but frequently touch on the topics of Hope & Sorrow, Faith & Doubt, and sometimes flowers. www.wilderadkins.com Ellen Bass's poetry collections include Indigo, Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Among her awards are Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and The NEA, The Lambda Literary Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. With Florence Howe, she co-edited the first major anthology of women's poetry, No More Masks! and she co-authored the groundbreaking, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse and Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth—and Their Allies. A Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz jails, and teaches in Pacific University's MFA program.  www.ellenbass.com Special Thanks Goes to: Lucid House Press: www.lucidhousepublishing.com UCLA Extension Writing Program: www.uclaextension.edu The Crown: www.thecrownbrasstown.com Mercer University Press: www.mupress.org The Red Phone Booth: www.redphonebooth.com The host, Clifford Brooks', The Draw of Broken Eyes & Whirling Metaphysics, Athena Departs, and Old Gods are available everywhere books are sold. His chapbook, Exiles of Eden, is only available through his website: www.cliffbrooks.com/how-to-order Check out his Teachable courses on thriving with autism and creative writing as a profession here: brooks-sessions.teachable.com/p/the-working-writer

SUBSCRIBE - LIKE - COMMENT!!!  Ray & Benny look at Team Targets of the remaining CFL Free Agents. R&B then move to Winnipeg Jets Talk by Fahrenheit Air Brushing; Colorado Review and Star of the Week, and they look ahead to Original 6 matchups and final games of 2023. 00:00 INTRO00:34 CFL Free Agent Talk16:26 Winnipeg Jets Talk18:46 Colorado Review22:30 Player of the Week24:43 Jets Vs Original 6 Clubs28:30 Jets Preview into 202432:29 Be the GM: Trade Talk OptionsFahrenheit Airbrushing - https://www.facebook.com/fahrenheitairbrushing?mibextid=LQQJ4d#forthew #cfl #nfl #nhl #stanleycup #canadianfootball #winnipeg #podcast #sports #manitoba #bluebombers  #winnipegjets #gojetsgo #canadianfootball #bombers ———FOLLOW US ON...Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/raybennytalksportsInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/raybennysports/Twitter: https://twitter.com/raybennysportsTikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@raybennysportsApple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3rPuut8Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3rO0AFFGoogle Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3y5q4zwBuzzsprout: https://rayandbennytalksports.buzzsprout.com/Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/raybennytalksports/Discord: https://discord.gg/ADenV7R7

Derek Annis (they/he) is a neurodivergent poet from the Inland Northwest. He is the author of Neighborhood of Gray Houses (Lost Horse Press) and River City Fires (Driftwood Press). They are an editor for Lynx House Press, and their poems have appeared in The Account, Colorado Review, Epiphany, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review Online, Poet Lore, Spillway, and Third Coast, among others. https://derekannis.wordpress.com/ https://instagram.com/derekannis?igshid=NzZlODBkYWE4Ng== https://www.facebook.com/derek.annis?mibextid=ZbWKwL

Notes and Links to Andrew Porter's Work        For Episode 213, Pete welcomes Andrew Porter, and the two discuss, among other topics, his lifelong love of art and creativity, his pivotal short story classes in college, wonderful writing mentors, the stories that continue to thrill and inspire him and his students, and salient themes from his most recent collection, such as the ephemeral nature of life, fatherhood, aging and nostalgia, and friendship triangles and squares.       Andrew Porter is the author of the short story collection The Theory of Light and Matter (Vintage/Penguin Random House), which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, the novel In Between Days (Knopf), which was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers”  selection and an IndieBound “Indie Next” selection, and the short story  collection The Disappeared (Knopf), which was recently published in April 2023. Porter's books have been published in foreign editions in the UK and Australia and translated into numerous  languages, including French, Spanish, Dutch, Bulgarian, and Korean.    In addition to winning the Flannery O'Connor Award, his collection, The Theory of Light and Matter,  received Foreword Magazine's “Book of the Year” Award for Short  Fiction, was a finalist for The Steven Turner Award, The Paterson Prize  and The WLT Book Award, was shortlisted for the William Saroyan  International Prize for Writing, and was selected by both The Kansas City Star and The San Antonio Express-News  as one of the “Best Books of the Year.”    The recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the James Michener-Copernicus Foundation, the W.K. Rose Foundation, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Porter's  short stories have appeared in One Story, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Threepenny Review, The Missouri Review, Narrative Magazine, Epoch, Story, The Colorado Review, and Prairie Schooner, among others. He has had his work read on NPR's Selected Shorts and twice selected as one of the Distinguished Stories of the Year by Best American Short Stories.       A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Porter is currently a Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Trinity University in San Antonio.   Andrew's Website   Buy The Disappeared   The Disappeared Review from Chicago Review of Books   New York Times Shoutout for The Disappeared At about 1:50, Pete asks Andrew about the Spurs and breakfast tacos in San Antonio   At about 2:40, Andrew discusses his artistic loves as a kid and growing up and his picking up a love for the short story in college   At about 5:20, Andrew cites Bausch, Carver, Richard Ford, Amy Hempel, Lorrie Moore, and Joyce Carol Oates' story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” as formative and transformative   At about 8:40, Andrew responds to Pete's question about whom he is reading these days-writers including Annie Ernauex, Rachel Cusk, and Jamel Brinkley   At about 10:00, Andrew traces the evolution of his writing career, including how he received wonderful mentorship from Dean Crawford and the “hugely” influential David Wong Louie    At about 12:15, Pete asks Andrew what feedback he has gotten since his short story collection The Disappeared has received, and what his students have said as well   At about 13:50, Pete highlights Andrew's wonderful and resonant endings and he and Andrew discuss the powerful opening story of the collection, “Austin”   At about 17:55, Pete puts the flash fiction piece “Cigarettes” into context regarding the book's theme of aging and nostalgia   At about 19:00, Pete laments his predicament as he readies to play in the high school Students vs. Faculty Game (plot spoiler: he played well, and the faculty won)   At about 19:40, The two discuss the engrossing and echoing “Vines” short story, including themes within, and Andrew discusses the art life   At about 23:00, “Cello” is discussed in the vein of a life lived with(out) art   At about 24:20, The story “Chili” is discussed with regards to the theme of aging, and Andrew expounds about including foods he likes and that he identifies with San Antonio and Austin   At about 26:40, Pete stumbles through remembering details of a favorite canceled show and talks glowingly about “Rhinebeck” and its characters and themes; Andrew discusses the topics that interest him and inspired the story   At about 30:20, Pete and Andrew discuss “in-betweeners” in the collection, including Jimena and others who complicate romantic and friend relationships   At about 32:50, Pete cites the collection's titular story and the “netherworld” in which the characters exist; Andrew collects the story with the previously-mentioned ones in exploring “triangulation”   At about 34:20, The two discussed what Pete dubs “men unmoored” in the collection   At about 35:15, The two discuss art as a collection theme, and Anthony speaks on presenting different levels of art and different representations of the creative life and past versions of ourselves   At about 37:15, Andrew replies to Pete asking about art/writing as a “restorative process”   At about 38:25, The two discuss the ways in which fatherhood is discussed in the collection, especially in the story “Breathe”   At about 43:15, The two continue to talk about the ephemeral nature of so much of the book, including in the titular story   At about 44:25, Andrew responds to Pete's asking about the ephemeral nature of the book and how he wanted the titular story's ending to be a sort of an answer to the collection's first story   At about 46:20, Pete refers to the delightful ambiguity in the book   At about 47:15, Pete asks Andrew about future projects    At about 50:00, Andrew shouts out publishing info, social media contacts    You can now subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, and leave me a five-star review. You can also ask for the podcast by name using Alexa, and find the pod on Stitcher, Spotify, and on Amazon Music. Follow me on IG, where I'm @chillsatwillpodcast, or on Twitter, where I'm @chillsatwillpo1. You can watch this and other episodes on YouTube-watch and subscribe to The Chills at Will Podcast Channel. Please subscribe to both my YouTube Channel and my podcast while you're checking out this episode.    Sign up now for The Chills at Will Podcast Patreon: it can be found at patreon.com/chillsatwillpodcastpeterriehl     Check out the page that describes the benefits of a Patreon membership, including cool swag and bonus episodes. Thanks in advance for supporting my one-man show, my DIY podcast and my extensive reading, research, editing, and promoting to keep this independent podcast pumping out high-quality content!    NEW MERCH! You can browse and buy here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/ChillsatWillPodcast    This is a passion project of mine, a DIY operation, and I'd love for your help in promoting what I'm convinced is a unique and spirited look at an often-ignored art form.    The intro song for The Chills at Will Podcast is “Wind Down” (Instrumental Version), and the other song played on this episode was “Hoops” (Instrumental)” by Matt Weidauer, and both songs are used through ArchesAudio.com.    Please tune in for Episode 214 with Leah Myers. Leah is a member of the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe of the Pacific Northwest, and she earned her MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of New Orleans, where she won the Samuel Mockbee Award for Nonfiction two years in a row. Her debut memoir, THINNING BLOOD, is published by W.W. Norton and received a rave review in the New York Times.    The episode will air on November 28.

An American poet and artist, Sally Van Doren is the author of four poetry collections, Sibilance, (LSU Press 2023) Promise, (2017) Possessive, (2012) and Sex at Noon Taxes (2008) which received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have been featured by NPR, PBS, The Poetry Foundation, American Life in Poetry, and Poetry Daily, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry has appeared widely in national and international publications such as American Letters and Commentary, American Poet, Barrow Street, Boulevard, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, december, Lumina, The Moth, The New Republic, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, Southern Review, Southwest Review, Verse Daily and Western Humanities Review. Her ongoing poetic memoir, The Sense Series, served as the text for a multi-media installation at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. ------ As a practicing visual artist, Van Doren formalized her training at Hunter College and The School of Visual Arts in New York. She has had solo exhibitions at Furnace Art on Paper Archive and other venues and participates in group shows regularly. Her work is held in distinguished private and corporate collections, including a print commission for each guest room for the Hotel Downstreet in North Adams, MA.  Her art appears on the cover of The Difference is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems (UPenn Press 2022) and in literary magazines such as The Nashville Review and 2River. ------ A graduate of Princeton University (BA) and University of Missouri-St. Louis (MFA), Van Doren has taught poetry workshops for a variety of educational institutions, among them the 92nd Street Y, the St. Louis Public Schools, Washington University in St. Louis, the St. Louis County Juvenile Detention Center and Scoville Memorial Library. She curated the Sunday Poetry Workshops for the St. Louis Poetry Center and serves on the board of the Five Points Center for the Visual Arts in Torrington, CT. A native St. Louisan, she works from her studio in West Cornwall, CT. -------

Slushies, in this episode we consider two poems by C. Fausto Cabrera, both of which speak, in very different ways, to the imagination in building our sense of self. The notion of being seen, a topic of universal relevance to any writer or artist, is explored in the first poem, which ends with the line “stuck in between the covers wondering when you'll be back”, simultaneously exploring themes of incarceration or imprisonment. This discussion leads us to consider the many layers of being seen and Jason takes a moment to appreciate the “sexy time” of having a book tucked in your pocket. The second poem takes us on a related yet palpably different journey and reveals one of the paths our editorial discussions can take us to. Take a listen, you won't be disappointed!   This episode is brought to you by our sponsor Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show.    At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Samantha Neugebauer, and Dagne Forrest.   C. Fausto Cabrera is a multi-genre artist and writer currently incarcerated since 2003. His work has appeared in: The Colorado Review, The Antioch Review, Puerto del Sol, The American Literary Review, The Water~Stone Review, The Woodward Review, among others. "The Parameters of Our Cage" is his prose collaboration with photographer Alec Soth.             To Be Seen at All , "What makes us so deserving of space  in other people' s minds?"    -Daniel Ruiz     My boss in the kitchen asks me how it felt to be famous after looking up my Washington Post Magazine essay & cover art online. The question left me stuck I didn't feel famous. I hadn't received much mail in years. What does celebrity mean separate from saturation, fame to the incarcerated— but infamy?   I question the value of telling people about accomplishments, about publishing at all— in a place where your spades game gets more respect, & swagger's stuck in the last time you punched a muthafucker in the face, what' s the point? I just felt petty for wanting to be seen at all. Guards are more concerned with how many towels I have than who I become.   I'm being heard— & that should be the focus, right? Is the nobility of a thing in or on purpose? Or the other way around? Cause who ever does anything for nobility— I'm starving to be objectified: stripped  down by the new young blond guard like a Skinamax late nite B-movie, why else do hundreds of burpees if not to play into the bad boy fantasies of anyone watching?   I went away before social media, but had my Lil' cousin Artesia build me a platform to stand upon, thinkin' it'd present me somehow, someway, maybe keep me present— be on someone's mind or wall, admired even for a moment. The Past says they miss me, but since they never reach past the screen it's not the real me, only their memory. It's not about me at all—and neither should the work be.   There is a point to this poem, in its lack of trust. & none of it is an answer. How can I count on anything through a 2-way mirror? I am just a writer, the world through my eyes glows different due to the depths of my damage. When you close this book & move on I'll still be stuck in-between the covers,    wondering                                                when you'll be back.         In the Sun that Seeps from the Dungeons/ Window/ Everything is Bright                  Because God is in an algorithm I hear through the toggle of my shuffle button/ from a playlist I                                                            composed/ I tell myself/ that if I listen, while the TV projects a pretty face to see when I look up                 from what I'm reading of poetry, mechanical pencil, click, click, underlining & taking notes in                    the margins— sipping a mug of French vanilla creamer laden coffee w/thoughts swirling in my                       cinnamon head/ the sheer alchemy of it all should/ naturally combust! What butterfly wings must                          taste like/embers floating/escape the chaos, wondering west to set fires/troublesome/I                             want blood in the cut, I want noise/they made me something vicious. Will I burn out or fade                               away? The man in black speaks for me & reminds me I'm not alone. A rainbow in                                   the dark, I'll take death before dishonor, bet I bomb on them first/ it's just the life of an                                      outlaw.                                          I am an amalgamation of influences, intricate in their darkness, complex in their                                            origins, some speak integrable nostalgic, others spark dumb & rash/& I gave                                               away my youth to sit & listen to all at once/hopeful/ saying something of a future I'                                                II forget/ I longed for/ once /it arrives. I read my poetry book, circle a                                                   word or phrase to slow down, hoping to see something I can lift/ above a drawn                                                    line or jot in the margins that can change the way I see or say.                                                       Words & wonder/ pour into my ears, my eyes catch/ images I pull into my                                                         heart while I swallow the sweetness of an appreciation. In these                                                            moments I am alive. Then God says, through The City of Prague' s                                                           Philharmonic Orchestra that the path isn't interchangeable.  There's no other person I'd rather be.   

Rachel Moritz is the author of two poetry books, Sweet Velocity (Lost Roads Press, 2017), and Borrowed Wave (Kore Press, 2015), as well as five chapbooks. She's also the co-editor of a collection of personal essays, My Caesarean: Twenty-One Mothers on the C-Section Experience and After (The Experiment, 2019), which won the Foreword INDIES Award in Silver. Rachel's work has appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Aufgabe, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Iowa Review, Tupelo Quarterly, VOLT, Water-Stone Review, and other journals. Her poems and critical writing have been featured in Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Verse Daily, and in the anthologies Queer Nature, Rocked by the Waters: Poems of Motherhood, Uncoverage: Asking After Recent Poetry, and Jean Valentine: This World Company. She's received a 2019 Best American Essay Notable mention as well as awards, grants, and residencies. Rachel teaches creative writing with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, Unrestricted Interest, and CommonBond Communities. She lives in Minneapolis with her partner and son. www.rachelmoritz.com   M. Ahd grew up moving frequently. They have resided in New Jersey, Iowa, Texas, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the Czech Republic. M has worked as a software company recruiter, sports camera operator, reader to the blind, and arts magazine writer, among other jobs. After teaching high school English and coaching Quiz Bowl for a decade, they now write from home full time. M has been the recipient of the 2016 Barnes and Nobel Regional My Favorite Teacher Contest, named the 2018 National High School Quiz Bowl Coach of the Year, and a finalist for the 2019 Loft Literary Center Mentor Series. M lives in Minneapolis with their spouse, two dogs named Zero and Eleven, and a rotating cast of teens and young adults in need of a spare room.

July 2023 Update: Sarah is preparing to appear at the New York City Poetry Festival at the end of July. Sarah will read a poem and be interviewed as part of an appearance with the monthly poetry show "There's a Lot to Unpack Here". Sarah also has a new book of poetry, “The Familiar”, coming out from Texas Review Press in Spring 2024. Welcome to Episode 19 of Slush Pile! For this episode, we have two “creepy” poems submitted for our Monsters Issue by Sarah Kain Gutowski. While these poems, part of a suite, did not get unanimous votes, we all felt they enveloped us into a universe of magical realism. True to the tradition of scary stories, these poems demand to be read slowly, deliberately, and out loud. Additionally, Gutowski's work is more than simply scary. Like Kathy says, “Sometimes freaky shit happens,” and these poems force our team to consider the ambiguities of life, or pre-death, as Tim puts it. Listen to the outcome, but one thing is for sure: these poems are stronger together. Comment on our Facebook event page or on Twitter with #frogtongue and sign for our email list if you're in the area, and even if you're not! Read on!   At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Lauren Patterson, Tim Fitts, Caitlin McLaughlin, Jason Schneiderman, and Marion Wrenn   Sarah Kain Gutowski is the author of two books, The Familiar (forthcoming) and Fabulous Beast: Poems, winner of the 14th annual National Indies Excellence Award for Poetry. With interdisciplinary artist Meredith Starr, she is co-creator of Every Second Feels Like Theft, a conversation in cyanotypes and poetry, and It's All Too Much, a limited edition audio project. Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Threepenny Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and The Southern Review, and her criticism has been published by Colorado Review, Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, and the New York Journal of Books.   Chapter VI: The Children Have a Request The season stretched itself thin, weakened by storms and heat. Inside the damp, shadowy space of the children's fort, the woman with the frog tongue wove baskets and bowls with tight, interlocked laces, while her silk stitches began to fray and lengthen. The gap between her lips widened to where the children could see the white of her teeth. They stared at her, sometimes; she saw them clench their jaws and try to speak to each other without moving their mouths. Before long they'd begin to laugh, and she'd shake with relief at the sound. Then one day, when the trees broke into glittering shards of gold and red and green, and light spun pinwheels above their heads as they walked together between the falling leaves, the girl looked at the woman and asked if she had a name. At this, the woman jerked to a stop. The old surge, the impulse to speak that rose within her belly and chest, overwhelmed. She wanted the girl and boy to know her name. Her tongue, rolled tightly and barred from moving inside its cage, strained against her teeth and cheeks, contorting her face with its rage. The boy stepped back when he saw the change on the woman's face. The girl moved closer, though, to pat the hand she held like she might a frightened kitten or skittish, fallen bird. Let's guess your name, she said. The woman's jaw fell slack, as much as the stitches allowed. Her panic passed away. The boy saw her relax and began to hop around. A game, a game, he chanted. Across her eyes the sun sliced its blade, and though her vision bled with its light, she felt cheered by the girl's hand and the boy's excitement. Aurora. Jezebel. Serafina, guessed the girl. Her brother laughed and grabbed a fallen branch, whacking the moss-covered roots of the trees surrounding them. The woman laughed, too, short bursts of air through her nose. Her happiness shocked them all. The boy laughed again, a raucous sound, and she looked the little girl in the eye. A curve tested her mouth's seams, more grimace than grin, but the girl smiled back and sighed with some relief. Then she reached toward the woman and pulled her close, until they were cheek to cheek. The girl's face, cold and smooth, smelled of the moss and earth her brother lashed and whipped with vigor into the air. The woman with the frog tongue hugged the girl loosely, as if those little shoulder blades were planes of cloud, a shifting mist she could see and feel between her arms but couldn't collect, or hold, or keep for her very own. The girl stepped back yet kept her hands by the woman's face. Her small, thin fingers hovered before the fraying threads. Why don't you take these out? she asked, as she touched each ragged end. At this the boy stopped his joyful assault of the trees and ran to see for himself what they discussed each night when walking home: her muffled, choked murmurings, the gray lattice unraveling across her mouth. He peered closely at each loose stitch, searching beyond her lips for whatever monster she'd locked so poorly inside. He found no monster, just a hint of pink tongue. So he shrugged, said Yes, and spun on his heel to resume his game. The girl jumped up and down, shouting: And then you'll tell us your name! The woman watched the boy whip tree roots free of moss, the tufts spinning into the air and separating, becoming dust, the dark green spores like beaks of birds that plummet toward the rocky earth without fear. She watched the girl's hair lift and fly away from her head, the wind dividing its strands, the way it hung, suspended like dust in the sun, then sank like spores: a sudden drop. She worked her mouth from side to side, and by degrees opened her lips enough to burble a sound that said: Maybe.   Chapter VII: She Grows a Second Heart That night she woke to find another oddity: during sleep her heart had split or twinned itself, and where one muscle pumped before, now beat two. Her blood coursed through her veins twice as fast as before, and over those paths her skin buzzed and stammered, like wire strung tautly between two poles and charged with load. As if she'd run for miles across rolling hills, as if inside her chest two fists beat time all day, beneath the bone she sped at death in the most alive way. The day crawled while her two hearts raced. Above the fire she set a series of clocks to ticking. She watched the flames, sometimes leaning close enough to feel the heat singe her stitches a deeper shade, their fibers scorching until they curled, like dark froth spilling from her mouth. But when her hearts began to flicker more, and faster than she could stand, she turned her eyes to the clocks' marked faces and drew comfort from the second hands' neurotic twitch. Every minute witnessed meant another minute lived. Beneath her breastbone her strange second heart pulsed harder. She sensed the muscle, like her tongue, would leap and fly away from her body if her body let it go. She took the silver-handled knife and incised a cross above the cavity where her hearts ballooned together, jostling for room and dominance. The flaps of skin, pale as egg shell, trembled slightly. A head appeared. A bird with obsidian eyes emerged wet with her blood, shook to shed its burden, and leapt toward the rafters above. She watched the bird and felt air seep into the space it left behind, her single heart unrivaled but lonely in its great room. The wound bled slowly, healing fast to a pale silver scar, flaps falling back to close neatly over the bone, which laid itself again like lines of track or scaffolding across her chest. The bird flew to the window's sill, and ticked its head to look back at the woman. A slight breeze, cool and calm, caressed its dark wings, and it leapt for the steady branch of that arm.

Today, I have the pleasure of interviewing MT Anderson. We'll be talking about his book, Elf Dog and Owl Head, and raising your story's stakes. M. T. Anderson has written stories for adults, picture books for children, adventure novels for young readers, graphic novel adaptations of ancient French tales, and several books for older readers (both teens and adults). His satirical book Feed was a Finalist for the National Book Award and was the winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize. Both Time Magazine and National Public Radio have included it on their lists of the best 100 YA novels of all time. Another satirical science fiction novel, Landscape with Invisible Hand, has been turned into a movie starring Tiffany Haddish and Asante Blackk.  The first volume of Anderson's Octavian Nothing saga, The Pox Party, won the National Book Award and the Boston Globe / Horn Book Prize. The second volume, The Kingdom on the Waves, was a New York Times best-seller. The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge, a tragicomic spy story for young goblins written with Newbery-Honor winner Eugene Yelchin, was a Finalist for the National Book Award in 2018.  Anderson's nonfiction book Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad was long-listed for the National Book Award.  He has published stories for adults in literary journals like The Northwest Review, The Colorado Review, and Conjunctions. Several of his stories have appeared in the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror collections. His nonfiction articles and reviews have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Slate, and Salon.  He has curated concerts that bring together text and classical music all over New England.  You can find him on his website or follow him on Twitter.   In this episode MT Anderson and I discuss: Weaving events from your real life into a fantastical story Why you need to have rules for the magic you create in order for it to be fun. How to reverse engineer and perfect the opening of your novel. Plus, his #1 tip for writers. For more info and show notes: diymfa.com/468

Jackson Holbert reads poems from his debut book, Winter Stranger (2023, Milkweed Editions), which won the 2022 Max Ritvo Prize. Jackson was born and raised in eastern Washington. His work has appeared in Poetry, FIELD, The Nation, Narrative, Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, The Iowa Review, and multiple editions of Best New Poets. He received his MFA in poetry from the Michener Center for Writers and is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. He has received fellowships from the Michener Center for Writers, The Stadler Center for Poetry, and The Sewanee Writer's Conference and has been a finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship.

Deepa Varadarajan lives in Atlanta with her husband and two children. She is a legal academic and a graduate of Yale Law School. She grew up in Texas and received her BA from the University of Texas at Austin. Her short fiction has appeared in The Georgia Review and Colorado Review, and her legal scholarship has appeared in The Yale Law Journal and many other publications. Late Bloomers is her first novel. In our second segment we welcome Christina Dodd Readers become writers, and Christina Dodd has always been a reader. She reads everything, but because she loves humor, she likes romance best. A woman wants things like world peace, a clean house, and a deep and meaningful relationship based on mutual understanding and love. A man wants things like a Craftsman router with attachments, undisputed control of the TV remote, and a red Corvette which will miraculously make his bald spot disappear. So when Christina's first daughter was born, she told her husband she was going to quit work and write a book. It was a good time to start a new career, because how much trouble could one little infant be? Ha! It took ten years, two children and three completed manuscripts before her first novel, CANDLE IN THE WINDOW, was published. In the thirty-two years since, her novels have been translated into 25 languages, won Romance Writers of America's prestigious Golden Heart and RITA Awards and been called the year's best by Library Journal and Booklist. Christina Dodd herself has been a clue in the Los Angeles Times crossword puzzle (11/18/05, # 13 Down: Romance Novelist named Christina.) Her mother was thrilled! With more than 15 million of her books in print, Booklist praises her, “brilliantly etched characters, polished writing, and unexpected flashes of sharp humor that are pure Dodd.”

Late Bloomers: A Novel Deepa Varadarajan lives in Atlanta with her husband and two children. She is a legal academic and a graduate of Yale Law School. She grew up in Texas and received her BA from the University of Texas at Austin. Her short fiction has appeared in The Georgia Review and Colorado Review, and her legal scholarship has appeared in The Yale Law Journal and many other publications. Late Bloomers is her first novel. In our second segment we welcome Christina Dodd Forget What You Know: A Novel Readers become writers, and Christina Dodd has always been a reader. She reads everything, but because she loves humor, she likes romance best. A woman wants things like world peace, a clean house, and a deep and meaningful relationship based on mutual understanding and love. A man wants things like a Craftsman router with attachments, undisputed control of the TV remote, and a red Corvette which will miraculously make his bald spot disappear. So when Christina's first daughter was born, she told her husband she was going to quit work and write a book. It was a good time to start a new career, because how much trouble could one little infant be? Ha! It took ten years, two children and three completed manuscripts before her first novel, CANDLE IN THE WINDOW, was published. In the thirty-two years since, her novels have been translated into 25 languages, won Romance Writers of America's prestigious Golden Heart and RITA Awards and been called the year's best by Library Journal and Booklist. Christina Dodd herself has been a clue in the Los Angeles Times crossword puzzle (11/18/05, # 13 Down: Romance Novelist named Christina.) Her mother was thrilled! With more than 15 million of her books in print, Booklist praises her, “brilliantly etched characters, polished writing, and unexpected flashes of sharp humor that are pure Dodd.” When you click a link on our site, it might just be a magical portal (aka an affiliate link). We're passionate about only sharing the treasures we truly believe in. Every purchase made from our links not only supports Dabble but also the marvelous authors and creators we showcase, at no additional cost to you.

On this episode the whole gang is here (Simon, Kodey, and Gideon) to talk about Colorado colleges and just air out our thoughts on how they've done with recruiting Colorado High School Football players. This will be the first episode of our brand new Culture Series where we talk about all things Colorado Football. Follow us on social media for more, and updates! Recorded April 2nd 2023.  Intro 0:00-1:55 Out of State Teams Recruiting Colorado 1:56- 18:10 University of Colorado Review 18:11-53:20 Colorado State Review 53:21- 1:23:43 Air Force Review 1:23:44- 1:38:30 Northern Colorado Review 1:38:31- 1:53:52 D2 Programs and Their Success 1:53:53- 2:11:18 The Argument for a JUCO Football Program 2:11:19- 2:23:29 Outro 2:23:30- 2:30:32 https://linktr.ee/PlaymakersCorner Social Media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/PlaymakerCorner Tik Tok: Playmakers Corner Instagram: https:https://www.instagram.com/playmakerscorner/?hl=en Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PlaymakerCorner Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUEcv0BIfXT78kNEtk1pbxQ/featured  Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/playmakerscorner  Website: https://playmakerscorner.com/  Listen to us on: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4rkM8hKtf8eqDPy2xqOPqr  Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-cycle-365/id1484493484?uo=4  Breaker: https://www.breaker.audio/the-cycle-365 Google Podcasts: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy9mODg4MWYwL3BvZGNhc3QvcnNz

Guest host Jeff Alessandrelli talks with Arda Collins about feeling freer about writing after having kids, becoming a poet, hiding her prose, Charles Simic, working on documentaries, the Iowa workshop, her first collection IT IS DAYLIGHT (2009), her new collection STAR LAKE (2022), the years between the books, the links between the books, and more.Arda Collins is the author of Star Lake (2022) and It Is Daylight (2009), which was awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, A Public Space, Colorado Review, jubilat, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the Sarton Award in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.Jeff Alessandrelli is the director and co-editor of Fonograf Editions and its imprint, BUNNY.Find Autofocus Books at autofocuslit.com/books.Podcast theme: DJ Garlik & Bertholet's "Special Sause" used with permission from Bertholet.

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired April 11th, 2023) featuring award-winning poet Christopher Brean Murray whose debut collection Black Observatory, published by Milkweed Editions, was selected by Dana Levin as the winner of the 2021-22 Jake Adam York Prize.   Planet Poet's Poet-at-Large, writer and visual artist Pamela Manché Pearce also joins us on the program to bring us her unique poetic insights and the latest in poetry news Christopher Brean Murray has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and Inprint Houston and he served as online poetry editor of Gulf Coast.  His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Copper Nickel, New Ohio Review, Washington Square Review and other journals. He lives in Houston, Texas. “Its very strangeness, its eccentric lenses on cis masculinity, and its simple, formal elegance called me to Black Observatory.  Reading these poems is like embarking on a Twilight Zone episode where Franz Kafka bumps into Salvador Dali in a hardware store, and dark, absurdist adventures ensue; where ‘Crimes of the Future' involve ‘Quitting a job everyone agrees you should keep' and ‘Kissing a foreigner in a time of war.”  There's sweetness here, too, and deep thought and feeling – this is a singular debut by a singular sensibility:  no one else sounds like Murray.”  -- Dana Levin “In Christopher Brean Murray's Black Observatory, characters set out on adventures in a world not quite like our own.  They enter museums of impossible objects, venture down forest paths to strangely abandoned settlements, or wander along the industrial outskirts of eerie cities.  All at once, the new American painters – all of them? everywhere? – act in unison, as if their simultaneous cooperation had some specific, perhaps insidious intent. Here, everything is off-kilter and mysterious.  Speakers move thorough unnerving landscapes with a mixture of curiosity, ambivalence, and moments of startling insight.  This is a brilliant first book, one I will return to with pleasure.” – Kevin Prufer

Into the Archives A National Poetry Month Digital Reading   Listen in as we move through decades of poetry at Colorado Review in celebration of National Poetry Month! This June, social media manager and associate editor Alec Witthohn, delved into Colorado Review‘s archives to bring you eight exceptional poets from across the magazine's history. Interns […]

Ronna Wineberg: Artifacts and Other Stories. This is episode 556 of Teaching Learning Leading K12, an audio podcast. Ronna Wineberg is an award-winning author of four books, including her newest one, Artifacts and Other Stories, a collection of short stories which is our focus today. Her latest book was long-listed for the Shelf Unbound Best Indie Book Competition and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Over the past three decades, her writings have received recognition that includes being a finalist for Bread Loaf Writers Conference Fellowship, a finalist for Moment Magazine Short Fiction Contest, winner of New River Press Many Voices Project Literary Competition, finalist for the Willa Cather Prize in Fiction, and a prize-winner in the Denver Women's Press Club Story Contest. She is the founding fiction editor of Bellevue Literary Review, where she served 21 years as its senior fiction editor, and now is their contributing fiction editor. The publication is credited with publishing the early works of Celeste Ng, who went on to become a New York Times best-selling author. Wineberg has also served as the president of Tennessee Writers Alliance and was a member of the program committee for Southern Festival of Books. Wineberg was awarded a prestigious Fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, A Residency from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, a Residency from Ragdale Foundation, and a Scholarship in Fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Michigan Quarterly Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Writers Forum, The South Dakota Review, American Way, Colorado Review, Jewish Women's Literary Annual, and Eureka Literary Magazine. Wineberg is a dynamic guest-speaker and has presented at many conferences like the AWP Conference, Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, PEN and BRUSH Writing Conference, and many others.  She taught a total of five years, including creative writing at University School of Nashville Evening Classes for Adults, and as an Adjunct Professor in English at New York University. Wineberg was a legal aid lawyer, public defender, and a lawyer in private practice earlier in her career. She earned a JD from University of Denver College of Law and a BA with distinction from the University of Michigan. She has lived in Nashville and Denver, and resides in New York City. For more information, please consult: www.ronnawineberg.com.  Awesome read! Awesome talk! So much to learn! Before you go... Could you do me a favor? Please go to my website at https://www.stevenmiletto.com/reviews/ or open the podcast app that you are listening to me on, and would you rate and review the podcast? That would be Awesome. Thanks! If you are listening on Apple Podcasts on your phone, go to the logo - click so that you are on the main page with a listing of the episodes for my podcast and scroll to the bottom. There you will see a place to rate and review. Could you review me? That would be so cool. Thank you! Hey, I've got another favor...could you share the podcast with one of your friends, colleagues, and family members? Hmmm? What do you think? That would so awesome! Thanks for sharing! Thanks for listening! Connect & Learn More: www.ronnawineberg.com https://mobile.twitter.com/Ronnawineberg Length - 28:38

Critically acclaimed debut crime novelist and poet, Margot Douaihy, spoke with me about what she learned from Gillian Flynn, subverting the hard-boiled mystery, and writing a queer, iconoclastic, chain-smoking, punk rock nun, for her latest SCORCHED GRACE. Margot Douaihy is an award-winning educator, editor, and poet whose first novel is Scorched Grace, the inaugural title published by Gillian Flynn Books, an imprint with Zando. It was named a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, Amazon Editors' Choice
, Apple Books Best Book of the Month, and one of the “most anticipated crime books” of the year by Barnes & Noble, Crime Reads, Electric Lit, LGBTQ Reads and many others. The book has been described as a lyrical mystery that kicks off a series featuring protagonist “Sister Holiday, a chain-smoking, heavily tattooed, queer nun, [who] puts her amateur sleuthing skills to the test…” Don Winslow, #1 internationally bestselling author of The Power of the Dog and City on Fire, said of the book, “Margot Douaihy's bold entry into the hard-boiled genre revitalizes it for our times. Skillfully plotted, propulsive, and deeply engaged with the communities it represents, Scorched Grace is one of the best crime fiction debuts I've come across in a long while.” Margot has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, is the co-editor of Cambridge's Elements in Crime Narratives series, teaches Creative Writing and Editing/Publishing at Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, NH, and is the author of four poetry collections. Her writing has been featured in Colorado Review; The Florida Review; North American Review; PBS NewsHour; Portland Review, and many others. [Discover The Writer Files Extra: Get 'The Writer Files' Podcast Delivered Straight to Your Inbox at writerfiles.fm] [If you're a fan of The Writer Files, please click FOLLOW to automatically see new interviews. And drop us a rating or a review wherever you listen] In this file Margot Douaihy and I discussed: The winding path to celebrated debut novel Why we uphold a tragic misconception about writers How to honor, and repudiate, masters of the noir genre The ecosystem of her deep immersion and channeling of the muse How to find the broad brush strokes of causality in crime Why writers need to double down and follow their curiosity And a lot more! Show Notes: margotdouaihy.com Scorched Grace By Margot Douaihy (Amazon) Margot Douaihy on Instagram Margot Douaihy on Twitter Kelton Reid on Twitter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sandi Wisenberg joins Let's Talk Memoir for a conversation about finding home, the structure our books need, her career as a journalist, negotiating a legacy of woman shame and Jewish shame, writing what you have to, and her new collection of memoiristic essays, The Wandering Womb.   Also in this episode: -looking for home -not wrapping our writing up too neatly -a closer look at “the wandering Jew” trope   Further reading about The Wandering Jew trope from rootsmetals.com: https://www.rootsmetals.com/blogs/news/the-wandering-jew-trope   Books mentioned in this episode: The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy A Chorus of Stones by Susan Griffin Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her by Susan Griffin Books by Phillip Lopate   S.L. Wisenberg is the author of the forthcoming book, The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home, winner of the Juniper Prize in creative nonfiction. It will be published March 31, 2023, by the University of Massachusetts Press. She's also the author of a short-story collection, The Sweetheart Is In; an essay collection, Holocaust Girls: History, Memory, & Other Obsessions; and a nonfiction chronicle, The Adventures of Cancer Bitch. She is a fourth-generation native Texan who lives in Chicago and edits Another Chicago Magazine. She has an MFA in fiction from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and a BSJ from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She was a feature writer for the Miami Herald and has published prose and poetry in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Narrative, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, and many other places. Her anthologized work is in Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction, Creating Nonfiction: A Guide and Anthology, Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft, Life is Short--Art is Shorter, and a number of other books. For ten years she was co-director of Northwestern's then-MA/MFA in Creative Writing program and was a graduate faculty recipient of a Distinguished Teacher Award. She has been the literary editor of TriQuarterly, the creative nonfiction editor of Another Chicago Magazine. and is now the editor of ACM. She's received a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. She was the Coal Royalty Chair for a semester at the University of Alabama, teaching in the MFA program. Wisenberg has read her work and lectured at many universities and colleges, including Brown, Creighton, Minnesota State, Texas A&M, University of Tampa, Ripon, and Lafayette. Besides Northwestern, she has taught at DePaul, Roosevelt, Western Michigan, North Park University, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is working on a collection of short stories that are pre- and post-Holocaust and have a connection to old movies and Houston. One of these was runner-up in Narrative Magazine's Fall 2021 contest, and another won Narrative's Spring 22 contest.    Connect with Sandi: https://www.facebook.com/sandi.wisenberg Sandi Wisenberg @SLWisenberg slwisenberg.com Sandi's first three books: https://bookshop.org/books?keywords=wisenberg Sandi's forthcoming book:  https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781625347350 or Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-wandering-womb-s-l-wisenberg/1142599024?ean=9781625347350 -- Ronit Plank is a writer, teacher, and editor whose work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Writer's Digest, The Rumpus, American Literary Review, Hippocampus, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named a 2021 Best True Crime Book by Book Riot and was a Finalist in the National Indie Excellence Awards, the Housatonic Book Awards, and the Book of the Year Awards. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, the Best of the Net, and the Best Microfiction Anthology, and her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts' Eludia Award. She is creative nonfiction editor at The Citron Review and lives in Seattle with her family where she is working on her next book.   More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com Sign up for monthly podcast and writing updates: https://bit.ly/33nyTKd Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/ More about WHEN SHE COMES BACK, a memoir: https://ronitplank.com/book/ More about HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE, a short story collection: https://ronitplank.com/home-is-a-made-up-place/ Connect with Ronit: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/ https://twitter.com/RonitPlank https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank   Background photo: Canva Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll's Fingers

City Lights presents Peter Turchi in conversation with Austin Kleon. Peter Turchi discusses his new book “(Don't) Stop Me if You've Heard This Before (and Other Essays on Writing Fiction)”, published by Trinity University Press. This virtual event was hosted by Peter Maravelis. You can purchase copies of “(Don't) Stop Me if You've Heard This Before (and Other Essays on Writing Fiction)” directly from City Lights here: https://citylights.com/dont-stop-me-if-youve-heard-this-befor/ Peter Turchi has written and coedited several books on writing fiction, including “Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer”, “A Muse and a Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic”, “A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft”, and “(Don't) Stop Me if You've Heard This Before (and Other Essays on Writing Fiction)”. His stories have appeared in “Ploughshares”, “Story”, the “Alaska Quarterly Review”, “Puerto del Sol”, and the “Colorado Review”, among other journals. He has received numerous accolades, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is a professor of creative writing at the University of Houston. Austin Kleon is a New York Times bestselling author. His books include “Steal Like an Artist”; “Show Your Work!”; “Keep Going”; “Steal Like An Artist Journal”; and “Newspaper Blackout”. His works focus on creativity in today's world. He has spoken at organizations such as Pixar, Google, and TEDx, and at conferences such as The Economist's Human Potential Summit and SXSW. This event was made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation: citylights.com/foundation

Margot Douaihy earned a BA in Writing from the University of Pittsburgh Writing Program, an MA in Creative & Life Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. Douaihy is the author of the true-crime poetry project Bandit/Queen: The Runaway Story of Belle Starr; Scranton Lace; the Lambda Literary Finalist Girls Like You (Clemson University Press); and I Would Ruby If I Could (Factory Hollow Press). Douaihy's sleuth fiction inhabits and reconstructs hardboiled PI tropes through a queer lens. Douaihy's work has been featured in PBS NewsHour, Colorado Review, Madison Review, Tahoma Literary Review, North American Review, among others. Honors include the Aesthetica Magazine Creative Writing Award, Finalist (2020), Red Hen Press Quill Prose Award, Finalist (2019), C&R Press Best Novel Award, Longlist (2018), Lambda Literary Award Poetry, Finalist (2015), and River Styx Micro-Fiction Contest Finalist (2015). Margot joins Barbara to talk about Scorched Grace, the first imprint of Gillian Flynn/Zando. They talk about the irreverent nun protagonist, Sister Holiday in the mystery novel, naming characters, writing dialogue, backstory, and so much more. For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Recorded in March, 2023. Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettCo-Host: Marrie StoneMusic and sound design: Travis Barrett

What a thrill it was to talk with Christopher Spaide about one of the great poems of this century, Terrance Hayes's "The Golden Shovel."This is a two-for-one Close Readings experience, since you can't talk about the Hayes poem without also discussing the Gwendolyn Brooks poem that his is "after," "We Real Cool."Christopher Spaide is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, where he focuses on poetry, ecopoetics, American literature, and Asian American literature. His academic writing on poetry (as well as music and comics) appears in American Literary History, The Cambridge Quarterly, College Literature, Contemporary Literature, ELH, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and several edited collections. His essays and reviews and his poems appear in The Boston Globe, Boston Review, Colorado Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry, Slate, The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and honors from Harvard University, the James Merrill House, and the Keasbey Foundation.As ever, if you're enjoying the podcast, please leave a rating and review, and make sure you're following us. Share Close Readings with a friend! And subscribe to the newsletter, where you'll get more thoughts from me and links to things that come up during the episodes.

In 1942, the US government began construction on a sixty-thousand-acre planned community named Oak Ridge in a rural area west of Knoxville, Tennessee. Unmarked on regional maps, Oak Ridge attracted more than seventy thousand people eager for high-paying wartime jobs. Among them was author Emily Strasser's grandfather George, a chemist. All employees—from scientists to secretaries, from military personnel to construction workers—were restricted by the tightest security. They were provided only the minimum information necessary to perform their jobs. It wasn't until three years later that the citizens of Oak Ridge, and the rest of the world, learned the true purpose of the local industry. Oak Ridge was one of three secret cities constructed by the Manhattan Project for the express purpose of developing the first atomic bomb, which devastated Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. In Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History (UP of Kentucky, 2023), Emily Strasser exposes the toxic legacy—political, environmental, and personal—that forever polluted her family, a community, the nation, and the world. Sifting through archives and family memories, and traveling to the deserts of Nevada and the living rooms of Hiroshima, she grapples with the far-reaching ramifications of her grandfather's work. She learns that during the three decades he spent building nuclear weapons, George suffered from increasingly debilitating mental illness. Returning to Oak Ridge, Strasser confronts the widespread contamination resulting from nuclear weapons production and the government's disregard for its impact on the environment and public health. With brilliant insight, she reveals the intersections between the culture of secrecy in her family and the institutionalized secrecy within the nuclear industry, which persists, with grave consequences, to this day. Emily Strasser: Emily Strasser is a writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She received her MFA in nonfiction from the University of Minnesota. Her work has appeared in Catapult, Ploughshares, Guernica, Colorado Review, The Bitter Southerner, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Gulf Coast, and Tricycle, among others, and she was the presenter of the BBC podcast “The Bomb.” Her essays have been named notable in Best American Essays 2016 and 2017 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was a winner of the 2015 Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Contest, a 2016 AWP Intro Award, a 2016 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist's Initiative Grant, and the 2016 W.K. Rose Fellowship from Vassar College. She served as a 2018-19 Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University and a 2019 McKnight Writing Fellow. Cody Skahan (cas12@hi.is) is a student in the MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow. His work focuses on environmentalism in Iceland, especially the social and political implications of the youth environmentalist movement in an arctic country that has created for itself a façade of being environmentally and socially progressive. More generally, his other interests span anywhere from critical theory, psychoanalysis, anarchism, cultural studies, anime, and applying theory through praxis. Cody has a blog where he is trying to write more rather than just only read and talk about books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In 1942, the US government began construction on a sixty-thousand-acre planned community named Oak Ridge in a rural area west of Knoxville, Tennessee. Unmarked on regional maps, Oak Ridge attracted more than seventy thousand people eager for high-paying wartime jobs. Among them was author Emily Strasser's grandfather George, a chemist. All employees—from scientists to secretaries, from military personnel to construction workers—were restricted by the tightest security. They were provided only the minimum information necessary to perform their jobs. It wasn't until three years later that the citizens of Oak Ridge, and the rest of the world, learned the true purpose of the local industry. Oak Ridge was one of three secret cities constructed by the Manhattan Project for the express purpose of developing the first atomic bomb, which devastated Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. In Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History (UP of Kentucky, 2023), Emily Strasser exposes the toxic legacy—political, environmental, and personal—that forever polluted her family, a community, the nation, and the world. Sifting through archives and family memories, and traveling to the deserts of Nevada and the living rooms of Hiroshima, she grapples with the far-reaching ramifications of her grandfather's work. She learns that during the three decades he spent building nuclear weapons, George suffered from increasingly debilitating mental illness. Returning to Oak Ridge, Strasser confronts the widespread contamination resulting from nuclear weapons production and the government's disregard for its impact on the environment and public health. With brilliant insight, she reveals the intersections between the culture of secrecy in her family and the institutionalized secrecy within the nuclear industry, which persists, with grave consequences, to this day. Emily Strasser: Emily Strasser is a writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She received her MFA in nonfiction from the University of Minnesota. Her work has appeared in Catapult, Ploughshares, Guernica, Colorado Review, The Bitter Southerner, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Gulf Coast, and Tricycle, among others, and she was the presenter of the BBC podcast “The Bomb.” Her essays have been named notable in Best American Essays 2016 and 2017 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was a winner of the 2015 Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Contest, a 2016 AWP Intro Award, a 2016 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist's Initiative Grant, and the 2016 W.K. Rose Fellowship from Vassar College. She served as a 2018-19 Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University and a 2019 McKnight Writing Fellow. Cody Skahan (cas12@hi.is) is a student in the MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow. His work focuses on environmentalism in Iceland, especially the social and political implications of the youth environmentalist movement in an arctic country that has created for itself a façade of being environmentally and socially progressive. More generally, his other interests span anywhere from critical theory, psychoanalysis, anarchism, cultural studies, anime, and applying theory through praxis. Cody has a blog where he is trying to write more rather than just only read and talk about books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In 1942, the US government began construction on a sixty-thousand-acre planned community named Oak Ridge in a rural area west of Knoxville, Tennessee. Unmarked on regional maps, Oak Ridge attracted more than seventy thousand people eager for high-paying wartime jobs. Among them was author Emily Strasser's grandfather George, a chemist. All employees—from scientists to secretaries, from military personnel to construction workers—were restricted by the tightest security. They were provided only the minimum information necessary to perform their jobs. It wasn't until three years later that the citizens of Oak Ridge, and the rest of the world, learned the true purpose of the local industry. Oak Ridge was one of three secret cities constructed by the Manhattan Project for the express purpose of developing the first atomic bomb, which devastated Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. In Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History (UP of Kentucky, 2023), Emily Strasser exposes the toxic legacy—political, environmental, and personal—that forever polluted her family, a community, the nation, and the world. Sifting through archives and family memories, and traveling to the deserts of Nevada and the living rooms of Hiroshima, she grapples with the far-reaching ramifications of her grandfather's work. She learns that during the three decades he spent building nuclear weapons, George suffered from increasingly debilitating mental illness. Returning to Oak Ridge, Strasser confronts the widespread contamination resulting from nuclear weapons production and the government's disregard for its impact on the environment and public health. With brilliant insight, she reveals the intersections between the culture of secrecy in her family and the institutionalized secrecy within the nuclear industry, which persists, with grave consequences, to this day. Emily Strasser: Emily Strasser is a writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She received her MFA in nonfiction from the University of Minnesota. Her work has appeared in Catapult, Ploughshares, Guernica, Colorado Review, The Bitter Southerner, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Gulf Coast, and Tricycle, among others, and she was the presenter of the BBC podcast “The Bomb.” Her essays have been named notable in Best American Essays 2016 and 2017 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was a winner of the 2015 Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Contest, a 2016 AWP Intro Award, a 2016 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist's Initiative Grant, and the 2016 W.K. Rose Fellowship from Vassar College. She served as a 2018-19 Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University and a 2019 McKnight Writing Fellow. Cody Skahan (cas12@hi.is) is a student in the MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow. His work focuses on environmentalism in Iceland, especially the social and political implications of the youth environmentalist movement in an arctic country that has created for itself a façade of being environmentally and socially progressive. More generally, his other interests span anywhere from critical theory, psychoanalysis, anarchism, cultural studies, anime, and applying theory through praxis. Cody has a blog where he is trying to write more rather than just only read and talk about books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In this episode of "Craftwork," author Peter Turchi teaches a lesson on how to use shifting power dynamics to write more dynamic scenes in fiction. Turchi is the author of seven books and the co-editor of three anthologies. His books include (Don't) Stop Me if You've Heard This Before; A Muse and A Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic; Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer; Suburban Journals: The Sketchbooks, Drawings, and Prints of Charles Ritchie, in collaboration with the artist; a novel, The Girls Next Door; a collection of stories, Magician; and The Pirate Prince, co-written with Cape Cod treasure hunter Barry Clifford, about Clifford's discovery of the pirate ship Whydah. His short story “Night, Truck, Two Lights Burning” has been published, with images by Charles Ritchie, in a limited edition artist's book. He has also co-edited, with Andrea Barrett, A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft, The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work and, with Charles Baxter, Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life. Turchi's work has appeared in Tin House, Fiction Writers Review, Ploughshares, Story, The Alaska Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, and The Colorado Review, among other journals. His honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Washington College's Sophie Kerr Prize, an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award, North Carolina's Sir Walter Raleigh Award, and having a quotation from A Muse and a Maze serve as the answer to the New York Times Magazine Sunday acrostic. Born in Baltimore, he earned his BA at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, and his MFA at the University of Arizona. He has taught at Northwestern University and Appalachian State University, and has been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. For 15 years he directed The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina; at Arizona State University he taught fiction and served as Director of Creative Writing and Director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. He currently teaches at the University of Houston, and in Warren Wilson's MFA Program for Writers. Laura, his wife, is a Clinical Professor in English at Arizona State University, where she is curriculum director for “RaceB4Race: Sustaining, Building, Innovating” at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies; she also co-directs the Shakespeare and Social Justice Project at the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles. Reed, their son, is a musician (www.reedturchi.com). *** Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Launched in 2011. Books. Literature. Writing. Publishing. Authors. Screenwriters. Etc. Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeart Radio, etc. Subscribe to Brad Listi's email newsletter. Support the show on Patreon Merch @otherppl Instagram  YouTube TikTok Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Not too long ago, Anne Marie had the opportunity to talk to Emily Strasser. Emily has written a book about a little-known community built in secret by the United States government in rural western Knoxville, Tennessee. Oak Ridge was one of three secret cities constructed by the Manhattan Project. Emily Strasser is a writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She received her MFA in nonfiction from the University of Minnesota. Her work has appeared in Catapult, Ploughshares, Guernica, Colorado Review, The Bitter Southerner, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Gulf Coast, and Tricycle, among others, and she was the presenter of the BBC podcast “The Bomb.” Her essays have been named notable in Best American Essays 2016 and 2017 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was a winner of the 2015 Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Contest, a 2016 AWP Intro Award, a 2016 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist's Initiative Grant, and the 2016 W.K. Rose Fellowship from Vassar College. She served as a 2018-19 Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University and a 2019 McKnight Writing Fellow. Her first book, Half-Life of a Secret, a memoir on the intersection of family and national secrets in the nuclear city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, is forthcoming in April 2023. Pre-order here.In this episode, Emily talks about her book, Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History, part history, part memoir, and part biography.Resources:Emily Strasser: https://emilystrasser.comHalf-Life of a Secret: https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813197197/half-life-of-a-secret/Oak-Ridge, Tennessee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Ridge,_TennesseeAnna Rosenberg Episode: https://armchairhistorians.buzzsprout.com/1020073/12009142Follow us on Social Media:Instagram: @armchairhistoriansTwitter: @ArmchairHistor1Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/armchairhistoriansSupport Armchair Historians:Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/armchairhistoriansKo-fi: https://ko-fi.com/belgiumrabbitproductionsSupport the show

Hi there, Today I am so happy to be arts calling Monica Macansantos! About our guest: Monica Macansantos (monicamacansantos.com) is a former James A. Michener Fellow for Fiction and Poetry at the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned her MFA in Writing. She also holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the Victoria University of Wellington, International Institute of Modern Letters. Her debut collection of stories about Filipinos at home and in the diaspora, Love and Other Rituals, is out from the University of Melbourne's Grattan Street Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, The Hopkins Review, Bennington Review, The Masters Review, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and Katherine Mansfield and Children (Edinburgh University Press), among other places. Her work has been recognized as Notable in the Best American Essays 2022 _and the _Best American Essays 2016, and has received finalist and honorable mention citations from the _Glimmer Train _Fiction Open. Her work has also been translated into Czech (_Kuřata v hadí kleci: _Prague, Argo Press, 2020) and Spanish (_Arbolarium, Antologia Poetica de los Cinco Continentes: _Bogota, Colegio Bilingüe José Max León, 2019).  She has received fellowships and scholarships from the Michener Center for Writers, Hedgebrook, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the I-Park Foundation, Storyknife Writers Retreat, Moriumius (Japan), the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi, and the International Institute of Modern Letters.  Her completed manuscripts also include a collection of essays entitled Returning to My Father's Kitchen about grief, home, and belonging, and a novel entitled People We Trust about three young people who come of age in Marcos-era Philippines. She is currently working on a second novel, entitled Marian and Anja, about two childhood friends navigating the in-betweenness of their cultural identities in '90s Philippines and 2010s Austin, as well as a second story collection about Filipinos at home, in the US, and in New Zealand. She has lived in Delaware, Texas, the Philippines, and New Zealand, and loves tango, cooking, swimming, and birds. She also loves writing about her late father, the poet Francis C. Macansantos, from whom she inherited her love of writing, laughter, and life. Love & Other RItuals, now available here: https://www.monicamacansantos.com and here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/love-and-other-rituals-selected-stories-monica-macansantos/18834429 Twitter: https://twitter.com/missmacansantos Thanks for taking the time to chat on the show, Monica! All the best! -- Arts Calling is produced by Jaime Alejandro (cruzfolio.com). If you like the show: please consider reviewing the podcast and sharing it with those who love the arts, or are starting their creative journey! Your support truly makes a difference, so check out the new website artscalling.com for the latest episodes! Go make a dent: much love, j

John Sibley Williams is the author of Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (Cider Press Review Book Award, 2021), The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award, 2021), As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize, 2019), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. His book Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming in translated form by the Portuguese press do lado esquerdo. He has also served as editor of two Northwest poetry anthologies, Alive at the Center (Ooligan Press, 2013) and Motionless from the Iron Bridge (barebones books, 2013). A twenty-eight-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Laux/Millar Prize, Wabash Prize, Philip Booth Award, Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, The 46er Prize, Nancy D. Hargrove Editors' Prize, Confrontation Poetry Prize, and Vallum Award for Poetry. Previous publishing credits include: Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Midwest Quarterly, Southern Review, Colorado Review, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, Massachusetts Review, Poet Lore, Saranac Review, Atlanta Review, TriQuarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, and various anthologies.

On the latest episode of Now, Appalachia, Eliot interviews author Rebecca Bernard about her new short story collection OUR SISTER WHO WILL NOT DIE. Rebecca is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Angelo State University. Her work has appeared in Colorado Review, Southwest Review, Juked, Pleiades, and elsewhere and has been recognized in Best American Short Stories.

On the latest episode of Now, Appalachia, Eliot interviews author Rebecca Bernard about her new short story collection OUR SISTER WHO WILL NOT DIE. Rebecca is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Angelo State University. Her work has appeared in Colorado Review, Southwest Review, Juked, Pleiades, and elsewhere and has been recognized in Best American Short Stories. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/eliot-parker/support

Luke Dani Blue is the author of the debut story collection Pretend It's My Body, available from The Feminist Press. It is the official September pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club. Blue's stories have appeared in the Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, and have been included on the list of the year's most distinguished stories in Best American Short Stories 2016. Originally from Michigan, Luke (they/them) is a two-time college dropout and time-traveling Victorian invalid who resides most reliably on the internet. They are also an astrologer.  *** Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Launched in 2011. Books. Literature. Writing. Publishing. Authors. Screenwriters. Etc. Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeart Radio, etc. Subscribe to Brad Listi's email newsletter. Support the show on Patreon Merch @otherppl Instagram  YouTube Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Enter the poetic dreamscape of Piscean poets Sara Lupita Olivares and Alyssa Jewell. People born under the star sign of Pisces (Feb 19-March 20) are known for being old souls with a great affinity for both mystical and artistic realms. Pisces is a water sign ruled by Neptune, a planet of mystery and psychic energy. Pisceans are gifted with natural intuition and house creative gifts that truly captivate us. Dreams and poetry are a very natural intersection to find a creative Pisces.  In this episode of The Fairy Ring, we discuss dreams and how they connect to poetry in seen and unseen ways. Grab a cup of tea and join us for our watery, dreamy, and poetic conversation. Sara Lupita Olivares is the author of Migratory Sound (The University of Arkansas Press), which was selected as winner of the 2020 CantoMundo Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Field Things (dancing girl press). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New York Times, Hayden's Ferry Review, Black Warrior Review, Salt Hill Journal, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She currently lives and teaches in the midwest. website: www.saralupitaolivares.com instagram: saralupitao Alyssa Jewell edits poetry for Waxwing as well as Third Coast and coordinates the Poets in Print reading series at the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, Witness, Virginia Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Hayden's Ferry Review,  Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Grand Rapids where she teaches college ESL classes. She is a graduate student at Western Michigan University. website: alyssajewell.orgThe Poets in Print Event page is: https://kalbookarts.org/events/ Thank you for listening. Taking a moment to rate and share is a great source of support. Your energy is appreciated

Celebrated Chicana poet Naomi Helena Quinoñez reads and discusses poems that thematize divine feminine power, women's spirituality, racial oppression, social justice, and more. Naomi Helena Quiñonez is a poet, educator and activist, and author of three collections of poetry, Exiled Moon, The Smoking Mirror, and Hummingbird Dream/Sueño de Colibri. Quiñonez edited several critical and literary publications including Invocation L.A: Urban Multicultural Poetry Anthology, which won the American Book Award, Decolonial Voices, and Caminos Magazine. She holds a Ph.D. in American History and contributes to the scholarship of Latino/as and women of color. Quiñonez has been featured throughout the country, including the Los Angeles Writers Festival, the Nuyrican Café, the De Young Museum, and the Miami Book Festival. She has shared the mic with Quincy Troupe, Octavia Butler, Luis Rodriguez, and Ana Castillo. Her work has appeared in the Colorado Review, Infinite Divisions, Voices of our Ancestors, and Maestrapeace. Recently Quiñonez received the Teyolia Community Award from the San Francisco International Flor Y Canto Festival. She's also an honoree of the San Francisco Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, a recipient of the Berkeley Lifetime Achievement Award in poetry, a Rockefeller Fellowship, the American Book Award, and a California Arts Grant. She is featured in Notable Hispanic Women and the Dictionary of Literary Biography. She currently lives in Oakland. For more information about the author's books or to purchase copies, contact Naomi Helena Quiñonez at naomiquinonez@yahoo.com

In this episode Eric sits down with the wonderful author Lynne Thompson where they discuss her childhood, family roots and fascination with African American history. How she transitioned from being a lawyer, to eventually following her dream to write and become a poet. They discuss how Thompson was recently appointed Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles and the many activities she has done in that role; to promote literacy for Angelinos! They discuss her writing process; her use of sound and rhythm and how she has been influenced by renowned musicians and artists such as Miles Davis and William Pajaud. Lynne shares inspiring words of wisdom to writers.. and even recites one of her beautiful poems.. “The House of Many Pleasures! For more visit: www.ericsperspective.comGuest Bio: Lynne Thompson is the 2021-2022 Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles. The daughter of Caribbean immigrants, her poetry collections include Beg No Pardon (2007), winner of the Perugia Press Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association's New Writers Award; Start With A Small Guitar (2013), from What Books Press; and Fretwork (2019), winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize. Thompson's honors include the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award (poetry) and the Stephen Dunn Prize for Poetry as well as fellowships from the City of Los Angeles, Vermont Studio Center, and the Summer Literary Series in Kenya. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Poem-A-Day (Academy of American Poets), New England Review, Colorado Review, Pleiades, Ecotone, and Best American Poetry, to name a few. A lawyer by training, Thompson sits on the boards of the Los Angeles Review of Books and Cave Canem and is the Chair of the Board of Trustees at Scripps College, her alma mater. She facilitates private workshops, most recently for Beyond Baroque, Poetry By the Sea Conference, Moorpark College Writers Festival, and Central Coast Writers' Conference. Thompson is a native of Los Angeles, California, where she resides.About Eric's Perspective: A podcast series on African American art with Eric Hanks — African American art specialist, owner of the renowned M. Hanks Gallery and commissioner on the Los Angeles County Arts Commission; offers his perspective on African American art through in-depth conversations with fellow art enthusiasts where they discuss the past, present & future of African American art.For more on Eric's Perspective, visit www.ericsperspective.com#ERICSPERSPECTIVE #AFRICANAMERICAN #ART SUBSCRIBE: http://bit.ly/2vVJkDn LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2B6wB3USpotify: https://spoti.fi/3j6QRmWGoogle Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3fNNgrYiHeartRadio: https://ihr.fm/2KtYGXv Pandora: https://pdora.co/38pFWAmConnect with us ONLINE: Visit Eric's Perspective website: https://bit.ly/2ZQ41x1Facebook: https://bit.ly/3jq5fXPInstagram: https://bit.ly/39jFZxGTwitter: https://bit.ly/2OMRx33 www.mhanksgallery.comAbout Eric Hanks: African American art specialist and owner of the renowned M. Hanks Gallery, Eric Hanks is one of the leading representatives of Black artists, promoting and selling their works nationally to individual and museum collections, publishing exhibition catalogues, teaching art appreciation classes, and writing articles and essays appearing in prestigious art books and various other publications. 

In part two of Colorado Review's May podcast, Podcast Host Lilia Shrayfer sits down with Colorado State University alum and former Colorado Review Podcast Editor Kylan Rice. Together, they talk about their experiences at AWP, writing and professionalization, and life after the MFA.

In this special segment, Colorado Review celebrates National Poetry Month with readings across our issues beginning with our first issue dating back to Winter 1956-57. During the last few weeks, interns have curated selections from Langston Hughes, Gillian Kiley, Denise Levertov, Lisa Fishman, Martha Ronk, Kevin Goodan, Charles Bukowski, and C.D. Wright.

*** Links to buy "The Mother Tree" ***Softcover version: https://faithmatters.org/themothertreeAudible and Kindle version: https://www.amazon.com/Mother-Tree-Discovering-Wisdom-Divine/dp/B09YCDHTDZ/Today, we're excited to announce the latest offering from Faith Matters Publishing, following our previous books All Things New by Terryl and Fiona Givens, Restoration by Patrick Mason, and Better Than Happy by Jody Moore.This book is called The Mother Tree: Discovering the Love and Wisdom  of Our Divine Mother, and was written by Kathryn Knight Sonntag. It is a truly beautiful book and a great read.The timing of this release is interesting. First, we're coming up on Mothers Day and we love that this book is a profound recognition of  our Divine Mother. Second, Elder Renlund of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles recently gave an important talk to the women of the church on the doctrine of Heavenly Mother. While celebrating with us this unique doctrine, he also had words of caution about demanding further revelation on Heavenly Mother theology, among other things. Though this book was obviously completed well before that recent address, it strikes us as very much in the same spirit. It is a celebration of our unique doctrine, which is beautifully outlined in the church's Gospel Topics essay on Heavenly Mother. But the book values experiencing her presence in the world and in our lives over theological speculation. It is about how accessing different ways of knowing–through the languages of art, nature, poetry and stillness–can lead to a personal relationship with our Divine Mother. And it points to surprising ways in which, as the Church's essay points out, She has always been there in our scriptures.So today we spoke with the author of The Mother Tree, Kathryn Knight Sonntag. Kathryn's book of poetry The Tree at the Center was a 2019 Association for Mormon Letters Awards finalist. Her poetry and essays have appeared in many publications including Colorado Review, Rock & Sling, and Dialogue. She holds a master's degree in landscape architecture and environmental planning, and works as a landscape architect and freelance writer in Salt Lake City.Just a note on where you can purchase the book. As of today, the Kindle version is available on Amazon but the print version is just coming off the press. It will be a few weeks before you can buy it on Amazon. Since we know that many of you will want a physical copy of the book for Mother's Day, we've set up a special shipping operation where you can buy the book and have it shipped to you right away. In order to do that, head to faithmatters.org/themothertree. You'll be sent straight to a product page where you can buy the book, and Faith Matters is paying the cost of shipping for all US customers so that nothing gets in the way if you'd like to have this book as a gift in time for Mother's Day.

Twila Newey has an M.F.A. in Writing and Poetics from Naropa. Her poems were finalists for the 2019 Coniston Prize at Radar Poetry and won honorable mention in the 2019 JuxtaProse Poetry Contest. You can read recent work at Interim Poetics, Sugarhouse Review, Green Mountains Review, and Moist Poetry journal. Twila lives in Northern California at the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers.Read: Twila's poems "honeycomb" and "Theories of Heaven" at Green Mountain Review.Natalie Solmer is the founder and Editor In Chief of The Indianapolis Review, and is an Assistant Professor of English at Ivy Tech Community College. She grew up in South Bend, Indiana, went to Clemson University in South Carolina and majored in horticulture. Before her return to grad school and career in teaching, she worked in the horticultural field, primarily as a grocery store florist for 13 years. Her poetry has been published in numerous publications such as: Colorado Review, North American Review, The Literary Review, and Pleiades. She also has published her visual poetry and visual art in places such as Yes, Poetry and Babel Tower Notice Board. Read: Natalie Solmer's poem "Girl of Water, I could Swallow a Garden" at EcoTheo Review.

Read: Kasey Jueds' poem "Kittatinny," which she reads on the episode.Kasey Jueds a poet living in the Catskill Mountains in New York. Kasey poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications including American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bennington Review, Cave Wall, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Narrative, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, Provincetown Arts, River Styx, Salamander, The Southampton Review, Tinderbox, and Waxwing.Kasey has been a resident at the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Soapstone, and the Ucross Foundation; and a visiting poet at the University of Pennsylvania, LaSalle College, and the University of Northern Colorado. Kasey's first book Keeper first book, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press, and was published by Pitt in fall, 2013. Kasey's second book, The Thicket, is has just been published by Pittsburg Press this month, November, 2021.Purchase: The Thicket by Kasey Jueds (UPitt Press, 2021).