Podcasts about whiting writers award

We always hear about Benjamin Franklin's accomplishments while he was alive, but his bet on America in his Final Will and Testament truly left a legacy.  Author Michael Meyer joins us and shares this story and more from his book "Benjamin Franklin's Last Bet: The Favorite Founder's Divisive Death, Enduring Afterlife and Blueprint for American Prosperity." Michael Meyer is the author of multiple critically acclaimed books, as well as articles in the New York Times and other outlets. A Fulbright scholar, Guggenheim, NEH, Cullman Center and MacDowell fellow, and the recipient of the Whiting Writers Award, Meyer is a Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches nonfiction writing. He lives with his family in Pittsburgh. This episode is sponsored by Good Capital, a registered investment advisor focused on families, organizations and businesses that also want to plant seeds for future generations. Simplicity, a foundational wealth plan and investing for decades and generations, not days or quarters. Good People. Good Strategies. Good Capital. Visit www.GoodCapital.pro , if this appeals to you.  Follow us at www.BuildUponTheGood.com and on Facebook, Instagram and Bluesky. *Special thanks to Sean Kelly and the band The Samples for permission to use "Streets in the Rain." Please support them at www.TheSamples.com 

Mark Doty is a poet, essayist, memoirist and author of nine books of poetry. His book Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems won the 2008 National Book Award. He has also received other literary awards, including the Whiting Writers Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, two Lambda Literary Awards and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. His poetry collection “My Alexandria” was chosen for the National Poetry Series. Doty has also received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships, a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Award, and the Witter Bynner Prize. Doty's most recent book is What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life (Norton), a memoir about his poetic relationship with Walt Whitman. Doty is a distinguished professor of English and the director of Writers House at Rutgers University.-bio via Library of Congress Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Ben Fountain's work has received the Los Angeles Book Prize for Fiction, and a Whiting Writers Award, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award and runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.  His books include Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, and the novel Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award.  His non-fiction book is Beautiful Country Burn Again.  His latest novel is Devil Makes Three. We talked about Ben's early exposure to social justice and politics, his history as a traveler to Haiti, protagonists who may or may not stake their claim on their own agency, writing from a female Haitian's point of view, his creative writing process, and Robert Stone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Berkeley Talks episode 179, Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson reads several poems, including "The Mud Sermon," "The Bicycle Eclogue" and "After the Hurricane." His April reading was part of the UC Berkeley Library's monthly event Lunch Poems."I take this voyage into poetry very seriously," begins Hutchinson, "and take none of it for granted, because of the weight of history, both growing up in Jamaica and knowing the violent history that comes with that. But also the violence, too, of canon, and seeing that my work as a poet, in part, is to figure out what sort of emancipatory forces I should summon. Luckily, I stand in great shoulders within the Caribbean tradition of many poets and writers that I admire, and envy, and wish they hadn't been born. Don't tell them that. This isn't recorded, of course."Here's “A Mud Sermon,” one of the poems Hutchinson read during the event:They shovelled the long trenches day and night.Frostbitten mud. Shellshock mud. Dungheap mud. Imperial mud.Venereal mud. Malaria mud. Hun bait mud. Mating mud.1655 mud: white flashes of sharks. Golgotha mud. Chilblain mud.Caliban mud. Cannibal mud. Ha ha ha mud. Amnesia mud.Drapetomania mud. Lice mud. Pyrexia mud. Exposure mud. Aphasia mud.No-man's-land's-Everyman's mud. And the smoking flax mud.Dysentery mud. Septic sore mud. Hog pen mud. Nephritis mud.Constipated mud. Faith mud. Sandfly fever mud. Rat mud.Sheol mud. Ir-ha-cheres mud. Ague mud. Asquith mud. Parade mud.Scabies mud. Mumps mud. Memra mud. Pneumonia mud.Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin mud. Civil war mud.And darkness and worms will be their dwelling-place mud.Yaws mud. Gog mud. Magog mud. God mud.Canaan the unseen, as promised, saw mud.They resurrected new counter-kingdoms,by the arbitrament of the sword mud.Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of two poetry collections: Far District and House of Lords and Commons. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among others. He is a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art, and teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University.Lunch Poems is an ongoing poetry reading series at Berkeley that began in 2014. All readings happen from 12:10 p.m. to 12:50 p.m. on the first Thursday of the month. A new season of Lunch Poems will begin on Oct. 5 with Inuit poet dg nanouk okpik in the Morrison Library.Find upcoming talks on the Lunch Poems website and watch videos of past readings on the Lunch Poems YouTube channel. Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).Photo by Neil-Anthony Watson.Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“I think you can see that from my work, that I try to put everything I know in there and everything I don't know. I'm looking for stuff that I don't know, in that pursuit of, like, a daily practice.” Terrance Hayes is fascinated by creating records of daily life. With a background in visual art and poetry, he has a nuanced understanding of what constitutes writing and reading across mediums. His work as a teacher also touches everything he does. In this episode, hosted by Getty Research Institute associate curator Dr. LeRonn Brooks, Hayes discusses his creative practice, as well as the possibilities of radical imagination in recording one's life. Hayes is professor of creative writing at New York University. He is the author of the National Book Award finalist How to Be Drawn (Penguin, 2015) and Lighthead (2010), which won the 2010 National Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His numerous honors include a Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, United States Artists, the Guggenheim, and the MacArthur Foundation. For images, transcripts, and more, visit https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/art-and-poetry-recording-everyday-life/ or http://www.getty.edu/podcasts To learn more about Terrance Hayes, visit https://terrancehayes.com/

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of two poetry collections: Far District and House of Lords and Commons. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among others. He is a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art and teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University.This week's Southword poem is ‘Elegy' by Olaitan Humble, which appears in issue 43. You can buy single issues, subscribe, or find out how to submit to Southword here.

In this episode of UIndy's Potluck Podcast, where we host conversations about the arts, English majors Olivia Cameron, Brandon Hickey, and Sam Jackson, interview poet Tyree Daye, a guest of the Kellogg Writers Series, which is a series that brings writers of distinction to the University of Indianapolis campus for classroom discussions and free public readings. Special thanks to Music Technology major Jesse Wallace for editing this episode's audio. Tyree Daye is a poet from Youngsville, North Carolina, and a Teaching Assistant Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is the author of two poetry collections River Hymns and Cardinal. Daye is a Cave Canem fellow and winner of the 2019 Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellowship, the 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-In-Residence at UC Santa Barbara. Daye is a 2019 Kate Tufts Finalist, and most recently, he was awarded a 2019 Whiting Writers Award. We thank you for listening to UIndy's Potluck Podcast, which is hosted by students and faculty of the University of Indianapolis. We would like to thank our guests and the Shaheen College of Arts and Sciences. To learn more about UIndy's Potluck Podcast and hear other episodes, please visit etchings.uindy.edu/the-potluck-podcast. Thank you for your support.

Tyree Daye is a poet from Youngsville, North Carolina, and a Teaching Assistant Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is the author of two poetry collections River Hymns 2017 APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner and Cardinal from Copper Canyon Press 2020. Daye is a Cave Canem fellow. Daye won the 2019 Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellowship, 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-In-Residence at UC Santa Barbara, and is a 2019 Kate Tufts Finalist. Daye most recently was awarded a 2019 Whiting Writers Award.Bio via Tyree.work. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this week's episode of the Get Lit Minute, your weekly poetry podcast, we spotlight American poet and educator, Terrance Hayes. His 2010 collection, Lighthead, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2010. About his work, Cornelius Eady has said: "First you'll marvel at his skill, his near-perfect pitch, his disarming humor, his brilliant turns of phrase. Then you'll notice the grace, the tenderness, the unblinking truth-telling just beneath his lines, the open and generous way he takes in our world."He has received many honors and awards, including a Whiting Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism, and three Best American Poetry selections, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation“George Floyd”“You can be a bother who dyeshis hair Dennis Rodman bluein the face of the man kneeling in bluein the face the music of his wrist-watch your mouth is little morethan a door being knockedout of the ring of fire aroundthe afternoon came evening's bellof the ball and chain around the neckof the unarmed brother ground downto gunpowder dirt can be inhaledlike a puff the magic bullet pointof transformation both kills and firesthe life of the party like it's 1999 bottlesof beer on the wall street peoplewho sleep in the streets do not sleepwithout counting yourself luckyrabbit's foot of the mountainlion do not sleep withoutmaking your bed of the riverboat gambling there will beno stormy weather on the waterbored to death any means of killingtime is on your side of the bedof the truck transporting Emmetttill the break of day Emmett tillthe river runs dry your facethe music of the spheresEmmett till the end of time”Support the show (https://getlit.org/donate/)

On February 9, 2021 the Lannan Center presented a Crowdcast webinar featuring Shane McCrae and Vievee Francis. Introductions by Lannan Fellows Joshua Kim and Renny Simone. Moderated by Carolyn Forché.Shane McCrae is the author of seven books of poetry, including Sometimes I Never Suffered (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020); In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015), winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.Vievee Francis was born in West Texas. She earned an MFA from the University of Michigan in 2009, and she received a Rona Jaffe Award the same year. She is the author of Forest Primeval (TriQuarterly Books, 2015), winner of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award; Horse in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2012), winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize; and Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006). The poet Adrian Matejka describes her poems as “revelations—of memory, of dust, of the cotton and marginalia strung together to make a history.” The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and the Kresge Foundation, Francis currently serves as an editor for Callaloo and teaches English and creative writing at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is a poet, writer and literary and art critic - and sports writer! - who was born and raised in New York City. He is the author of the poetry collections The Ground (2012), Heaven (2015; a finalist for the National Book Award), and Living Weapon (2019).  In addition to his collections of poetry, Phillips is author of the critical volume When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (2010) where Uli has hosted him on his podcast on Great Books to talk about Phillis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and African American poetry in general. He translated Salvador Espriu’s story collection Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth (2012) into English, and received a 2013 Whiting Writers’ Award, a PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Poetry, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. A contributing writer at Artforum, he has taught at Columbia University, Harvard, Princeton, and at SUNY-Stony Brook, where he’s served as director of the Poetry Center.  /////////////// Follow us: TWITTER - @ulibaer / @corklinedRoom INSTAGRAM - @ulinyc / @carolineweber2020 (PROUST QUESTIONNAIRE PODCAST) - @proust.questionnaire ROWAN RICARDO PHILLIPS - @rowanricardophillips //////////////// Listen to the Podcast on: APPLE PODCASTS - Proust Questionnaire Podcast SPOTIFY - Proust Questionnaire Podcast YOUTUBE: Ulrich Baer  //////////////// Thanks for listening! :) Uli Baer & Caroline Weber.

Paul is joined by Suketu Mehta for a conversation on how the pandemic is affecting global migration. Suketu shares his call for international solidarity, as well as the idea that migration can be a form of reparations, particularly in countries such as Britain and the United States. Suketu Mehta is the New York-based author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award. He has won the Whiting Writers’ Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. Mehta’s work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Granta, Harper’s Magazine, Time, and Newsweek, and has been featured on NPR’s ‘Fresh Air’ and ‘All Things Considered.’Mehta is an Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University. His book about global migration, This Land is Our Land, will be published by Farrar Straus & Giroux in June 2019. He is also working on a nonfiction book about immigrants in contemporary New York, for which he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. Mehta has written original screenplays for films, including ‘New York, I Love You’. Mehta was born in Calcutta and raised in Bombay and New York. He is a graduate of New York University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Samuel D. Hunter’s plays include The Whale (Drama Desk Award, Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, GLAAD Media Award, Drama League and Outer Critics Circle nominations for Best Play), A Bright New Boise (Obie Award, Drama Desk nomination for Best Play), The Few, A Great Wilderness, Rest, Pocatello, Lewiston, Clarkston, and most recently, The Healing and The Harvest. He is the recipient of a 2014 MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship, a 2012 Whiting Writers Award, the 2013 Otis Guernsey New Voices Award, the 2011 Sky Cooper Prize, the 2008 PONY/Lark Fellowship, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Idaho. His plays have been produced in New York at Playwrights Horizons, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Clubbed Thumb and Page 73, and around the country at such theaters as Seattle Rep, South Coast Rep, Victory Gardens, Williamstown Theater Festival, The Old Globe, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Denver Center Theatre Company, Marin Theater Company, and elsewhere. Samuel's work has been developed at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, the Ojai Playwrights Conference, Seven Devils, and PlayPenn. A published anthology of his work, including The Whale and A Bright New Boise, is available from TCG books. He is a member of New Dramatists, an Ensemble Playwright at Victory Gardens, a member of Partial Comfort Productions, and was a 2013 Resident Playwright at Arena Stage. A native of northern Idaho, Sam lives in Inwood, NYC. He holds degrees in playwriting from NYU, The Iowa Playwrights Workshop, and Juilliard. Watch for new Inwood Art Works On Air episodes! Live N' Local episodes drop the first Thursday of each month, and Artist Spotlight episodes drop two weeks later. Subscribe so you don't miss a thing! And please, show local artists (and us!) some love by leaving some stars and a review on Apple Podcasts. Inwood Art Works On Air is produced by Inwood Art Works. If you would like to support this this podcast by setting up a $2 to $20 monthly tax-deductible donation to Inwood Art Works please visit www.inwoodartworks.nyc/support/donate-now. If you would like to feature your small business and support Inwood Art Works On Air by sponsoring an episode, contact us. Corporate and neighborhood small business sponsorships are available; email info@inwooodartworks.nyc for more info.

Ishion Hutchinson Neil Watson Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of two poetry collections: Far District and House of Lords and Commons. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among others. He is a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art and teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University. Books mentioned, two by Montale: Collected Poems and The Second Art of Life.

In this episode, Clifford Brooks and Michael Amidei interview poet Tyree Daye. Tyree Daye (http://www.tyree.work/) a poet from Youngsville, North Carolina, and a Teaching Assistant Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is the author of two poetry collections River Hymns 2017 APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner and Cardinal forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press 2020. Daye is a Cave Canem fellow. Daye’s work has been published in Prairie Schooner, New York Times, Nashville Review. Daye won the 2019 Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellowship, 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-In-Residence at UC Santa Barbara, and is a 2019 Kate Tufts Finalist. Daye most recently was awarded a 2019 Whiting Writers Award.

Many times it's the small annoyances that bother us the most. Jay Hopler was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1970, and he has earned degrees from New York University, The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars and The Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is the author of two books of poetry and two anthologies and has published in numerous journals. His other awards include a Whiting Writers' Award and a Rome Prize in Literature from the America Academy in Rome. He is a professor of English at the University of South Florida.

The panel discussion from the LIC Reading Series event on May 9, 2019, featuring Idra Novey (Those Who Knew), John Wray (Godsend), and Garnette Cadogan (Non-Stop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas). Listen to our previous episode for the readings. About our readers: Idra Novey is the award-winning author of the novel Ways to Disappear. Her work has been translated into ten languages and she’s translated numerous authors from Spanish and Portuguese, most recently Clarice Lispector. She lives in Brooklyn with her family. John Wray is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Lost Time Accidents, Lowboy, The Right Hand of Sleep, and Canaan’s Tongue. He was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists in 2007. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, he lives in Brooklyn, New York. Garnette Cadogan is an essayist and journalist who focuses on history, culture, and the arts. He is editor-at-large for Non-Stop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, edited by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Shapiro, and is working on a book on walking. He lives in Charlottesville, VA. - - - This event was made possible in part by the Queens Council on the Arts, with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Thank you to our local sponsors: LIC Bar, Astoria Bookshop, Sweetleaf Coffee, Gantry Bar LIC, and LIC Corner Cafe. Learn more at licreadingseries.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Readings from the LIC Reading Series event on May 9, 2019, featuring Idra Novey (Those Who Knew), John Wray (Godsend), and Garnette Cadogan (Non-Stop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas). Check back Thursday for the discussion! About our readers: Idra Novey is the award-winning author of the novel Ways to Disappear. Her work has been translated into ten languages and she’s translated numerous authors from Spanish and Portuguese, most recently Clarice Lispector. She lives in Brooklyn with her family. John Wray is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Lost Time Accidents, Lowboy, The Right Hand of Sleep, and Canaan’s Tongue. He was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists in 2007. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, he lives in Brooklyn, New York. Garnette Cadogan is an essayist and journalist who focuses on history, culture, and the arts. He is editor-at-large for Non-Stop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, edited by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Shapiro, and is working on a book on walking. He lives in Charlottesville, VA. - - - This event was made possible in part by the Queens Council on the Arts, with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Thank you to our local sponsors: LIC Bar, Astoria Bookshop, Sweetleaf Coffee, Gantry Bar LIC, and LIC Corner Cafe. Learn more at licreadingseries.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Clifford Thompson received a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction in 2013 for Love for Sale and Other Essays. During this podcast, he discusses his forthcoming new book, What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man's Blues.

The idea behind this show is pretty simple: We invite scholars, makers, and professionals out to brunch for an informal conversation about their work, and then we turn those brunches into a podcast.It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it.For our season 3 premiere, we talked with author Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, an associate professor of English at Notre Dame and the winner of the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the largest peer-juried prize for novels and short stories in the United States.Azareen was recognized for her second novel, Call Me Zebra, published last year by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The book also won the John Gardner Fiction Book Award and was named a Best Book by a number of media outlets, including Entertainment Weekly and Harper’s Bazaar. Azareen was previously the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and honored as one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” in 2015.Host Ted Fox started out by asking her to read from Call Me Zebra, after which they talked about the book, the complicated journey of its unforgettable protagonist, and whether there’s any such thing as original writing.

Jericho Brown is the author of the collection The Tradition. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please, won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Time, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies. He is an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta.Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.Recorded On: Tuesday, June 25, 2019

Jericho Brown is the author of the collection The Tradition. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please, won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Time, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies. He is an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta.Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.

Sharon sits down with playwright, Sarah Ruhl.Sarah is a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and is currently on the faculty of the Yale School of Drama. She has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award, and the Whiting Writers’ Award. Sarah is the author of several books, including her collection of essays “100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write,” which was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, and “Letters from Max: A Book of Friendship” published in 2012.In this episode, Sharon and Sarah discuss the connection between creativity and practice at length. Sarah also reads from her book, discussing Metta (lovingkindness) Meditation, and Sharon’s childhood dream of writing a play!

The human urge for self-expression is so powerful that it often challenges conventions that seem set in stone. The poetry of Phillis Wheatley is among the writers whose tremendous capacity to speak out in her own words upends a tradition and inaugurates something truly new. Wheatley is the first person of African descent to publish a book in the United States. She had been kidnapped as a child in Africa and sold into slavery to a family in Boston, Massachusetts in 1761 where she learned English, Latin, and Greek. She started writing and publishing poems at a young age. Wheatley's status as the first African-American person to publish a book of poetry in the US is of great importance, and yet it is an ambiguous matter to assign her this role of being 'the first.' It means that Wheatley is more often name-checked than read, and that her achievement is sometimes reduced to being a symbol rather than treated as a writer in her own right. The critic and poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips, whom Harold Bloom has called a singular voice of tremendous importance in American literature, talks about the significance of being "the first" in a conversation on Wheatley and the African-American tradition. Phillips explains what it means for Wheatley to be the first Black poet to publish a book, for Frederick Douglas to be the first Black man and a writer to become an Ambassador, for Paul Laurence Dunbar to be the first African-American to publish widely celebrated poems in both vernacular and standard English, for Langston Hughes to publish poetry which captures the genius of jazz. Rowan explains why discussions of the canon so often overlook poetry itself, and he asks what it means to talk of "the African-American tradition" as if it's a separate thing, and how to balance the critical need for recognition without isolating and side-lining some of the world's greatest writers from the claim of universal importance. Born and raised in New York City, poet, literary and art critic, and translator Rowan Ricardo Phillips earned a BA at Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. at Brown University. He is the author of the poetry collections The Ground (2012) and Heaven (2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. His poems engage the acts of post-9/11 memory and ruin, lingering in interrupted or merged landscapes of art, rhetoric, and marginalia. In addition to his collections of poetry, Phillips has written the critical volume When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (2010) and translated Salvador Espriu’s story collection Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth (2012). Phillips received a 2013 Whiting Writers’ Award and has also received the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Poetry, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship.

In this conversation Virginia Grise & Shayok Misha Chowdhury talk about longing, Love and the Moon…migration histories…shared lineages…real time collaborations/and just doing the work.  Virginia Grise is a recipient of the Whiting Writers' Award, Princess Grace Award in Theatre Directing and the Yale Drama Series Award. Publications include: Your Healing is Killing Me (Plays Inverse Press), blu (Yale University Press) and The Panza Monologues co-written with Irma Mayorga (University of Texas Press). More at: http://virginiagrise.com Shayok Misha Chowdhury is a queer Bengali director, writer, and theater-maker based in Brooklyn. Misha is currently in residence at Ars Nova, Soho Rep, the Drama League, and The Flea, and was recently a Directing Fellow at New York Theater Workshop. Misha was featured on the Grammy-winning album Calling All Dawns.  More at: shayokmishachowdhury.com

Tony Diaz, El Librotraficante and the Nuestra Palabra Crew provide a sneak preview of the XXI Anniversary Showcase of Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say featuring the Godfather of Chicano Literature Dagoberto Gilb and poet Lips Mendez. The show aired live Tuesday April 2, 2019, the night before the NPXXI showcase at the Museum of Fine Arts Brown Auditorium. Click her to donate to Nuestra Palabra: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=9CPLMM88TF5BS Dagoberto Gilb is the author of nine books, including The Magic of Blood, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña, Woodcuts of Women, Gritos, The Flowers, and Before the End, After the Beginning. He is also the editor of two canonical anthologies, Hecho en Tejas: Texas Mexican Literature and Mexican American Literature, and the founding editor of Huizache, the country’s best Latino literary magazine. Among his own writing’s honors are the PEN/Hemingway Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Whiting Writers Award; his work has been a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle and PEN/Faulkner Awards and has been honored several times in Texas as a proud part of its literary tradition. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Best American Essays, O’Henry Prize Stories, and several hundred others, much of it widely reprinted in textbooks. Gilb spent sixteen years making a living, as a father of two children, in the construction trades, twelve of them as a journeyman high-rise carpenter with the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. He has since taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Arizona, the University of Wyoming, Vassar, and Texas State University. He is currently the executive director of CentroVictoria, at the University of Houston-Victoria. Born and raised in Los Angeles to an American father and a Mexican mother, he has lived as long in both El Paso and now Austin. Originally from Galveston, TX, Lupe (Writer//Educator//Activist) works with Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say, Brazilian Arts Foundation and other organizations to promote poetry events, advocate for literacy/literature and organize creative writing workshops that are open to the public. He is the founder of Tintero Projects and works with emerging Latinx writers and other writers of color within the Texas Gulf Coast Region, with Houston as its hub. In addition, Lupe co-hosts INKWELL - a collaborative podcast creation between Tintero Projects and Inprint, placing a monthly spotlight on Regional, National and International Latinx writers and other Writers of Color. Mendez is a CantoMundo Fellow , a Macondo Fellow and an Emerging Poet Incubator Fellow and his newest collection of poetry - WHY I AM LIKE TEQUILA is forthcoming from Willow Books. Dr, Jesse Esparza is a professor at Texas Southern University, NP Radio airs live Tuesdays 6pm-7pm cst 90.1 FM KPFT Houston, TX. Livestream www.KPFT.org. More podcasts at www.NuestraPalabra.org. The Nuestra Palabra Radio Show is archived at the University of Houston Digital Archives. Our hard copy archives are kept at the Houston Public Library’s Special Collections Hispanic Archives. Producers: Leti Lopez & Marlen Treviño. Board operator: Terrell Quillin Tony Diaz Sundays, Mondays, & Tuesdays & The Other Side Sun 7am "What's Your Point" Fox 26 Houston Mon Noon "The Cultural Accelerator" at www.TonyDiaz.net Tues 6pm NP Lit Radio 90.1 FM KPFT, Houston www.NuestraPalabra.org 24/7 The Other Side TV www.TheOtherSideTele.com

Colson Whitehead is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Writers Award. He is the author of: “The Intuitionist,” “John Henry Days,” “The Colossus of New York,” “Apex Hides the Hurt,” “Sag Harbor,” “Zone One” and “The Noble Hustle.” His most recent novel, “The Underground Railroad,” was an international and No. 1 New York Times best-seller. It won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Carnegie Medal for Fiction, the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for Fiction and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction Literature. In 2018, he was chosen as the 12th New York State Author. His next book, “The Nickel Boys,” will be published in July 2019.

Danielle uses Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s poem to change Max's opinion of a discovery that he initially found to be unsettling.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tyehimba Jess, author of 2018 Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle selection Olio, joins Atom Atkinson this episode to discuss his life, career and writing process. As part of a week at Chautauqua celebrating "The Life of the Written Word," Jess presented Olio to the Chautauqua Amphitheater audience, taught a master class titled “Show the Receipts: Historical Documentation in Poetic Form” and even heard a performance inspired by his work by the Chautauqua Opera Company. Jess is an award-winning poet and teacher. Olio, his latest book, has received numerous accolades, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and The Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry. Jess' previous works include African American Pride: Celebrating Our Achievements, Contributions, and Enduring Legacy, and leadbelly, which was published as one of five selections of the 2004 National Poetry Series. His honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Award. He has taught at the Juilliard School and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and currently serves on the faculty at the College of Staten Island in New York City. Follow him on Twitter at @TyehimbaJess. Atkinson is a poet and serves as director of literary arts at Chautauqua Institution. Follow them on Twitter at @AtomAtkinson.

In 2011 a magnitude-9 earthquake shook northeast Japan and wracked the coast with a massive tsunami, devastating towns, destabilizing economies nationwide—and causing meltdowns in nuclear power plants. Nonfiction author William T. Vollmann joined us to share firsthand accounts of the fallout from these disasters, bringing excerpts from his newest book No Immediate Danger, whose title sardonically co-opts the reassuring mantra of official Japanese energy experts. Vollman cautioned against nuclear power, drawing parallels to other sprawling practices such as fossil fuel extraction and industrial manufacturing as contributors to climate change. He invited us to examine the ramifications of nuclear power and evaluate whether the risks it poses are outweighed by the economic demand for electrical power and the justifiable yearning of people all over the world to live in comfort. To illustrate the realities of these risks, Vollmann recounted visits made at significant personal risk over the course of seven years to the contaminated no-go zones and ghost towns of Fukushima, Japan. Equipped first only with a dosimeter and then with a scintillation counter, he measured radiation and interviewed tsunami victims, nuclear evacuees, anti-nuclear organizers, and pro-nuclear utility workers. Vollmann shared the powerful and sobering object lesson of Fukushima—and brought us into a broader conversation on the factors and human actions that will define our relationship with the environment for generations to come. William T. Vollmann is the author of ten novels, including Europe Central, which won the National Book Award. He has also written four collections of stories, including The Atlas, which won the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His journalism and fiction have been published in The New Yorker, Harpers, Esquire, Granta, and many other publications. Recorded live at Greenwood Senior Center by Town Hall Seattle on Wednesday, April 18, 2018. 

Brad Listi talks with Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, author of the novel CALL ME ZEBRA (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Oloomi is the winner of a 2015 Whiting Writers' Award, a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree, the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship in Fiction to Catalonia, Spain. She currently teaches in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame and splits her time between South Bend, Indiana and Florence, Italy.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hilary S. Jacqmin's first book of poems, Missing Persons, was published by Waywiser Press in spring 2017. She earned her BA from Wesleyan University, her MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and her MFA from the University of Florida. She lives in Baltimore, where she is an associate production editor at Johns Hopkins University Press. Her work has appeared in 32 Poems, Painted Bride Quarterly, PANK, Best New Poets, DIAGRAM, FIELD, and elsewhere.Greg Williamson is the author of four volumes of poetry: The Silent Partner, Errors in the Script, A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck, and The Hole Story of Kirby the Sneak and Arlo the True. He has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Nicholas Roerich Prize, an NEA Grant in Poetry, and others. His poetry has been published in more than 50 periodicals and several anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Poetry. He teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.Michele Wolf is the author of Immersion (Hilary Tham Capital Collection, The Word Works, selected by Denise Duhamel), Conversations During Sleep (Anhinga Prize for Poetry, Anhinga Press, chosen by Peter Meinke), and The Keeper of Light (Painted Bride Quarterly Poetry Chapbook Series, selected by J.T. Barbarese). Her poems have also appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, The North American Review, and many other journals and anthologies, as well as on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. A contributing editor for Poet Lore, she teaches at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda and lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland.Read "Coupling" by Hilary S. Jacqmin. Read "Drawing Hands" by Greg Williamson. Read "The Great Tsunami" by Michele Wolf.Recorded On: Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Hilary S. Jacqmin's first book of poems, Missing Persons, was published by Waywiser Press in spring 2017. She earned her BA from Wesleyan University, her MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and her MFA from the University of Florida. She lives in Baltimore, where she is an associate production editor at Johns Hopkins University Press. Her work has appeared in 32 Poems, Painted Bride Quarterly, PANK, Best New Poets, DIAGRAM, FIELD, and elsewhere.Greg Williamson is the author of four volumes of poetry: The Silent Partner, Errors in the Script, A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck, and The Hole Story of Kirby the Sneak and Arlo the True. He has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Nicholas Roerich Prize, an NEA Grant in Poetry, and others. His poetry has been published in more than 50 periodicals and several anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Poetry. He teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.Michele Wolf is the author of Immersion (Hilary Tham Capital Collection, The Word Works, selected by Denise Duhamel), Conversations During Sleep (Anhinga Prize for Poetry, Anhinga Press, chosen by Peter Meinke), and The Keeper of Light (Painted Bride Quarterly Poetry Chapbook Series, selected by J.T. Barbarese). Her poems have also appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, The North American Review, and many other journals and anthologies, as well as on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. A contributing editor for Poet Lore, she teaches at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda and lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland.Read "Coupling" by Hilary S. Jacqmin. Read "Drawing Hands" by Greg Williamson. Read "The Great Tsunami" by Michele Wolf.

In an unnamed country at the beginning of the last century, a child called Pavla is born to peasant parents. Her arrival, fervently anticipated and conceived in part by gypsy tonics and archaic prescriptions, stuns her parents and brings outrage and scorn from her community. Pavla has been born a dwarf, beautiful in face, but as the years pass, she grows no farther than the edge of her crib. When her parents turn to the treatments of a local charlatan, his terrifying cure opens the floodgates of persecution for Pavla.Little Nothing unfolds across a lifetime of unimaginable, magical transformation in and out of human form, as an outcast girl becomes a hunted woman whose ultimate survival depends on the most startling transfiguration of them all. Woven throughout is the journey of Danilo, the young man entranced by Pavla, obsessed only with protecting her. Part allegory about the shifting nature of being, part subversive fairy tale of love in all its uncanny guises, Little Nothing spans the beginning of a new century, the disintegration of ancient superstitions, and the adoption of industry and invention. With a cast of remarkable characters, a wholly original story, and extraordinary, page-turning prose, Marisa Silver delivers a novel of sheer electricity.Praise for Little Nothing“Silver has created a gorgeously rendered, imaginative, magical yarn.” —Booklist“Pavla serves to remind readers of the moral of the story, that a good soul can find transcendence in the face of unbearable odds. And in Danilo readers will recognize their own longing for transcendence and meaning as he transforms himself through pain and sorrow into a man of courage and ingenuity." —Publishers Weekly“In Little Nothing, the wizardly Marisa Silver conjures a pitch-dark tale with empathy and humor. An emotionally suspenseful allegory, the novel reveals how the world's expectations can torque a woman's identity and leave a ferocious ache behind. The novel twisted me up inside. I loved it.” —Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies, a National Book Award Finalist"Little Nothing is a magnificent something, an inventive, unexpected story that seamlessly blends fable and folklore into the lives of characters who remain heart-wrenchingly real. That Silver wrestles with nearly unanswerable questions – What does it mean to occupy a body? What does it mean to be human? How transformative is love? – and still produces an exhilarating page-turner is a testament to her biting, beautiful prose. In addition to being a joy to read, this book challenged and changed me, and I can’t imagine what else anyone would want from a work of art." —Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, author of The NestMarisa Silver is the author of the novel Mary Coin, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Southern California Independent Bookseller’s Award. She is also the author of The God of War (a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist); No Direction Home; and two story collections, Alone with You and Babe in Paradise (a New York Times Notable Book and Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year). Silver’s fiction has won the O. Henry Award and been included in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and other anthologies. She lives in Los Angeles.Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is the author of two novels, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award and winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including the New Yorker, Ploughshares, Tin House, the Georgia Review, and the Best American Short Stories 2004 and 2009. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Fellowship, she was named one of “20 Under 40” fiction writers by the New Yorker. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.

Hey there word nerds! Today I am so pleased to have Teddy Wayne on the show. Teddy  is the author of several books, most recently his novel Loner, which is out now. Teddy has won numerous writing awards, is regular contributor to several prestigious publications, and has taught at Columbia University in NYC and Washington University in St. Louis. In this interview, we talk about Teddy’s newest book and the craft behind bringing an anti-hero to life on the page. During the episode, we geek out about anti-heroes, Hitchcock movies, and how trying to understand reprehensible characters can help expand our humanity. Listen below.   In this episode we discuss: What writers can learn about crafting an anti-hero from the TV show All in the Family, and how to create a character who is deeply flawed but also relatable. How much of an anti-hero’s character is shaped by internal qualities versus environmental or situational factors. How to avoid making an anti-hero seem over-simplified and make readers feel connected to an evil character. The difference between an extraordinary character’s slow descent into darkness, and a regular character making a terrible choice and having to “fix” the situation. The two components that writers can infuse into literary fiction to make it come to life and hook readers. Plus, Teddy’s #1 tip for writers. About the Teddy Wayne Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels Loner, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, and Kapitoil. He is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A columnist for the New York Times, he is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and McSweeney’s and has taught at Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis. He lives in New York. About the Book With the same knack for voice and piercing social commentary Wayne gave readers in The Love Song of Jonny Valentine and Kapitoil, LONER is a riveting, frighteningly believable portrait of obsession on a college campus. Much like Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs, Herman Koch’s The Dinner, and Charlotte Rogan’s The Lifeboat—and, further back, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Lolita, and Notes from Underground—it is one of those rare novels where, as the pages fly by, readers feel everything from fear to rage to empathy for characters they might not like, but nevertheless find completely mesmerizing. Wayne’s New York Times column the last couple of years, “Future Tense,” has demonstrated his critical talents for dissecting the alienating effects of contemporary culture, and LONER continues this with the misfit David Federman at the center of the novel. An academically gifted yet painfully forgettable member of his New Jersey high school class, the withdrawn, mild-mannered freshman arrives at Harvard fully expecting to be embraced by a new tribe of high-achieving peers. But, initially, his social prospects seem unlikely to change. Then Veronica Morgan Wells enters his life. Immediately struck by her beauty, wit, and sophisticated Manhattan upbringing, David falls feverishly in love with the woman he sees as an embodiment of what he’s always wanted to be: popular, attractive, powerful. Determined to stop at nothing to win her attention and an invitation into her glamorous world, he begins compromising his moral standards. But both Veronica and David, it turns out, are not exactly as they seem. Links & Resources Check out these previous podcast episodes talking about systematic and deliberate practice in writing. These interview share some great insights about how to practice as a writer. Episode 61: How to Write Spellbinding Sentences–Interview with Barbara Baig DIYMFA.com/061 Episode 89: The Power of Deliberate Practice – Interview with Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool DIYMFA.com/089 For more info and show notes: DIYMFA.com/117

Monday Reading Series Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry. His first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award, and his second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best books of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is an associate professor in English and creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta. Montana Ray is a feminist poet, translator, and scholar. The author of 5 chapbooks and artist books, her first full length collection of poetry, (guns & butter), is available from Argos Books. She's also a PhD student in comparative literature at Columbia University & the mom of Pokémon enthusiast, Amadeus.

John Wray is the author of The Right Hand of Sleep, which won a Whiting Writers' Award, Canaan's Tongue and the critically-acclaimed Lowboy. He was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists in 2007. His latest novel is The Lost Time Accidents. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Author Amy Leach presents the 2016 Endowed English Reading. Leach's work has been published in "A Public Space," "Tin House," "Orion," the "Los Angeles Review," and many others. She has been recognized with the Whiting Writers' Award, Best American Essays selections, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award, and a Pushcart Prize. She plays bluegrass, teaches English, and lives in Montana. The essay collection "Things That Are" is her first book.

Sep. 5, 2015. Amy Wiletz discusses "Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti" at the 2015 Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. Speaker Biography: Amy Wilentz is a journalist and author who teaches in the Literary Journalism program at the University of California at Irvine. She is the former Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker and a longtime contributing editor at The Nation. Her work has appeared in various publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s and Time. She has received the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN Martha Albrand Non-Fiction Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award. Her recent memoir, “Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti," is the 2014 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and describes her passion, connection and fascination with Haiti. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=6989

Sep. 15, 2015. Daniel Alarcón appears at the 2015 Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. Speaker Biography: Daniel Alarcón is an award-winning writer who was born in Peru. He has written several novels and short stories, and his work has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Harper's, Granta and the Virginia Quarterly Review. A former Fulbright scholar, Alarcón is currently an associate editor at the Peruvian magazine Etiqueta Negra. His published books include "War by Candlelight," "Lost City Radio" and his most recent novel, "At Night We Walk in Circles." He has received a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Alabama Library Association Award for Fiction, a PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award and an International Literature Award. Alarcón is also a co-founder and executive producer of Radio Ambulante, a Spanish-language storytelling podcast. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=6931

The Other Paris (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)A trip through Paris as it will never be again--dark and dank and poor and slapdash and truly bohemian.Paris, the City of Light. The city of the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, of soft cheese and fresh baguettes. Or so tourist brochures would have you believe. In The Other Paris, Luc Sante reveals the city's hidden past, its seamy underside--one populated by working and criminal classes that, though virtually extinct today, have shaped Paris over the past two centuries. Drawing on testimony from a great range of witnesses--from Balzac and Hugo to assorted boulevardiers, rabble-rousers, and tramps--Sante, whose thorough research is matched only by the vividness of his narration, takes the reader on a whirlwind tour. Richly illustrated with more than three hundred images, The Other Paris scuttles through the knotted streets of pre-Haussmann Paris; through the improvised accommodations of the original bohemians; through the massive garbage dump at Montfaucon, active until 1849, in which, "at any given time the carcasses of 12,000 horses . . . were left to rot."A wildly lively survey of labor conditions, prostitution, drinking, crime, and popular entertainment, of the reporters, réaliste singers, pamphleteers, and poets who chronicled their evolution, The Other Paris is a book meant to upend the story of the French capital, to reclaim the city from the bon vivants and the speculators, and to hold a light to the works and days of the forgotten poor.Praise for The Other Paris:“The Other Paris is a heartbreaking spectacle, immense in intellectual and political scope and emotional reach. Peopled by crooks and movie stars, gamblers and thinkers, the world’s premiere city of dreams is rendered, through Luc Sante’s fine hand, historian’s eye, and poet’s heart, into a place we hardly knew—a world of hitherto unknown mysteries and realities. A grand journey in an epic work.”—Hilton Als “‘We have forgotten what a city was,’ writes Luc Sante provocatively about Paris. By the last chapter of this absorbing book we are convinced. Washerwomen and rag pickers, bohemians and clochards, anarchists and apaches, all play their part in this alternative urban history. This is not the Gay Paree of Maurice Chevalier, though he too makes an appearance.”—Witold Rybczynski “This brilliant, beautifully written essay is the finest book I have ever read about Paris. Ever. Thank you, Luc Sante.”—Paul Auster “Nowadays, the old crowded, swarming, surly cities are at least half-forgotten. But in this great chronicle Luc Sante recalls when Paris was rougher, when the poor, the tough, the unregulated, the underworld, thrived there; maybe the city was also less rough, in that there was room for nearly everyone all the way down the social ladder. Hanging over The Other Paris is the contemporary curse of cities that perhaps hit Paris first, of cities that have become bland transnational stopping places for the privileged. Magisterial as ever, Sante returns us to the flavor, texture, savor, shouts, and clashes of the bygone city.”—Rebecca SolnitLuc Sante was born in Verviers, Belgium. His other books include Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, and Kill All Your Darlings. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy (for album notes), an Infinity Award for Writing from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman fellowships. He has contributed to The New York Review of Books since 1981, and has written for many other magazines. He is the visiting professor of writing and the history of photography at Bard College and lives in Ulster Country, New York.Originally from Chicago, J.C. Gabel is a book editor, writer, journalist, small publisher and curator living in Los Angeles. He is the founder of Stop Smiling, "The Magazine for High-Minded Lowlifes," and founding Editor and Publisher of LA-based Hat & Beard Press, which will launch in 2016 in partnership with DAP (Distributor of Artist Publishers).  

Joshua Weiner is the author of three books of poetry, most recently, The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish (2013). He is also the editor of At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn, and the poetry editor at Tikkun magazine. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a 2014 fellowship from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, among others. A professor of English at the University of Maryland, he lives with his family in Washington DC. Series: "Lunch Poems Reading Series" [Humanities] [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 29365]

Joshua Weiner is the author of three books of poetry, most recently, The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish (2013). He is also the editor of At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn, and the poetry editor at Tikkun magazine. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a 2014 fellowship from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, among others. A professor of English at the University of Maryland, he lives with his family in Washington DC. Series: "Lunch Poems Reading Series" [Humanities] [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 29365]

Joshua Weiner is the author of three books of poetry, most recently, The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish (2013). He is also the editor of At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn, and the poetry editor at Tikkun magazine. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a 2014 fellowship from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, among others. A professor of English at the University of Maryland, he lives with his family in Washington DC. Series: "Lunch Poems Reading Series" [Humanities] [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 29365]

Joshua Weiner is the author of three books of poetry, most recently, The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish (2013). He is also the editor of At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn, and the poetry editor at Tikkun magazine. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a 2014 fellowship from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, among others. A professor of English at the University of Maryland, he lives with his family in Washington DC. Series: "Lunch Poems Reading Series" [Humanities] [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 29365]

Michael Meyer, author of In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China discussed the genesis of his new book, the village called Wasteland (set in the beautiful landscape of Jilin Province), his research process and life in the village in an interview with National Committee Program Officer Maura Elizabeth Cunningham on April 2, 2015.  As the author of the acclaimed The Last Days of Old Beijing (2008), Mr. Meyer received a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He also won a Lowell Thomas Award from the Society of American Travel Writers. Mr. Meyer’s stories have appeared in the New York Times, Time, Smithsonian, Sports Illustrated, Slate, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and on This American Life. He recently taught literary journalism at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Center, and is now an assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh where he teaches nonfiction writing.  He divides his time between Pittsburgh and Singapore. The National Committee on U.S.-China Relations is the leading nonprofit nonpartisan organization that encourages understanding of China and the United States among citizens of both countries.    

With self-deprecating humor and insight, Colson Whitehead discusses his youth as “a bit of a shut-in” and his development as a writer, poking fun at his early misconceptions about the profession, stating, “Half the reason I got into the writing business was so I could sit on my ass all day.” He goes on to tell anecdotes about the successes that helped his career flourish, as well as his plans for the future. Toward the end of his lecture, Whitehead gives a lengthy reading from his then-upcoming novel, Sag Harbor. Colson Whitehead was born in 1969 and raised in Manhattan. After graduating from Harvard College, he started working at the Village Voice, where he wrote reviews of television, books, and music. His first novel, The Intuitionist, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway and a winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award. John Henry Days (2001) followed and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Fiction Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. The Colossus of New York (2003) was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) was a recipient of the PEN/Oakland Award. Whitehead's reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in a number of publications, such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper's, and Granta. He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, A Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. (Source: www.colsonwhitehead.com) I was a bit of a shut-in. I would have preferred to have been a sickly child, but it didn't work out that way. I always like it when I read a biography of somebody, like Joyce, or whatever, and it says, ‘They were a sickly child, forced to retreat into a world of imagination.' It sounds so wonderful. Instead, I just didn't like going outside.” “So then I stated thinking about it scientifically. The average book of literary fiction sells, like, 5,000 copies. 5,000 copies, if you're lucky. Now, assume that everyone loves the book—doesn't just throw it into the trash in disgust—and, in addition, makes 10 other people read it, who also love it. Let's say this book has 50,000 readers—50,000 people who love it. But there are 4.5 billion people in the world. You made an impact in the lives of .00—a lot more zeros—01 % of the population. You're not even a gnat trying to get the attention of an elephant; you're a microbe in the butt of a gnat trying to get the attention of an elephant.” “I really don't like the precocious teenager in fiction. I never really took to Catcher in the Rye. Looking back, if we just gave Holden Caulfield some Prozac and an Xbox I think he'd be better off, and we could save a lot of trouble.”

Jess Row, the author of “Your Face in Mine” and two short story collections, “The Train to Lo Wu” and “Nobody Ever Gets Lost” reads from his work at UC Berkeley. He has received a Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/O. Henry Award, and two Pushcart Prizes. In 2007 he was named a "Best Young American Novelist" by Granta. He teaches at the College of New Jersey and is an ordained Zen Teacher. Series: "Story Hour in the Library" [Humanities] [Show ID: 28831]

Jess Row, the author of “Your Face in Mine” and two short story collections, “The Train to Lo Wu” and “Nobody Ever Gets Lost” reads from his work at UC Berkeley. He has received a Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/O. Henry Award, and two Pushcart Prizes. In 2007 he was named a "Best Young American Novelist" by Granta. He teaches at the College of New Jersey and is an ordained Zen Teacher. Series: "Story Hour in the Library" [Humanities] [Show ID: 28831]

Chris Abani' reads from his novel The Secret History of Las Vegas. Cristina García reads from her novel King of Cuba. The discussion took place on April 1, 2014, and was moderated by Elena Creef, Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Cristina García is the author of six novels: King of Cuba, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, A Handbook to Luck, Monkey Hunting, The Agüero Sisters, winner of the Janet Heidiger Kafka Prize; and Dreaming in Cuban, finalist for the National Book Award. García has edited two anthologies, Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature(2006) and Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature (2003). She is also the author of three works for young readers, Dreams of Significant Girls (2011), a young adult novel set in a Swiss boarding school in the 1970s; The Dog Who Loved the Moon, illustrated by Sebastia Serra, (Atheneum, 2008); and I Wanna Be Your Shoebox (Simon and Schuster, 2008). A collection of poetry, The Lesser Tragedy of Death (Akashic Books), was published in 2010. García holds a Bachelor's degree in Political Science from Barnard College, and a Master's degree in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Her work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into 14 languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA grant, among others. García has been a Visiting Professor at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas-Austin and The University of Miami. She teaches part time at Texas Tech University and will serve as University Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University-San Marcos from 2012-14 Chris Abani's prose includes Song For Night, The Virgin of Flames,Becoming Abigail, GraceLand, and Masters of the Board. His poetry collections are Sanctificum, There Are No Names for Red, Feed Me The Sun - Collected Long Poems, Hands Washing Water, Dog Woman, Daphne's Lot, and Kalakuta Republic. He holds a BA in English (Nigeria), an MA in Gender and Culture (Birkbeck College, University of London), an MA in English and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing (University of Southern California). He is a Professor at the University of California, Riverside and the recipient of the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the PEN Hemingway Book Prize & a Guggenheim Award. 

A former National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Brian Teare is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the American Antiquarian Society. He is the author of four books—The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, the Lambda Award-winning Pleasure, and Companion Grasses, one of Slate's 10 best poetry books of 2013. An Assistant Professor at Temple University, he lives in Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.Joshua Weiner is the author of three books of poetry, most recently, The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish (Chicago, 2013).  He is also the editor of At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn, and the poetry editor at Tikkun magazine.  He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a 2014 fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, among others.  He teaches on the faculty of the MFA Program at the University of Maryland and lives with his family in Washington, D.C.Read poems by Brian Teare.Read poems by Joshua Weiner.Recorded On: Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Dan Chiasson is an Associate Professor at Wellesley College and the author of three books of poetry: The Afterlife of Objects (2002), Natural History (2005), and Where's the Moon, There's the Moon (2010). A book of criticism, One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America, was published in 2006. He reviews poetry regularly for the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review and formerly served as a poetry editor for the Paris Review. He has received the Whiting Writers' Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation.

García is the author of five novels: Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck and The Lady Matador’s Hotel. García has edited two anthologies, Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature and Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature. Two works for young readers, The Dog Who Loved the Moon and I Wanna Be Your Shoebox were published in 2008. A collection of poetry, The Lesser Tragedy of Death, was published in 2010. Her recent young adult novel, Dreams of Significant Girls, is set in a Swiss boarding school in the 1970s. Garcia’s forthcoming novel, to be published in May 2013, is King of Cuba, a darkly comic novel featuring a fictionalized Fidel Castro, an octogenarian Miami exile and a rabble of Cuban voices. García’s work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into fourteen languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA grant, among others. Recently, Garcia was a Visiting Professor at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas-Austin and teaches at Texas Tech University most spring semesters. This past fall, Garcia was a Visiting Professor at the University of Miami and is currently University Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University-San Marcos.

Teddy Wayne is the guest. He is the author of the novel Kapitoil (Harper Perennial), for which he was the winner of a 2011 Whiting Writers' Award. He has also been the recipient of a New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His second novel, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, is due out from Free Press on February 5, 2013. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, calls it "Masterfully executed...the real accomplishment is the unforgettable voice of Jonny. If this impressive novel, both entertaining and tragically insightful, were a song, it would have a Michael Jackson beat with Morrissey lyrics." And Ben Fountain raves "The Love Song of Jonny Valentine takes us deep into the dark arts and even darker heart of mass-market celebrity, 21st-century version. In the near-pubescent hitmaker of the title, Teddy Wayne delivers a wild ride through the upper echelons of the entertainment machine as it ingests human beings at one end and spews out dollars at the other. Jonny's like all the rest of us, he wants to love and be loved, and as this brilliant novel shows, that’s a dangerous way to be when you’re inside the machine." Monologue topics: surgery, Vicodin, hernias, tweets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Maile Chapman and Vu Tran read from their work. Chapman is a widely published short story writer and author of the novel _Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto_, and Tran is the winner of a 2009 Whiting Writers' Award and a contributor to the serial novel _Restless City_. Both are Schaeffer Fellows in fiction at UNLV. The event was presented in partnership with the UNLV Department of English and was held April 15, 2010 in the UNLV Barrick Museum Auditorium in Las Vegas, NV.

In this episode, novelist and 2009 Whiting Writers' Award winner Vu Tran discusses his new novel on the April 14, 2010 edition of KNPR's "State of Nevada." The interview is used with the gracious permission of KNPR' s "State of Nevada" which podcasts many segments of its programs. See knpr.org/son/feeds for more information.

Kim Edwards, a graduate of Colgate University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, has won numerous awards for her fiction, including a Whiting Writers' Award, the Nelson Algren Award, and the National Magazine Award for Excellence in Fiction. She is the author of a collection of short stories, The Secrets of a Fire King, which was short-listed for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her first novel, The Memory Keeper's Daughter, spent two years on The New York Times Bestseller List, with 20 weeks at No. 1; it won the British Book Award, and has been now been published in 40 countries. Kim Edwards is an associate professor at The University of Kentucky. She is finishing a new novel set in the Finger Lakes area of upstate New York, where she grew up.

Kim Edwards, a graduate of Colgate University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, has won numerous awards for her fiction, including a Whiting Writers' Award, the Nelson Algren Award, and the National Magazine Award for Excellence in Fiction. She is the author of a collection of short stories, The Secrets of a Fire King, which was short-listed for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her first novel, The Memory Keeper's Daughter, spent two years on The New York Times Bestseller List, with 20 weeks at No. 1; it won the British Book Award, and has been now been published in 40 countries. Kim Edwards is an associate professor at The University of Kentucky. She is finishing a new novel set in the Finger Lakes area of upstate New York, where she grew up.

Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing, China and moved to the United States in 1996. Her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She has received a Whiting Writers' Award and was awarded a Lannan Foundation residency. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, and Guardian First Book Award. She was selected as one of Granta's 21 Best of Young American Novelists. Her novel, The Vagrants, was published in February 2009.

Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing, China and moved to the United States in 1996. Her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She has received a Whiting Writers' Award and was awarded a Lannan Foundation residency. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/ Hemingway Award, and Guardian First Book Award. She was selected as one of Granta's 21 Best of Young American Novelists. Her novel, The Vagrants, was published in February, 2009.

Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing, China and moved to the United States in 1996. Her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She has received a Whiting Writers' Award and was awarded a Lannan Foundation residency. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, and Guardian First Book Award. She was selected as one of Granta's 21 Best of Young American Novelists. Her novel, The Vagrants, was published in February 2009.

Manuel Muñoz is the author of two collections of short stories: Zigzagger (Northwestern University Press, 2003) and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2007), which was shortlisted for the 2007 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He is a recipient of a 2008 Whiting Writers’ Award and a 2009 PEN/O. Henry Award for his story “Tell Him About Brother John.”Muñoz is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. His work has appeared the New York Times, Rush Hour, Swink, Epoch, Glimmer Train, Edinburgh Review, and Boston Review, and has aired on National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts. A native of Dinuba, California, he graduated from Harvard University and received his MFA in creative writing at Cornell. He has joined the faculty of the University of Arizona’s creative writing program as an assistant professor, and currently lives in Tucson.Muñoz read from his work on October 15, 2009, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Our first interview this semester is with poet and essayist Mark Doty. Doty has written more than ten books of poetry and prose, and for his efforts has won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and the T. S. Eliot Prize. His new and selected poems, Fire To Fire, will be published next month. He lives in New York City, but this spring is one of three visiting writers spending the semester at Cornell.Mark Doty read from his work on February 15th, 2008, at the Schwartz Auditorium of Cornell’s Rockefeller Hall. This interview took place the following week.