Steve Almond is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Candyfreak and Against Football. His recent books include the novel All the Secrets of the World and WilliamStoner and the Battle for the Inner Life. For four years, Steve hosted the New York Times Dear Sugar podcast with Cheryl Strayed. He is the recipient of a 2022 NEA grant in fiction, and his short stories have been anthologized in the Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart...

Anne Lamott is the author of 20 books, which include fiction and nonfiction. Her novels include Hard Laughter, Blue Shoe, and Imperfect Birds. Her nonfiction titles include Operating Instructions, Bird by Bird, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope and the newly released Somehow: Thoughts on Love. She has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship and was inducted into the California Hall of Fame in 2010. We talked about love, call and response, writing craft, secrets, the solace and inspiration of...

Marie Mutsuki Mockett is the author of the novels Picking Bones from the Ash and The Tree Doctor.  Her nonfiction books include American Harvest, which won the Nebraska Book Award, and Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye, which was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award.   We talked about writing about nature, sex, loss, cross-cultural influences, Japan, and binaries.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Julia Alvarez has written novels including How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, ¡Yo!, In the Name of Salomé, Saving the World, Afterlife, collections of poems including Homecoming, The Other Side/ El Otro Lado, The Woman I Kept to Myself, nonfiction works including Something to Declare, Once Upon A Quinceañera, and A Wedding in Haiti, and numerous books for young readers including the Tía Lola Stories series, Before We Were Free, finding miracles, Return to...

Lily Brooks-Dalton is the bestselling author of The Light Pirate, which was the runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, a #1 Indie Next pick, a Good Morning America Book Club selection, one of NPR's "Books We Love," and a New York Times Editors' Pick. Her previous novel, Good Morning, Midnight, which was the inspiration for the film adaptation The Midnight Sky and her memoir, Motorcycles I’ve Loved, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Her work has been translated into 18...

Kiley Reid is the author of Come and Get It and Such A Fun Age, which was a New York Times Best Seller and longlisted for the 2020 Booker Price. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Playboy, The Guardian, and others. Reid is currently an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. We talked about religion and fiction, philosophy, acting, Buddhism, materialism, college age women, grace in fiction, what creative writing can and can’t do, not...

Debra Spark is the award-winning author of five novels, including Unknown Caller, which was picked for Maine’s statewide summer READ ME program.  She has also published two collections of short stories; and two books of essays on fiction writing called And Then Something Happened and Curious Attractions.   Her book reviews, short fiction, articles, op-eds, and essays have appeared in Agni, American Scholar, AWP Writers’ Chronicle, and the Boston Globe among others.  Her new novel...

Téa Obreht is the author of the novel The Tiger’s Wife, which won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction, and was a 2011 National Book Award finalist and an international bestseller.  Her novel Inland won the BRLA Southwest Book Award and the Ballard Prize.  Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading, and has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, Vogue, Esquire and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many others. She currently...

Diane Seuss is the author of the poetry collections Frank: Sonnets, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl; Four-Legged Girl, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open; and It Blows You Hollow. Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Georgia Review, Brevity, Able Muse, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and the Missouri Review, as well as The Best American Poetry 2014. She was the MacLean Distinguished...

Sloane Crosley is the author of The New York Times bestselling essay collections, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, How Did You Get This Number, and Look Alive Out There and the bestselling novels, The Clasp and Cult Classic. She served as editor of The Best American Travel Writing series and is featured in The Library of America's 50 Funniest American Writers, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading and others. She is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Her new memoir is called Grief Is for...

Temim Fruchter is a queer nonbinary Jewish writer who lives in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland and is the recipient of fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Vermont Studio Center, and a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. She is co-host of Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn. Her debut novel is City of Laughter. We talked about origin stories for families and books, queer sensibility, growing up Modern Orthodox Jew,...

Leslie Jamison is the author of two essay collections— The Empathy Exams and Make It Scream, Make It Burn—a critical memoir, The Recovering, and a novel, The Gin Closet. She’s written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Oxford American, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Believer.   Her new book is called Splinters. Jamison teaches at the Columbia University MFA program, where she directs the nonfiction concentration. We talked about how structure can be...

Margot Livesey has published ten novels: Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture, Banishing Verona, The House on Fortune Street, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Mercury, and The Boy in the Field, and The Road from Belhaven. The Hidden Machinery, a collection of essays on writing, was published by Tin House Books in 2017. Livesey is currently teaching at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives with her husband, a painter, in Cambridge, MA, and goes back to London...

Kaveh Akbar's poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry,and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic. He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine. In His novel is called Martyr! He is also the Poetry Editor of The Nation.  Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran, and teaches at the University of Iowa and in the...

Ilyon Woo is the is the New York Times best-selling author of Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, one of the New York Times’s “10 Best Books of 2023” and People Magazine’s “Top Ten Books of 2023. Woo is also the author of The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times.  Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, and The New York Times.  She has a PhD...

Jill McCorkle is the author of four short story collections and seven novels including the New York Timesbestseller Life After Life.  Five of her books have been New York Times Notable books and her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories.  She has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Garden and Gun, The Atlantic, and other publications. She is currently a faculty member at the Bennington College Writing Seminars and is affiliated with...

Vanessa Chan is the author of the novel The Storm We Made and the story collection The Ugliest Babies in the World.  Her other work has been published in Vogue, Esquire, and more. Chan grew up in Malaysia and is now based mostly in Brooklyn. We talked about researching her novel, family stories, the horror of WW II in Malaysia, young boys building the railroad near the border, war crimes, colonialism, spies, her favorite pastime when not writing, finding the title of the novel, and the...

Antoine Wilson is the author of the novel Mouth to Mouth, which was featured on Barack Obama’s 2022 Summer Reading List.  His other novels include The Interloper and Panorama City. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Quarterly West, and Best New American Voices, among other publications. He is a contributing editor at A Public Space. This was recorded live at the 2023 Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago. We talked about what it means to be a good person, first drafts, writing what...

Buzzy Jackson has a Ph.D. in History from UC Berkeley and is a member of the National Book Critics’ Circle. Her debut novel is To Die Beautiful. She is currently working on a new novel based on a historical American true crime.  This was recorded live at Paonia Books in Paonia, Colorado. We talked about World War II and Nazi resistance fighters in the Netherlands, particularly the real life Hannie Schaft, the main character of To Die Beautiful, how writing this book impacted Buzzy's...

David James Duncan is the author of the novels The River Why, The Brothers K, and Sun House, the story collection River Teeth, and the nonfiction collection and National Book Award finalist, My Story as Told by Water, and the best-selling collection of “churchless sermons," God Laughs & Plays.  He lives on a trout stream in Missoula, Montana. We talked about his writing process, how writing a novel over 16 changed him, activism, solitude and creativity. Learn more about your ad choices....

Paul Harding is the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel Tinkers.  His other novels include Enon and This Other Eden, which was short listed for the Booker Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award. He is director of the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook University, and lives on Long Island, New York. We talked about mystery in the writing process and the content of the creative writing project, the world offering itself to you and through you via your art,...

Michael Cunningham is a novelist, screenwriter, and educator. His novel The Hours received the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. He has taught at Columbia University and Brooklyn College. He is currently a professor in the practice at Yale University. His new novel is called Day. We talked about writing during the pandemic, throwing away a novel he wasn't happy with, the challenge of writing the middle of a novel, and getting the voice of children right. Learn...

Salar Abdoh is the author of Out of Mesopotamia, Tehran at Twilight, Opium, and The Poet Game, and editor and translator of the celebrated crime collection, Tehran Noir.  He divides his time between New York City and Tehran, Iran. He is a professor at the City University of New York’s City College campus in Harlem, where he teaches in the English Department’s MFA program and also directs undergraduate creative writing. His new novel is called A Nearby Country Called Love. We talked about the...

Alice McDermott is the author of nine novels, including Charming Billy, winner of the National Book Award, and That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This, which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of the essay collection What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and other publications. She lives outside Washington, DC. Her new...