Cornelius Eady has published seven books of poetry, including Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, which won the 1985 Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and Brutal Imagination, a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in poetry. Running Man, a music-theatre piece Eady coauthored with jazz musician Diedre Murray, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 1999 and received Obie awards for best musical score and lead actor in a musical. Eady is also the co-founder of Cave...

This week we go inside Rooted & Written, a new Writers Grotto initiative by and for writers of color. Featured in this one-hour show: live poetry and prose readings from the first Rooted & Written workshop series in September, 2019, as well as discussions and reactions from the event. Rooted and Written's Melissa Pandika leads us on this behind-the-scenes tour, which also features an in-depth conversation between some of the members of the workshop's founding team -- Susan Ito, Aditi...

As the year races to a close, we revisit the adrenaline rush of five key books: one inspired in part by SCUM Manifesto scribe Valerie Solanas; another powered by a Great Dane; a play-by-play plus backstory on the epic James Baldwin-William F. Buckley debate of yore; a biographer attempting to reveal his secret sauce; and one book to help us detox from it all, on defusing women's stress. Along with an introduction to 16 books published by Grotto writers in 2019, this rangy conversation...

Michael Frank is the author of the memoir The Mighty Franks, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection that was named one of the best books of 2017 by The Telegraph and The New Statesman and won the 2018 JQ Wingate Prize. In October, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published What Is Missing, his first novel. In this episode of the GrottoPod, Frank chats with author and Grotto instructor Lindsey Crittenden about What Is Missing, which The New Yorker has described as “a penetrating...

Writer Lucy Jane Bledsoe, whose new novel is Running Wild, interviews fellow authors Pam Berkman and Dorothy Hearst. Berkman and Hearst's new children's book is Filigree's Midnight Ride, the first entry in a series about, as Berkman says, "turning points in history, particularly American history, from the point of view of a dog who was there." Filigree's Midnight Ride tells the story of Paul Revere's ride, and of a Pomeranian, Filigree, who assumes that he can't help Revere because of his...

In this special episode of the GrottoPod, author and former GrottoPod co-host Bridget Quinn interviews writer Mary Ladd and San Francisco Chronicle “Bad Reporter” cartoonist Don Asmussen for the Betabrand podcast theater, recorded with a live studio audience at the apparel company's San Francisco headquarters on October 17, 2019. This event celebrated Ladd’s publishing debut of her “disrespectful cancer book,” The Wig Diaries, illustrated by Asmussen. Ladd and Asmussen swap cancer stories,...

What’s scarier: an abusive father imposing the re-enactment of an iron-age human-sacrifice ritual on his teenage daughter, an idealistic young man imprisoned and brutalized for a crime he clearly did not commit, a cast of characters adrift in a genuinely haunted house, or the political history of the United States? This week’s GrottoPod takes a look at four books that touch on these skin-crawling topics. They are Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss, The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, The Haunting of...

The future is already here—but there's another one, two, or three futures right around the corner. David Ewing Duncan's new book, Talking to Robots: Tales from our Human Robot Futures, speculates on the possibilities of what comes next in the AI-human interface, with help from theoretical physicist Brian Greene, futurist Kevin Kelly, and more. What could go right? What could go wrong? Duncan, whose previous books include Experimental Man and The Geneticist Who Played Hoops With my DNA, is...

Rummaging through piles of books has never been more fun than with books podcaster Traci Thomas, whose ebullient personality and searing smarts have grown her show, The Stacks, into a true indie media phenomenon. Whether she's in a page-by-page read of Toni Morrison's Beloved, revisiting Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, or getting honest over Iain Reid, Thomas and guests dig up treasures, poring over the best nuggets and helping us understand why we need to discard the worst. Thomas stopped...

Write funnier -- and livelier! Today’s episode is the second of two special podcasts about a new series of books from the Writers Grotto called Lit Starts, which are available on September 10, 2019. Each book is filled with prompts to help writers practice the craft of writing character, dialogue, action, and humor. Each book also features a foreword by a Grotto writer. Today’s podcast is devoted to a conversation between two of those writers, Bonnie Tsui, who wrote the foreword to Writing...

Want to take your writing to the next level? Today’s episode is the first of two special podcasts about a new series of books from the Writers Grotto called Lit Starts, available starting September 10, 2019. Each book is filled with prompts to help writers practice the craft of writing character, dialogue, action, and humor. Each book also features a foreword by a Grotto writer. Today’s podcast is devoted to a conversation between two of those writers, Shanthi Sekaran, who wrote the foreword...

Joshua Furst is an aficionado of American counterculture. His 2008 novel, The Sabotage Cafe, was a story of then-and-now punks defining themselves in opposition to the mainstream: dumpster-divers living in the shadow of American consumerism. His new novel, Revolutionaries, out now from Knopf, explores the life, legacy, and activism of an Abbie Hoffman-like figure, Lenny Snyder, as told by his disillusioned son, Freedom. Revolutionaries is populated with recognizable figures, both imagined and...

Sara Schneider has been a wine, food, and general lifestyle editor and writer for 25 years, most recently as Consulting Wine and Spirits Editor for Robb Report. Before that, Schneider was Sunset magazine’s Wine Editor, which is where she met GrottoPod co-host Ben Marks of CollectorsWeekly.com back in the 1990s. In this conversation, recorded on June 14, 2019, Schneider and Marks discuss the sometimes peculiar jargon employed by wine writers, defining many colorful wine-writing terms along the...

What does the publishing industry still have to offer writers who are breaking in? In this episode, George Higgins and Susie Gerhard take to the field to check out the Litquake panel “Tried and True: What’s so great about traditional publishing?” On a windy Sunday morning in front of Z Below in San Francisco's Mission District, they speculate about what the title means before heading inside to interview audience members and hear from moderator Natalie Baszile, author of the novel Queen Sugar,...

New York Times best-selling author Julia Flynn Siler takes us deep into the story of the women who fought slavery in San Francisco's Chinatown with her new book, The White Devil's Daughters. The Writers Grotto's Bonnie Tsui, author of the award-winning American Chinatown, talks to her about the meticulous research and care required to pull together revelations about the trafficking of young Asian girls that flourished in San Francisco during the first hundred years of Chinese immigration...

Journalist Diana Kapp is published widely, from San Francisco magazine to the New York Times, ESPN, and O, the Oprah Magazine. She's taken a circuitous path to many of her stories, which have included an investigation of teen suicide clusters in Palo Alto and an exploration into the education of girls in Afghanistan. But the trail she took to her latest story—an NYT essay on her 84-year-old father's new crush—was direct; as in, straight from the heart. It brought about a reckoning of sorts,...

Senior editor/reporter at Public Radio International's "The World," Monica Campbell focuses on immigration and immigrant life in the United States. She's reported internationally for years, including from Afghanistan and, most extensively, from Mexico and Latin America. In Mexico,she was the Committee to Protect Journalists representative (2006-2009). In this week's episode, she talks with Laura Fraser about immigration politics in the Trump era, the bravery of local journalists in the face...

We revisit our July 2018 interview with influential author and body-image activist Virgie Tovar, who was recently interviewed for the Pacific Standard by Writers Grotto member Beth Winegarner. Tovar is hosting a new summer camp, Camp Thunder Thighs, at the end of June in Northern California. When we spoke to her last summer, she dropped truth bombs about writing honestly and writing to empower, fat discrimination and celebration, and how to leverage social media for good. Tovar started the...

Award-winning author Jamie Ford joins co-hosts emeritus Larry and BQ for the second of two live podcasts recorded at the 2019 Storyfort Festival in Boise, Idaho. Their conversation with the Montana writer touches on the Ford family's experiences in the American West, Ford's journey from comic book-reading “artsy kid” to best-selling author, the value of an MFA versus life experience, and the extensive research and writing that produced his recent novel, Love and Other Consolation Prizes, as...

New York Times best-selling author Tara Conklin is our guest this week as she joins co-hosts emeritus Larry and BQ onstage at the Storyfort Festival in Boise, Idaho. Conklin talks craft, vision and work habits and shares tales of her mid-career switch from law to fiction writing. Her first novel, The House Girl, grew out of a short story, and her latest book, The Last Romantics, zoomed to the top of the Amazon.com fiction rankings when it was chosen by Jenna Bush Hager as her pick to kick off...

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Markoff joins co-host Ben Marks of CollectorsWeekly.com on the GrottoPod this week to talk about his forthcoming biography of Stewart Brand. Markoff, who spent 28 years at the New York Times, is the author of one of Marks’ favorite books, What the Dormouse Said. Markoff says his Brand biography could be considered a sequel of sorts to Dormouse, but its larger mission is to capture what Markoff believes is a particularly northern California sensibility,...

Tom Barbash (center) with Paul Harding and Laura Fraser. "Where were you when you heard John Lennon was killed?" It's a familiar question to people of a certain age, but Gen-Xers will not be the only ones fascinated by Tom Barbash's early-’80s New York City flashback, The Dakota Winters. With veteran journalist and memoirist Laura Fraser as guest host, GrottoPod Episode 99 finds Barbash talking about his childhood in NYC's Upper West Side and the process behind turning the biggest...

Larry Rosen and BQ. This week marks the final studio appearance for hosts Larry Rosen and Bridget Quinn, who usher in a new era of the GrottoPod by completing the cycle they began 98 episodes ago. In this hour, BQ interviews Larry about the ups and downs of his 27-year (and counting) writing career. They also chat about 2019 finances vs. 1990s finances, the secret code for freelancing and “finding out what you’re good at.” Say goodbye (for now) to your OG hosts, and check this space...

Rachel Howard. Rachel Howard was a Clovis High School flag-team member when an essay contest changed her life, putting her on a path whose latest milepost is the publication of her first novel, The Risk of Us, which will be available everywhere April 9. This week, Rachel joins The GrottoPod to talk about the inspiration for her new book, her unlikely path into the arts, how she’s helped create a writing community in the Sierra foothills and why you’re likely to hear torch songs at her...

Celeste Chan. For Celeste Chan -- a writer, filmmaker, teacher, artist and activist -- the medium is whatever fits the message. Raised by a pair of Berkeley-educated “halfway hippies” and home-schooled, Chan found her footing in a post-Riot Grrl Olympia, Washington, then shifted into high gear when she arrived in San Francisco in 2004. This week, the founder of Queer Rebels and teaching artist for the Queer Ancestors Project brings her story (and some pretty cool eyeglasses) to the...