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The high-art low-brow minds behind Bloomsday Literary bring you interviews with the creatives you should know, but don’t. Poets, novelists, memoirists, & short story writers join co-hosts Kate and Jessica as they take a respectful approach to investigating the writer’s art and an irreverent approach to getting the nitty-gritty on the hustle for publication and exposure. Most of us writers making a living by the pen occupy somewhere between the ubiquitous bestsellers and the people who want t ...
Amanda Niehaus has a PhD in Physiological Ecology. She is the author of numerous award-winning short stories, essays, and an acclaimed novel, The Breeding Season (Allen & Unwin, 2019). As part of her author profile (bestill our science-loving hearts) she writes: “Does science belong in literary fiction? As a scientist, I never thought so. But ficti…
Corraling the myriad ways Sumita Chakraborty’s poetry collection gets at the heart of grief all but flummoxed me. Its meaning is still washing over me. But I’ll say that poet Rishi Dastidar did what I couldnt do when she wrote that it’s “a book to hold close, an amulet that transmutes the intensities of grief into something uplifting, the attempt t…
Vanessa Garcia is a Miami-based novelist, playwright, journalist, and visual artist. Much of her work centers on her Cuban homeland, where her parents and grandparents were born. She is the author of incredible essays you can find all over the web and an immersive theater production called The Amparo Experience. She is the dreamer and 3D printer of…
Photo credit: Mike Glier Aimee Bender graduated from UC Irvine and teaches at USC. Her books have received accolades in all the major outlets: from the New York Times, LA Times, & MCSweeney’s, to Oprah. Her latest novel, published July 2020, is The Butterfly Lampshade. When I was rattling off the list of Bender’s books, Kate deadpanned, “So she’s b…
Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guam. He is the co-founder of Ala Press, and the author of three collections of poetry, most recently, Habitat Threshold. He’s the recipient of many prizes, including the 2011 PEN Center USA Literary Award. An assistant professor of English at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, Santos…
Farid Matuk’s poetry, essays, and translations from Spanish appear in a wide range of publications and anthologies. He is the author of the poetry collection, This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine), several chapbooks including My Daughter La Chola (Ahsahta), and The Real Horse (2018). He teaches in the MFA program at University of Arizona, whe…
We talked to Michael Zapata about his novel The Lost Book of Adana Moreau. It was the winner of the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, an NPR Best Book of the Year, a Most Anticipated Book of 2020 from The Boston Globe and The Millions, and his debut novel. Zapata is a founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine as well as on the core faculty…
Alison Deming is so prolific and has been writing for so long that it was a bit overwhelming to pack into a 20-minute interview, but we tried our best. Hawthorne is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona, where she founded the Field Studies in Writing Program in 2015. She has an MFA from Vermont College, a Stegner Fellowship, two po…
AWP 21 Episode—Jeffrey Colvin (Day 2, Episode 1) We talk to Jeffrey Colvin about his stunning new book, Africaville. Jeffrey Colvin is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, Harvard, and Columbia where he earned an MFA in fiction. He is also a member of the National Book Critics Circle and is assistant editor at Narrative Magazine. His debu…
In honor of the launch of Catherine Baab-Muguira’s new book, Poe for Your Problems, we are re-releasing F***ing Shakespeare’s interview with her that we did back in 2019—where we talked about this book in its wee-baby stages. And now, here it is, all grown up like the big beautiful babe it is! Get ready for some perfect hot takes. Kate, Jess, Phuc,…
Day 1, Episode 1 To kick off the podcast interviews at AWP, we were thrilled to talk to Lilly Dancyger. Her new memoir, Negative Space, comes out May 2021 with Santa Fe Writers Project. She’s the editor of the essay collection, Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, and a contributing editor at Catapult. Among the other fantastic things with whic…
If you have yet to read guest Mira Jacob’s 2019 memoir in conversations, Good Talk, we’re jealous. Praised for her “disarming wit,” Jacob achieves this by welcoming you into her indecision, her confusion, her wonder at raising a child against the backdrop of that tender point where politics meets the personal in 2016 America. In addition to it bein…
The one and only Jia Tolentino was our guest on the show. We had Shipley’s donuts & it’s Britney’s Spears birthday all in honor of Jia. She’s a staff writer for the New Yorker and if you haven’t been living in a cave, you know she’s been on an international press tour for her first book, Trick Mirror, which she documented with her signature mix of …
What do you get when you cross clever, sometimes soaring, sometimes heart-breaking, always beautiful prose with immortality, fantasy, and historical themes? Signature Joy Preble. Since 2009, when she published the first book in her Dreaming Anastasia series, she has been writing YA novels that will break your heart, restore your hope in the good th…
We first met this episode’s guest at the WriteFest conference at Rice University. We found had all sorts of connections, as writers in this weird industry often do: he grew up in Houston like Kate did, and he has ties to Jessica’s Boston, where he lives and teaches. We are more than happy to showcase his work here on the show. From the gorgeous and…
Welcome to our final installment of our special summer series, F***ing Shakespeare’s Shorts, where we interviewed the very tired but always brilliant souls who had books coming out in the time of the pandemic. For this final shorts episode, we spoke with poet Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers who shares with us the beautiful queering of poetic form in her b…
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Shakespeare’s Shorts: Alexis Kienlen, novelist
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Move aside, poets! (But just for one second!) Here near the end of our Shakespeare’s Shorts season, we finally caught hold of another fiction aficionado! Alexis Kienlen’s first novel, Mad Cow, came out this April from Now Or Never Publishing, but she’s also a two-time published poet. (We told you, poets: just hold on for one second.) In this episod…
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Shakespeare's Shorts: Ayokunle Falomo, poet
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In this episode, we get to chat (and giggle and lose all sense of time) with an old friend, Ayokunle Falomo, whose first incendiary chapbook entitled African, American has been published. He has promised us that it will be available for purchase from New Delta Review as soon as COVID insanity ends! We talk with Ayo about the many steps of working o…
Esther Lee is a poet (and letter-press artist!) who, along with her husband and cat Bowie, lives on a 35-foot sailboat called “Hope.” Currently, they’re living off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, where she writes poetry, blogs about her efforts at a zero-waste boat life, and occasionally takes phone calls from podcasters. Spit, her debut collec…
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Shakespeare's Shorts: Matthew Lippman, poet
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Matthew Lippman’s most recent collection, Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful, is the winner of the Levis prize from Four Way Books. He is the author of four other poetry collections—A Little Gut Magic, American Chew, Monkey Bars, and The New Year of Yellow. It was a delight to talk to Matthew about poetry, baseball, music, unfinished basements, and a wo…
“It is my belief that we would not know John James Audubon today if it weren’t for [Lucy].” For our third installment of F***ing Shakespeare Shorts, Juditha Dowd reads from her gorgeously soft-spoken collection, Audubon’s Sparrow. The collection is a biography-in-poems that lyrically imagines the interiority and emotions of Lucy Bakewell, the wife …
Welcome to our second installment of Shakespeare’s Shorts, where your favorites from F***ing Shakespeare host the virtual book tour that no one would have wanted before COVID-19, but that is now giving us a literary lifeline as we’re locked inside! Join us as we keep our thumbs on the pulse of amazing new literature, so it doesn’t get lost to quara…
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Shakespeare's Shorts: Lee Matalone, novelist
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HEY! We made a thing: it’s the Virtual Book Tour Quarantine edition of F***ing Shakespeare, we’re calling SHAKESPEARE’S SHORTS! We wanted to get out there and see what’s happening in the land of books — talk with authors who have books out now, right this second, when it’s very hard to be out in the world with a new book because you can’t actually …
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Bonus #AWP20 with Bloomsday Literary—Chris Cander and Amy Hanson
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We have one more bit of brightness to send your way with this interview of two writers in the AWP Writer 2 Writer Mentorship program, mentor Chris Cander and mentee Amy Hanson. Chris was unable to attend the conference, like so many, but we were able to catch up virtually with both of them just after the conference closed. Short story writer Amy Wi…
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Official podcast of #AWP20 LIVE with Bloomsday Literary—Day 3
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Fantastic advice from the authors, poets, & industry professionals at #AWP20. This is part one of a three-episode series featuring Bloomsday Literary’s partnership with #AWP20 to bring you all the literary goings-on from this year’s conference. Here’s Day Three! Richard Z. Santos 1:22 Santos’ debut novel Trust Me came out on 3/31/20 from Arte Públi…
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Official podcast of #AWP20 with Bloomsday Literary—Day 2
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Anna Lena Phillips Bell 0:58 Anna Lena is the editor and art director for Ecotone* and an editor for Lookout Books at the University of North Carolina—Wilmington. She talks about Ecotone’s mission and aesthetic, how to balance the two for publication, and dishes about her absolute stunner of a craft book, A Pocket Book of Forms. *While recording th…
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F***ing Shakespeare
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Official podcast of #AWP20 LIVE with Bloomsday Literary—Day 1
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Fantastic advice from the authors, poets, & industry professionals at #AWP20. This is part one of a three-episode series featuring Bloomsday Literary’s partnership with #AWP20 to bring you all the literary goings-on from this year’s conference. Angela “AJ” Super 0:00 Angela Super is the author of Erebus Dawning, forthcoming from Aethon Books. We ca…
Today on the show, Phong Nguyen, an absolute treasure trove of Twain trivia, author of The Adventures of Joe Harper. We do talk lots about writing dialect and the editors that love/hate it, why three-quarters of your way into writing a manuscript is the absolute sweet spot, and how living in Missouri and not Brooklyn is actually a blessing for the …
On today’s show, we have novelist Abbigail Rosewood. Jessica, Phuc, Abbigail, and I discussed the virtues of buying hibiscus plants from people who unofficially sell them on the streets of Brooklyn. We bring you another arousing author-psycho-therapy session starring Your Past, and how maybe you shouldn’t always listen to workshops and/or the thing…
On this episode of F***ing Shakespeare, our guest is the one and only Jericho Brown. Poets, lovers, and one who desires to hear beautiful language spoken by a beautiful voice, this episode is for you. We talk about Brown’s duplex, a poetic form he created for his new book “The Tradition,” his passion for his work and how he also doesn’t drive a Ben…
In today’s episode we have the 100% on-fire novelist, Bryan Washington, penning effing beautiful and raw stories straight out of the streets of Houston for his story collection Lot. He shares his ridiculously envy-enducing publishing journey for you, adding another to the longitudinal study that proves the traditional path to publication is a mythi…
In the studio today to open SEASON 4 of the show—that’s right y’all F***ing Shakespeare is on our 4th season! To celebrate we have Houston’s own lit genius, Mark Haber. He’s our first returning guest, so we must be doing something right. He’s definitely doing all the things right. He’s here to talk Tolstoy’s dog problem, melancholy, the fun-house m…
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Read all of Sarah’s work, but if we were forced to choose, here’s the place to start: Until We All Have Voices in Catapult Fabric of a Community, Gone Threadbare: A Tour of Ohio’s New Trump Country in Catapult The Crusading Bloggers Exposing Sexual Abuse in Protestant Churches in The Washington Post Magazine Teaching My Daughter That God Might Be a…
By Bloomsday Literary
Novelist and genre shapeshifter Edan Lepucki is our guest on today’s show. Expert writing tips include: what to do when you realize you’ve spent four years writing two different novels that are actually the same, spoiler alert: Instagram poetry is probably not the answer. We talk about how having a baby is a great way to make you finish a project, …
Photo by Wayne Alan Brenner Today we settle the great debate once and for all: drafting, or revising? Our guest, graphic novelist, Tillie Walden, weighs in. (Spoiler alert: write, write, write, and think about perfection later.) We also consider the value of the “traditional” story, how Tillie prioritized the truth of her emotions when drawing her …
Photo credit: Rita Meriano Ever wondered what you should do if your professor thinks you should write literary fiction, but you know you’re going to write something else? Today’s guest, Anna Meriano, talks about how much she appreciated that prof and also why choosing to disregard his suggestion was the best decision she could have made. Also, we i…
Jessica’s Writing We Discussed When I Spoke in Tongues: A Story of Faith and Its Loss “From Essay to Book: On ‘Mirrorings’” in Essay Daily “On the Far Side of the Fire: Life, Death and Witchcraft in the Niger Delta” in Longreads Suggested Reads and Honorable Mentions from Jessica Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje Bluets by Maggie Nelson Cam…
Get ready for some perfect hot takes on today’s episode of F***ing Shakepeare with freelancer Catherine Baab-Muguira. She looks behind the curtain at the self-appointed guardians of the world of culture, celebrates indulging a rabbit hole of eccentric ideas as a freelancer, and we all have a laugh about how her outstanding personal essay on her hig…
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Special LIVE edition — AWP2019, Day 2
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Erika Thorkelson 3:57 Erika Thorkelson holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and is currently a sessional instructor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. She is a regular contributor of arts and culture writing to the Vancouver Sun and Edmonton Journal as well as a host and operator on The Storytelling Show o…
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Special LIVE edition — AWP2019, Day 1
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James Charlesworth 3:56 James Charlesworth is the recipient of a Martin Dibner Fellowship from the Maine Community Foundation. He attended Penn State University and Emerson College in Boston and his debut novel, The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill (published by Arcade) was released January 15th, 2019. He joins us at AWP to talk about his publishi…
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Special LIVE edition — Texas Book Fest, Day 2
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Lowell Mick White 1:16 White is the author of three novels and two story collections and is also editor at Alamo Bay Press. His work has been featured in Callaloo, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Short Story, and I've won the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, awarded by the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas Institute of Letters. He’s been the Nat…
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Special — Mark Pryor and the Texas Book Festival, Day 1
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Mark Pryor 01:50 Mark Pryor, novelist Amber Elby, YA novelist Dylan Powell, mystery writer George Vance McGee, author Daniel Peña, novelist Leza Cantoral, author and panda Cat with book Phuc with dog Mark Pryor is the author of ten novels, including The Hollow Man, which introduced everyone’s favorite misanthrope*, Dominic. His latest, The Book Art…
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Special LIVE edition—Bobby Byrd, poet and publisher
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published by Cinco Puntos Press We were lucky enough to speak with Bobby Byrd, who along with Lee Byrd, founded Cinco Puntos Press in 1985 in El Paso, Texas. Cinco Puntos’ distinguished list of authors includes Joe Hayes, Christine Engla Eber, Daniel Bowles, and Beto O’Rourke. Since those early years, Cinco Puntos has gone on to win several distinc…
Chris Cander opens our all-female Season 3 of F***ing Shakespeare with a lovely conversation about witnessing magic in the every day, and how learning to really notice is the only rule she knows how to follow in crafting stories. We talk about adverbs and bull riding. And we discuss her publishing journey which sounds more like the world’s meanest …
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Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, Poet Laureate of Houston
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Houston’s Poet Laureate Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton closes our season 2 with a bang. We clink glasses as we talk about the intersection of poetry and community, and she explains how limiting her allotment of news to her once-a-week date with Trevor Noah keeps her sane, and we petition Hollywood to make more movies about breastfeeding moms. The sight ga…
Novelist Ches Smith talks about being depressed and vulnerable while being male, the inherent difficulties of writing characters who act suspiciously like a lot of the people you work with — but WHO ARE NOT THEM — and how writing metafiction offers a way to take the undesireable parts of yourself to their logical and worst conclusions, so you can (…
