McKeown’s crowd-funded new album, Manifestra, is a dizzying ten-track blend of political blues and party songs, featuring radio-friendly handclaps, a New Orleans-style funeral march, and a jam she co-wrote with Rachel Maddow.
Novelist Chris Castellani talks about avoiding sentimentality around the immigrant experience, letting go of the people and characters you love, and how he wrote three books while also running the writing center Grub Street.
Constance Hale, who has been called “Marion the Librarian on a Harley, or E. B. White on acid," talks verbs, literacy in the Digital Age, and why "it’s wrongheaded to think that the path to glory is only through standard English."
Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright Octavio Solis sits down for a chat about night terrors, universal storytelling, and finding a home with the Magic Theatre of San Francisco.
Cartoonist Natalie Dee's eponymous website, NatalieDee.Com, has consistently ranked among the most highly trafficked comic sites on the Internet since its debut. Her comic panels are equally hilarious and dark
Poet Jill McDonough chats about teaching in prisons, controversial art exhibits, getting lost in research, and writing fifty sonnets about American executions.
Daphne Gottlieb talks about Dear Dawn, a collection of letters written by Aileen Wuornos to her childhood friend from prison prior to her execution in 2002 .
Rosie Schaap discusses Drinking with Men, her love of poetry, her intriguing family members, and what she would do with her life if she weren’t a writer.
Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians, the co-founders of Melville House, share the history behind their thriving independent press—once earmarked as "a disaster in the making" and now celebrating its 10th anniversary.