Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Maggie Downs. Her new memoir, Braver Than You Think: Around the World on the Trip of My (Mother’s) Lifetime, is available from Counterpoint Press.

Downs is an award-winning writer based in Palm Springs, California. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Palm Springs Life, and McSweeney’s and has been anthologized in The Lonely Planet Travel Anthology: True Stories from the World’s Best Writers and Best Women’s Travel Writing. This is her first book.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Jean Kyoung Frazier. Her new novel, Pizza Girl, is available from Doubleday. It is the official July pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.

Jean lives in Los Angeles. This is her debut.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Nikki Dolson. Her new story collection, Love and Other Criminal Behavior, is available from Bronzeville Books.

Dolson is a writer primarily of short fiction, which has been published in places like Shotgun Honey, Tough, Thuglit, and Bartleby Snopes. Her other book, All Things Violent, is available from Fahrenheit Press. She lives in Las Vegas.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Genevieve Hudson. Their new novel, Boys of Alabama, is available from Liveright Publishing.

 
This is their second time on the program. They first appeared in Episode 544 on September 26, 2018.

Hudson’s other books include the critical memoir A Little in Love with Everyone (2018), and Pretend We Live Here: Stories (2018), which was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist.

They hold an MFA in fiction from Portland State University, and their work has appeared or is forthcoming in ELLE Magazine, OprahMag.com, McSweeney’s, Catapult, Bookforum, Bitch, and other places. They have received fellowships from the Fulbright Program, MacDowell, Caldera Arts, and The Vermont Studio Center. They are a Visiting Fiction Faculty member at Antioch University-Los Angeles’s MFA Program, a freelance writer, and also work in advertising. They live in Portland, Oregon.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Wayne Koestenbaum. His new essay collection, Figure It Out, is available from Soft Skull Press.

 
Koestenbaum has published nineteen books, including Camp Marmalade, Notes on Glaze, The Pink Trance Notebooks, My 1980s & Other Essays, Hotel Theory, Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Andy Warhol, Humiliation,and Jackie Under My Skin. His essays and poems have been widely published in periodicals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, The Best American Essays, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, London Review of Books, The Believer, The Iowa Review, Cabinet, and Artforum. Formerly an Associate Professor of English at Yale and a Visiting Professor in the Yale School of Art’s painting department, he is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Joseph Di Prisco. His new novel, The Good Family Fitzgerald, is available from Rare Bird Books. It was the official May pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.

Di Prisco has published four other novels (Confessions of Brother Eli, Sun City, All for Now, and The Alzhammer), three books of poetry (Wit’s End, Poems in Which, and Sightlines from the Cheap Seats), two books on childhood and adolescence co-written with psychologist and educator Michael Riera (Field Guide to the American Teenager and Right from Wrong), and two memoirs (Subway to California and The Pope of Brooklyn). His book reviews, essays, and poems have appeared in numerous journals and newspapers, and his poetry has been awarded prizes from Poetry Northwest, Bear Star Press, and Bread Loaf.

He lives with his wife, photographer Patti James, and their two whippets (Raylan and Ava—yes, their names straight out of Elmore Leonard) in Lafayette, California.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Meredith Talusan. Her new memoir, Fairest, is available from Viking.

Talusan is an award-winning journalist and author. She has written features, essays, and opinion pieces for many publications, including the New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, VICE, Matter, Backchannel, The Nation, and the American Prospect. She has contributed to several books including the New York Times Bestselling Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, edited by Roxane Gay. She lives in New York.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Natalie Diaz. Her new poetry collection, Postcolonial Love Poem, is available from Graywolf Press. It is the official June pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club. 

Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012. She is 2018 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, a Hodder Fellowship, and a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency, as well as being awarded a US Artists Ford Fellowship. Diaz teaches at the Arizona State University Creative Writing MFA program.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Brady Hammes. His debut novel, The Resolutions, is available from Ballantine Books.

 
Hammes lives in Los Angeles by way of Colorado and Iowa. His short stories have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Guernica, The Rattling Wall, and Harper Perennial’s Forty Stories Anthology.

He’s also an Emmy-Award winning documentary film editor whose most recent project, Tom vs. Time—about NFL quarterback Tom Brady—won a 2018 Sports Emmy. Before that, he edited the feature film Social Animals, which had its world premiere at the 2018 SXSW film festival. For more of Brady’s documentary work, please visit range-la.com.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Spring Washam. She is the author of A Fierce Heart: Finding Strength, Courage, and Wisdom in Any Moment (Hay House).

Washam is a well-known meditation teacher based in California and Peru. She is considered a pioneer in bringing mindfulness-based healing practices to diverse communities. She is one of the founders and core teachers at the East Bay Meditation Center, located in downtown Oakland, CA.  She received extensive training by Jack Kornfield, is a member of the teacher’s council at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in northern California, and has practiced and studied Buddhist philosophy in both the Theravada and Tibetan schools of Buddhism for the last 20 years.

In addition to being a teacher, she is also a shamanic practitioner and has studied indigenous healing practices for over a decade. She is the founder of Lotus Vine Journeys, an organization that blends indigenous healing practices with Buddhist wisdom. Her writing and teachings have appeared in many online journals and publications such as Lions Roar, Tricycle, and Belief.net. She has been a guest on many popular podcasts and radio shows. She currently travels and teaches meditation retreats, workshops and classes worldwide. She lives in the Bay Area.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Ashleigh Bryant Phillips. Her debut story collection, Sleepovers, is available from Hub City Press. It is the winner of the 2019 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize.

Phillips was raised in rural Woodland, North Carolina. She’s a graduate of Meredith College and earned an MFA from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her stories have appeared in The Oxford American, The Paris Review and others. Sleepovers is her first book. She lives in Baltimore.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Roxane Gay. A contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, she is the author of several bestselling books, including Bad Feminist, Difficult Women, and Hunger.

Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. Her other books include Ayiti, An Untamed State, and World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects. She lives in Los Angeles.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Susan Choi. Her latest novel, Trust Exercise, is available in trade paperback from Henry Holt. It is the winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction.

 
Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lammy Award. Her first book for children, Camp Tiger, was published in 2019.  A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she teaches fiction writing at Yale and lives in Brooklyn.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Kristen Millares Young. Her debut novel, Subduction, is available from Red Hen Press.

Young is a prize-winning journalist and essayist whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Guardian and the New York Times, along with the anthologies Pie & Whiskey, a 2017 New York Times New & Notable Book, and Latina Outsiders: Remaking Latina Identity.The current Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House, Kristen was the researcher for the New York Times team that produced “Snow Fall,” which won a Pulitzer Prize. She graduated from Harvard with a degree in history and literature, later earning her MFA from the University of Washington. She serves as board chair of InvestigateWest, a nonprofit news studio she co-founded in Seattle, where she lives with her family.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Chelsea Bieker. Her debut novel, Godshot, is available from Catapult Press.

Bieker’s forthcoming story collection, Cowboys and Angels, is due out in 2022. Her writing has been published by The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s, Lit Hub, and Electric Literature. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award and a MacDowell Colony fellowship. Originally from California’s Central Valley, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two children, where she teaches writing.

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